Alt-right turns to Jane Austen to sell white pride and prejudice

References to the bonnet-wearing author repeatedly pop up in speeches by leaders of the mostly male movement.

British right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.

The works of Jane Austen are an inspiration to authors seeking the essence of modern life. Yet it still comes as a shock to discover that a mostly male movement with a hateful right-wing message should also be in need of the ­bonnet-wearing author.

The world of Austen scholarship has been ruffled by an American academic’s discovery that her work has been appropriated by the alt-right, a loose collection of white nationalists, pseudo-libertarians, overt racists, anti-Semites and isolationists whose influence helped to propel Donald Trump to the presidency last year.

The tycoon finally disavowed their support after the November election. But then Richard Spencer, the white supremacist who coined the term “alt-right” was filmed delivering a racist address and declaring “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!”

Nicole Wright, an English specialist at Colorado University, had her curiosity piqued in January when British right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos dropped an Austen reference into a speech at her campus. Before an audience dotted with red “Make America Great Again” caps, Mr Yiannopoulos argued conservatives are more attractive. “As a Victorian novelist might have put it, it is a truth universally acknowledged that an ugly woman is far more likely to be a feminist than a hot one,” he said.

Dr Wright was intrigued. “Perhaps Yiannopoulos had glanced at the title of Austen’s most ­famous novel and assumed that Pride and Prejudice was a justification of white pride and prejudice against ethnic minorities,” she ­recalled thinking in an article published in The Chronicle of Higher Education this month. In the piece, she also points out that Austen died two decades before Queen Victoria’s reign began.

Investigating further, she found that “invocations of Austen popped up in many alt-right online venues”. Austen is deployed as a “symbol of sexual purity”, a “standard bearer of a vanished white traditional culture” and as an exception that “proves the rule of female inferiority”.

Austen’s novels were praised as a model for the “racial dictatorship” of tomorrow on the website of Counter-Currents, an alt-right publisher. Contributors debated the vision of marriage in Pride and Prejudice and the benefits of going “back to an Austen-like world” after “the ethno-state is created”.

In a post for The Daily Stormer, which has been called the “top hate site in America” by The Southern Poverty Law Centre, a white-supremacist ­approvingly described pop star Taylor Swift as “a secret Nazi”, whom he imagined “sitting at home with her cat reading Jane Austen”, while her contemporaries indulged in loose sexual ­behaviour “with coloured gentlemen”.

Although such references are a distortion of Austen’s work, the effect is dangerous Dr Wright ­argues, because “by comparing their movement not to the nightmare Germany of Hitler and Goebbels, but instead to the cosy England of Austen”, alt-right ­theorists are able to “nudge readers” into thinking that “perhaps white supremacists aren’t so different from mainstream folks”.

Most Austen characters are white, but this is not proof of bigotry, her defenders claim. “White nationalists would do well to realise her work has endured largely because it cleverly and subtly skewered them,” Claire Fallon wrote in The Huffington Post.

The Times