Dr. Claudia L. Johnson is Murray Professor of English at Princeton University. She is a scholar of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature and the novel, and has published extensively on Jane Austen. She is the author of Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures (Chicago, 2012), which won the Christian Gauss Award in 2013. She is also the author of Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago, 1988) and Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago, 1995), which won an Honorable Mention for the MLA Lowell Prize. She has also published an elaborate edition of Jane Austen’s The Beautifull Cassandra (Princeton, 2018) in collaboration with artist Leon Steinmetz, and 30 Myths about Jane Austen (Blackwell, 2020) with Clara Tuite.

Dr. Johnson has also co-edited The Blackwell Companion to Jane Austen and completed critical editions of Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey and (with Susan Wolfson) Pride and Prejudice.

In the excerpts below, Dr. Johnson discusses Jane Austen’s distinct cultural standing, Austen’s treatment of ordinary experience, and her understanding of intelligence. 

You can also access Dr. Johnson’s YouTube playlist directly.

Dr. Claudia L. Johnson identifies Jane Austen as a miracle

Dr. Claudia L. Johnson explains how Austen’s enduring popularity is due, in part, to her ability to value the quality of characters’ mental life of characters’s social status

Dr. Claudia L. Johnson discusses Jane Austen’s conception of intelligence and intelligent people

Dr. Claudia L. Johnson discusses Austen’s ability to represent, value, and make compelling ordinary people and experiences

Dr. Claudia L. Johnson reflects on Jane Austen as a cultural anomaly