G.I. Jane

Nothing depresses my spirits more quickly than an article promising to reveal Surprising Facts About Jane Austen.

What follows—whether compiled by human being, chatbot, or some unholy amalgam of the two—usually combines the utterly anodyne (“Jane Austen had six brothers”) with the sloppily erroneous (“Jane Austen was a Victorian”).

But “The hidden life of Jane Austen: facts you never knew,” a recent slideshow piece from a news and entertainment website called Stars Insider, is something altogether weirder—and, just incidentally, further proof that the internet can be a treacherous place for the unwary.

Sprinkled among actual facts about Austen’s life—she loved her sister, she turned down a marriage proposal, Charlotte Brontë didn’t like her books—are some nuggets of true Bizarroland oddity. I don’t have space to unpack it all, but suffice to say that the claim that Austen “lived with a vampire” is the one that actually has a kernel of truth to it.*

Today I will instead focus on the eye-popping allegation that Jane Austen, the spinster daughter of a respectable rural clergyman in early nineteenth-century England, “was a senior officer in the 4th Women's Battalion, King Royal's [sic] Hussars” and “even participated in active service at Ulm in 1805.”

Obviously, this claim is false in every particular—so flamboyantly false that, as I read, I wondered to myself, “Is this a joke?”

The answer, it turns out, is yes: The tale of Jane Austen’s heroic military service originated in “Twelve little-known facts about Jane Austen,” a 2008 Telegraph piece written by a British author and satirist named Craig Brown. Originated almost verbatim, in fact: “Austen herself was a senior officer in the 4th Women's Battalion, King's Royal Hussars and saw active service at Ulm in 1805,” Brown wrote. 

In context, Brown’s comedic intent is clear—at the time, Maggie Sullivan’s AustenBlog called his piece “a hilarious article. . . having a great time with Janemania.” But that was before the Internet Truthiness Machine got Brown’s joke stuck in its cogs, as writer after unwary writer Googled “facts about Jane Austen” and regurgitated his satire as if it were, well, facts about Jane Austen:

--In 2013, a blog called Classic Book Reader posted “10 Facts Most People Do Not Know About Jane Austen,” among them that “Austen herself was a senior officer in the 4th Women’s Battalion, King’s Royal Hussars and saw active service at Ulm in 1805.”

--In 2018, a Town and Country magazine story called “9 Surprising Jane Austen Facts” reported that “Jane Austen actually served in the military as a senior officer in the 4th Women's Battalion, King Royal's [sic] Hussars. She even saw active service at Ulm in 1805.”

--In 2019, the Facebook page of the Williamsburg (VA) Regional Library, which really should know better, advertised Women’s History Month with a post asking, “Did you know that Jane Austen served in the military? During the Napoleonic wars, she was a senior officer in the 4th Women's Battalion, King's Royal Hussars, and saw active service at the Battle of Ulm in 1805.”

and

--In 2025, Stars Insider largely plagiarized the 2018 Town and Country piece (including the spelling errors!), giving further oxygen to the allegedly factual tale of Austen’s non-existent military career.

The pushback against these outlandish claims seems to have been minimal to non-existent. The book blogger’s sole commenter applauded, the Stars Insider piece garnered two likes, the Town and Country article got no response, and the library Facebook post drew an accurate—but sadly isolated—correction from Amy Stallings, the coordinator of the Jane Austen Society of North America’s 2019 Williamsburg conference.

You could reasonably argue that none of this matters. Readership for these pieces was likely tiny, and anyone who knows even a smidgen of history would recognize that the British were not fielding all-female regiments in 1805, let alone enlisting middle-class women to serve in them.

But just suppose you stumbled across one of these mentions of the “4th Women's Battalion, King's Royal Hussars” and Austen’s supposed role in the (real) Battle of Ulm. Just suppose you then decided to consult the Oracle of Google for further information. Here’s what you’d get:

True, if you phrase your search differently—say, “jane austen military service” or “did jane austen serve in the military,” Google’s AI Overview will explain that Austen was not a soldier. But eliciting an accurate result takes some work.

I will admit that an ignoble part of me finds it deeply satisfying to establish (again!) how ludicrously error-ridden are the AI chatbots that threaten to make my line of work obsolete. But anyone who cares about truth (the historical kind, let alone the contemporary kind) has to be worried about how easily even accidental errors (let alone the deliberate kind) can proliferate. And the more often these errors are repeated, the more they take on the ring of crowd-sourced truth.

This year, as you may have heard, is the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth. Lots and lots of fresh-faced Gen Z interns at publications like—well, like Stars Insider—will soon be tasked with feeding the online Austen 250 content machine.

They will be Googling. God help us all.

* One of the young students who boarded with Austen’s father was John Charles Wallop, later 3rd Earl of Portsmouth. Wallop was severely disturbed from early childhood, and in adulthood, his mental illness led to some scary episodes involving blood. Since he spent only a few months with the Austens, was five years old at the time, and left some two years before Jane’s birth, it’s ridiculous to say that she “lived with a vampire.”