Did Jane Austen REALLY have AS?

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I've been researching this, since I left her out of my last video about famous women with AS. Evidence that she may have had it: eight characters in Pride and Prejudice have Asperger's traits. That is ALL I've found on-line. She was not reclusive, like Emily Dickenson, or eccentric and quirky like Virginia Woolf.

Does anyone know of more solid EVIDENCE that Jane Austen might have had AS?

If there is a case, I will dedicate a video to her.

not off hand. However, there a loads of Jane Austen sites, fan clubs, etc., out there that would give you every biographical detail you ever wanted (or didn't...

Asperger's syndrome hadn't been invented when jane austen was around.

It would be like saying Abraham lincoln had Marfan syndrome, or moses had AIDS.

Perhaps in the future you can troll less obviously.

Experts retroactively diagnose people with AS, based on their life history. The problem is that expert opinion gets mixed in with rumor and suspicion on the internet!

I spent an hour researching Austen and could find nothing "aspie-like" about her, so I wondered if she has fans in WP that would have a thought one way or another.

whitetiger, I talked myself out of reading Price & Prejudice after I read this online review:

"Jane Austen is one of the great masters of the English language, and PRIDE AND PREJUDICE is her great masterpiece, a sharp and witty comedy of manners played out in early 19th Century English society, [i]a world in which men held virtually all the power and women were required to negotiate mine-fields of social status, [u]respectability, wealth, love, and sex in order to marry both to their own liking and to the advantage of their family[/u]. And such is particularly the case of the Bennetts, a family of daughters whose father's estate is entailed to a distant relative, for upon Mr. Bennett's death they will loose home, land, income, everything. But are the Bennett daughters up to playing a winning hand in this high-stakes matrimonial game without forfeiting their own personal integrity?"[/i]


Regardless of whether Austen herself had AS or not (probably not), P & P does not seem like the type of book I'd want to read.

ah..afraid it might be like that. I do know (from watching TV, and listening to the radio), that there are 'Jane Austen Fanatics' out there, who come together to discuss her works, etc.

I've read the books (decades ago), and seen some of the usual UK TV 'spectacular' versions sometimes. To be honest, there's so much of 'how who felt when someone else felt' etc., I think she may have not been AS. I've been fascinated as much by the idea that it would explain 'women' to me (nice try..., as seeing the inner dialog that NTs produce.

btw - a disease doesn't come into existence because someone 'discovers' it. Actually, some historians think Lincoln did have Marfan's, though Moses, I dunno... Just sayin' it, that's all.

I think Austen showed a real interest in NT relationships and on an intricate level that someone with AS would not be capable of.

Well yeah P & P does contain Aspie themes. It examines social roles during the author's lifetime, social status. It examines conditions. It might not be about subjects that interest everyone but the same kind of book could be written about men and the pressures on them during that time.
Now, I do believe people with AS can develop an overly analytical mind. Austen demonstrates this ability.
At the time women couldn't get college degrees and jobs that offered enough pay to support themselves. They had to find a husband. Austen examines this. It's not controversial, society was really like that back then.

i don't know if she had AS or not, but she is very much a "structural" writer. ANd of course that level of analysis of human relations seems to me from a layperson's veiw to be a very AS-female approach. BUt who knows? I have no idea.

Her plot complexity reminds me a bit of Tolstoy - but i much prefer the latter.
My step-mother plied me with Austen when i was an androgynous and depressed and rebellious and drug-fucked adolescent. I read Austen, but never really enjoyed her actually, although i did admire the twists and turns of her story-telling.

I think i dumped "Norhtanger Abbey" in favour of "Go Ask Alice."
The slide downhill from there to prison was well and truly mapped.

Last edited by millie on 14 Mar 2009, 11:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I have no opinion of whether or not she might have been AS (or would have qualified for an AS diagnosis if she were alive today). I've never read her work, but I've seen a few movie adaptations of her books.

But one thing that has to be taken into considerations is the time and culture difference. The expected social norms of her day were different than that of today. So, given that, I wonder how a person with AS in her day would be different from a person with AS in our day. I don't know. It's just something to think about. (All I know is I'd be in an insane asylum from going NUTS from having to wear a corset. THAT is something I would not be able to handle!)

I remember reading Jane Austen last year for the first time (Persuasion) and it blew my mind that she could narrate a character who was able to analyze networks of social relations like I used to do, the hyper-math psychology of a super-inquisitive yet detached observer.

Do I believe she had AS? Impossible to tell, really. But the way she is able to cooly write the patterned inertias of socialization as if an embedded voyeur strikes me as someone obsessed with something that she felt not fully a part of, as if a sentimental anthropolgist writing about Regency Era human behavior.

I've only read one bio, though I've read all her books, and I do not believe she was on the spectrum. She came across as clever, somewhat bored, very status oriented, and the kind of woman who'd go into business today and clean up. Also, her small "p" political skills were way too high for autism to any degree. Perhaps she was more remote and introverted than the average person, perhaps more techie in some ways (but perhaps not), but I've known people who were like that who were, if anything, gifted at things autistic people tend to be bad at.

I never saw anything resembling autistic traits in her novels, just lots of sophisticated high school-type gossip. Very much the clever "in" crowd.

And she only did much writing when she was stuck out in the country without much to do. When she was in town I think she preferred the social whirl to writing.

I agree. to write about stuff like that one must be NT to the bone.

unless interpersonal relations and social intrigues were her special interest, but I find that hard to believe.

They could have been her special interest. I've never had an interest in Jane Austen and haven't made a study of her, just going by what I've read in this thread and other threads on WP. People who claim to be Aspies are very interested in analyzing NTs and their interactions. I don't know if anyone here could analyze them the way Austen does, but maybe, if they put a lot of thought into it.
I think an Aspie can do it. I read a blog entry by an Aspie and it was very analytical and about NT interactions.

possibly, but I think that an aspie/autistic person would've made it sound more like a point of view of an anthropologist, or of a biologist looking at a bunch of strangely behaving monkeys. Austen's writing is not even close to that description.

and if the tv series about her was any credible, she couldn't have been AS, she was far too quick-witted, charismatic and social.