It is a truth not universally acknowledged, that if you want to throw off any association with Nazi forebears, there is no better place to look than England’s Jane. For in what may be one of the most bizarre cases of image management, a US scholar has found that Jane Austen has been co-opted by the US far right to whitewash its image.

Nicole M Wright, assistant professor of English at the University of Colorado, found that the author has been invoked by white supremacists online as a symbol of sexual purity who advocated marriage, despite the fact that her heroines never emerge from the altar, and happy marriages are the exception rather than the rule in her work.

Rather than seeing Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet as a feminist icon, or Emma Woodhouse in Emma as a challenge to aristocratic entitlement, the far right are holding up both books as examples of how Austen supposedly pioneered their style of conservatism. One online commentator wrote: “If traditional marriage à la P&P [Pride and Prejudice] is going to be imposed, again, in an ethnostate, we must behave like gentlemen.”

Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth in Pride and Prejudice. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features

Wright also found Austen used as a standard-bearer for a “vanished white traditional culture” and “exception that proves the rule of female inferiority” (because there are so few women in the literary canon). Neither claim stands up to close examination, while, Wright added: “Austen’s protagonists express little of the populist boosterism and preoccupation with ethnic heritage that foster an ethnostate.”

The scholar was prompted to dig into the far-right devotion to Austen after hearing her misquoted by the disgraced “alt-right” flag-bearer Milo Yiannopoulos in a characteristically misogynist diatribe against feminism. Trawling through far-right sites, Wright recognised a pattern in which the author’s name was used. “By comparing their movement not to the nightmare Germany of Hitler and Goebbels, but instead to the cosy England of Austen – a much-beloved author with a centuries-long fandom and an unebbing academic following – the ‘alt-right’ normalises itself in the eyes of ordinary people,” she wrote.

Not only did the far right co-opt Austen in support of a mythologised past, but Wright believes the appropriation “also subtly panders to the nostalgia of the Brexiters, with their vision of a better, bygone Britain. Such references nudge readers who happen upon ‘alt-right’ sites to think that perhaps white supremacists aren’t so different from mainstream folks.”

Fellow Austen scholar Bharat Tandon, who edited the Harvard University Press edition of Emma, is sceptical that Austen’s fans on the far right have actually read her books. Citing Ayn Rand, another of the far right’s favourite female writers, he said: “[Austen] would have had Rand for breakfast. That rootsy post-Randian demagoguery that they all follow would have been completely alien to the society Austen chronicled.”

According to Tandon, the only character in Austen’s work who could possibly have voted for Donald Trump would be Mrs Norris, Fanny Price’s cruel and snobbish aunt in Mansfield Park. “She’s a nasty, greedy and abusive piece of work,” says Tandon. “Trump would speak to her.”

Claire Tomalin, whose biography, Jane Austen: A Life, revealed a woman more radical in her roots than her popular image allows, doubts the writer would find anything in common with white supremacists. “[Austen] loved the poetry of William Cowper, who was opposed to hunting and shooting,” she says.

Trump has yet to tweet his opinion of Austen, but her ascendance to global celebrity in the wake of myriad TV and film adaptations may well have endeared her to him, too.