Jane Austen Would Love Social Media
I often wonder how some of my favorite women authors (who are no longer with us) would’ve taken to social media back in their days. Would Pride & Prejudice have been a slightly juicier novel infiltrated with Bridgerton-esque societal gossip. Sylvia Plath would’ve relentlessly chewed out every matriarch on X, Threads and under a ghost account on Facebook. I mean most of the women writers mentioned here, with exception of Joan Didion, had to write by hand. Feather and ink or an unforgiving typewriter. Whenever I complain about my wrists cramping up from a measly two hours tapping away on my laptop, woe is me. These women had no technological distractions, just a pen, paper, ribbon, ink and countless hours (so I assume as much) writing and writing and writing.
It’s a fun little fantasy I have whenever I’m stuck on a cloud of no ideas. My mind wanders because I lack the next best sentence that would break open the creative juices. The best option is to get into a mental time machine and try to imagine what the literary greats would have done. What would Joan do, what would Emily Bronte say about this, would Virginia Woolf think it too common if I choose this word. The next maneuver is usually to pick up my phone for good quotes on writing by Virginia Woolf, which then spinoffs to liking a few dog videos, checking my inbox in case something needed my dire attention, getting caught up in viral acts of nothingness. But surely, these women had to have gone through difficulties in concentration. Maybe a bird perched on the windowsill captured Emily Bronte into a Disney-like conversation for ten minutes. Would that have been enough for her to lose a train of thought? What kind of physical distractions did they have to almost make a full writing day possible?
What if they did have social media, what would it be and why:
JANE AUSTEN
If anyone could read a room, it was Jane Austen. Her main characters always had a pocketful of just the right anecdotes for whatever casual or special occasion needed it. I read somewhere that her brother Henry Austen described her as ambitious, very independent, sharp-witted (clearly applied in her dialogues), often satirical but always benevolent, never cruel. So with that, I can only predict that Jane would be present on a majority of the platforms with a blue check next to her name. On Instagram, she would post occasional shots of her desk, hashtag #writerslife. On Threads and BlueSky she would quote herself or some of her favorite lines from her novels of course. She would repost accounts of other writers who were less known, of the younger generation, or on the cusp of becoming famous. Jane has an eye for these things. I don’t think she would find …
