The memoir of Jane Austen’s brother has been published with a trigger warning about the apparently alarming fact that an 18th– and 19th-century man held 18th– and 19th-century views.
The reflections of Sir Francis Austen, a Royal Navy admiral who supported his famous younger sister and the rest of his large family, have been compiled for the first time and are being published by the Jane Austen’s House museum in Chawton, Hampshire. A note on the title page states: “Readers are advised that this memoir reflects the opinions of its era and may contain passages which some find upsetting.”
Even so, anyone poised for a blast of outrageous national pride or prejudice will be in for a disappointment. The book offers no thoughts on empire or race, and contains none of the naughty terminology that has led to other historical works being given content warnings in recent years.
Although believed to be written by Mr Austen himself, the account is in the third person and consists largely of a recapitulation of his successful naval career, listing ships he served on, the battles he took part in and the duties he performed during his almost 80 years at sea. (Early on, these included delivering dispatches to Admiral Lord Nelson, who praised the “excellent” young Austen.) The text makes little mention of Jane or the wider Austen family.
Still, if you really want to take offence, it does criticise – perhaps even stereotype – Americans for spitting too much. It also possibly fails to accord with contemporary feminist ideas by praising Mr Austen’s second wife for her “sweet temper”, “ladylike manners” and being “impressed with the truths of Christianity”. English women generally are commended for their “retiring modesty” – unlike American ones who, sad to say, have “a flippant air”. Prefiguring the recent Supreme Court ruling in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers – which has left trans activists and their allies aghast – he also appears to suggest that being female or male is an immutable, biological fact, describing his first wife in proto-transphobic terms as “one of the most amiable of her sex”.
If you want to see if you can survive all this without having to clutch any pearls, the 65-page book is available online here.
Of course, this is hardly the most egregious example of the genre. But it’s a telling one. The mere possibility that a genteel 19th-century memoir might offend someone, somewhere, is now enough to warrant a formal note of caution.
Trigger warnings have for many years been widely used across the publishing industry, typically justified as a compassionate response to trauma. But are they really about protecting the vulnerable, or more about virtue signalling by those keen to be seen as progressive?
A 2020 study in Clinical Psychological Science casts serious doubt on their therapeutic value. Trigger warnings “were not helpful for individuals who self-reported a diagnosis of PTSD,” its authors conclude. Even when content closely matched participants’ past trauma, “trigger warnings were still unhelpful”. For those with more severe PTSD symptoms, they “slightly increased anxiety,” iatrogenically reinforcing the importance of past traumatic events for the very people they were originally designed to help.
The authors identify a key psychological mechanism: “Trigger warnings increase the narrative centrality of trauma among survivors, which is countertherapeutic.” In short, they may entrench trauma rather than ease it. “People who view trauma as a core part of their identity have worse symptoms.”
Among the wider population – including participants without trauma histories – another study found that effects are either negligible or mildly negative; that is, rather than building psychological robustness, trigger warnings risk undermining people’s sense of their own resilience to potential future trauma, and their confidence in the resilience of others.
Their conclusion? “The research suggests that trigger warnings are unhelpful for trauma survivors, college students, trauma-naïve individuals, and mixed groups of participants… We find no evidence-based reason for educators, administrators, or clinicians to use trigger warnings.”
