Economic historians would describe ‘absentee enslavers’ as people who managed enslaved people and the land they toiled on while geographically and psychologically removed from the terror of the plantation. Based on Tré’s wider work, this lecture first uses Jane Austen adaptations to reframe Austen’s women as absentees or in close association with that brutal system many miles away.

Gatekeepers in period drama and literary spaces treat her world not only as split from chattel enslavement but from the world we live in today. The National Trust’s 2020 inquiry shows the echoes and murmurs of the slave trade live in the shadows and walls and of heritage sites now used as filmsets. This lecture engages Austen as a vessel for the British Empire’s ghost. As Sara Ahmed writes, the past is “…living rather than dead, [it] lives in the very wounds that remain open in the present.”

Please contact Central Library with any queries on: northampton.libraryplus@westnorthants.gov.uk

This event is free, but booking is essential.