Welcome back, dear readers! This year, we’ve begun a blog series highlighting Austen-lovers around the world—sharing how they first discovered Austen’s fiction, why they love Austen, how they’ve contributed to the Janeite community, you get the picture. Fans, who cultivate and engage in discourse surrounding Austen’s life and fiction, participate in workshops and conventions, host book clubs, and don I ❤️ Darcy merchandise with pride (but hopefully not prejudice—wink, wink), are the reason Jane’s spirit survives in the twenty-first century. We deserve a shout-out! And we deserve the chance to connect with like-minded individuals across the world. Following a brief hiatus, the Janeite Spotlight project returns to celebrate Meredith Ammons, an NYC-based TikTok and Instagram influencer, Playbill social media coordinator, former JASP intern, and lover of all-things-Austen.
At the ripe young age of four-and-twenty, Meredith Ammons is a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which—as most of you know by now—just so happens to be the birthplace of the Jane Austen Summer Program (and, of course, Jane Austen & Company). In fact, it was through the university that Meredith first encountered Jane Austen. Required by her freshman-year drama class to attend three productions at a local theatre, Meredith was hooked instantly on their rendition of Kate Hamill’s comedic adaptation of Sense and Sensibility for the stage.
“I fell in love!” she recalls, immediately moving on to Emma Thompson’s 1995 film version of the novel, and then the novel itself. The rest of Austen’s fiction followed soon after.
“I love the fact that Jane Austen is very much the ‘best of both worlds’ author. She allows me to read social commentary and romance at the same time,” Meredith says. Of course, Austen wrote about the issues she observed from her own admittedly limited perch within nineteenth-century society, but “for better or worse, society has not changed that much. Human nature is human nature, no matter the time period.” Like so many fans, Meredith’s love for Austen’s fictional worlds stems from their acute mimicry of our modern dynamics concerning friends, families, lovers—and even those annoying cousins who never fail to spoil dinnertime conversation with their ill-timed remarks on boiled potatoes.
While Meredith relates most to Elinor Dashwood for their tendency toward practicality (with a few romantic fantasies interspersed now and then), her favorite character from Austen’s works is Catherine Morland: “She reminds me quite a lot of myself at that age [seventeen]. I was also very obsessed with books and adventures. [Catherine] was also the OG fangirl in a lot of ways. My Mysteries of Udolpho were Tumblr and One Direction.”
In 2020, Meredith was able to visit Bath on a study abroad program in the United Kingdom, an experience which she describes as a real “dream come true!” Two years later, she began working for JASP as a graphic designer and assistant social media manager, creating online content to promote our 2023 in-person symposium celebrating Austen’s juvenilia. Even as the conference was in full swing on Chapel Hill’s campus, Meredith continued generating regular content for the four-day event—especially on TikTok.
And speaking of the quintessential short-form video app, Meredith’s personal account, which features content pertaining to Jane Austen, Bridgerton, Meredith’s favorite musical artists (including the former members of One Direction, duh), and other various fandoms, boasts nearly 20k followers. To boot, this self-described “Tony Award-Viewing Indigenous Influencer” has amassed over 8 million “Likes” on her content overall. Professionally, she puts her digital media skills to use in New York City as a full-time social media coordinator for Playbill. She attended her first event as a professional influencer—accepting Netflix’s invitation to the season 3 premiere of Bridgerton in NYC, where she met the actor playing everyone’s favorite capital-R rake, Jonathan Bailey.
Meredith believes that the rise of social media—especially “BookTok,” where she is making a name for herself among millions of individuals worldwide—and modern “gateway” media like Bridgerton will only serve to grow the Janeite community. “More and more people are reading Austen every day!”
Excerpted from email correspondence with Meredith Ammons, March 9, 2024.
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