The son of a devoted Jane Austen scholar, TED SCHEINMAN spent his childhood summers eating Yorkshire pudding, singing in an Anglican choir, and watching Laurence Olivier as Mr. Darcy. Determined to leave his mother’s world behind, he nonetheless found himself in grad school organizing the first ever UNC-Chapel Hill Jane Austen Summer Camp, a weekend-long event that sits somewhere between an academic conference and superfan extravaganza. In Camp Austen, Scheinman tells the story of his indoctrination into this enthusiastic world and his struggle to shake his mother’s influence while navigating hasty theatrical adaptations, undaunted scholars in cravats, and unseemly petticoat fittings.
Scheinman is a writer and scholar based in Southern California, where he works as a senior editor at Pacific Standard magazine. He has taught courses on journalism, satire, and poetry at the University of North Carolina and has written for the New York Times, the Oxford American, Playboy, Slate, and many others.
Certain books were “banned in Boston” at least as far back as 1651, when one William Pynchon wrote a book criticizing Puritanism.