LITERATURE
She wrote just six novels and died 200 years ago this month. So why the enduring obsession with Jane Austen?
Why Jane Austen’s works have stood the test of time
From online games such as Ever, Jane to the world of the undead ( Pride and Prejudice and Zombies), from YouTube video diaries of a 21st-century Lizzy Bennet, from graphic novels to social media memes, from board games, card games, pornography and knitting patterns, Jane Austen and her characters provide seemingly endless fodder for pop cultural reinvention.
Colin Firth’s famous wet shirt scene and his smouldering presence opposite Jennifer Ehle’s intelligent, assured Elizabeth Bennet in the polished 1995 BBC mini-series Pride and Prejudice is widely credited with bringing Jane Austen to the attention of a new generation of readers who have continued to adapt her work in all manner of media and unlikely spin-offs.
All this from just six published novels by an author whose short life ended 200 years ago, on July 18, 1817, in the cathedral city of Winchester. Whether they’re approached as simple love stories, as guides to life or as witty, sharply observed depictions of English society in the early 19th century, Austen’s stories and characters continue to resonate with readers.
It’s as if, through their myriad incarnations, characters such as Emma and Elizabeth Bennet have become as familiar to her fans as members of their own family. They feel a sense of ownership, almost as if there’s a little bit of Austen in them all.
In this 200th anniversary year, a kind of genteel Austenmania is quietly gathering pace as Austen devotees everywhere prepare to mark the occasion. The English spa town of Bath, where the author lived for a time and set the novels Persuasian and Northanger Abbey, competes in its claims to Austen with Winchester and the village of Chawton, where the family home is now known as Jane Austen’s House Museum.
In Bath, visitors are urged to partake of “Jane-y things to do”, such as taking the air in Sydney Gardens, eating Bath buns, staying in Austen-themed accommodation or, for those who like to play dress-ups (and there are many), joining the Grand Regency Costumed Promenade. The promenade is the centrepiece of the annual Jane Austen Festival, which vies with the Jane Austen Society of North America’s annual Regency Ball for the biggest turnout of people in empire-line frocks, bonnets and breeches. Bath is winning at this stage. It holds the Guinness World Record at 409, but this year’s events – September in the UK and October in the US – promise to surpass that.
In Adelaide, an international literary conference, Immortal Austen, convened by the humanities department at Flinders University, runs for three days from Thursday. Keynote speakers include Professor Devoney Looser from Arizona State University and Professor Kathryn Sutherland from the University of Oxford. Melbourne author Andrea Goldsmith will deliver a public lecture titled “Never Leave Home Without Her”.
Although it has a serious academic purpose, the conference will embrace the popular aspects of Austen’s legacy inside and outside the lecture theatre. Flinders lecturer and conference co-convenor Dr Eric Parisot will deliver a paper entitled Undying Love(rs): Austen and the Vampires. “I thought about the number of vampire books that were coming out and it seemed to me that we have this kind of
Twilight- ification of Austen,” he says. “From 2009 to 2012 there were nine Austen-vampire mash-ups.” Among them are Mr
Darcy, Vampyre; Vampire Darcy’s Desire and Jane Bites Back, where Austen herself is a modern-day vampire. “She’s a kind of vampire slayer,” says Parisot.
Dr Gillian Dooley, co-convenor and honorary senior research fellow in the English department, was completing her Honours studies on Austen in the year the BBC miniseries was released. “I watched it, and I thought, ‘Oh, yeah’,” she says. “The thing I disliked about it was it was too literal. It tried to get all the famous quotes in.”
Dooley dates the steady rise in Austen’s popularity to the 1870s and 1880s after the publication in 1869 of her nephew James Austen-Leigh’s A Memoir of Jane Austen.
“Somehow that caught the imagination and she started getting popular,” she says. “And then people like Rudyard Kipling ... he wrote that story, The Janeites, about soldiers reading Jane Austen in the trenches. It’s extraordinary. So there was this almost canonisation of her. For a lot of people, it’s almost like holy writ.”
The embrace of the term “Janeites” by passionate fans and their fervour for her work raised eyebrows in literary circles and sparked a backlash from male critics who regarded Austen’s work as inferior because its focus was “too feminine” and its themes too constrained by domestic concerns.
“There were people who would say, ‘Well, don’t be silly,
she’s just a woman, she was very limited and she never wrote about men, and it was all domestic so what does all that matter?’,” Dooley says.
Academics have been dissecting the history of Austen’s reputation ever since. But Dooley has never been in any doubt. “There’s something about her and her work which sets her apart from other writers of the time,” she says. “If you read some of the other writers of the time, it’s just a completely different experience. She was so much more in command of her art. I think she has endured because of that.”
She names the 1995 film Clueless, the modern retelling of Emma starring Alicia Silverstone, as possibly her favourite adaptation. She is untroubled by any of the wackier manifestions of Austen fandom. “Some people get very offended: ‘How dare they do that!’,” she says. “There are several descendants of [Austen’s] brothers and they’re lovely, but they’re very solemn about her and they kind of feel like they own her.”
One of the descendants, Caroline Jane Knight, who was raised at Chawton but now lives with her family in Melbourne, has written Jane and Me: My Austen Heritage, published this month. When she was 17, her grandfather, the 15th squire of Chawton, died and the debt-ridden house and remaining land was sold. As she explains in her book, if there was no male heir, the estate passed to a relative on condition that he take the name Knight. “Edward Austen, Jane’s brother and my fourth great-grandfather, was adopted by the Knights to become the 11th Squire of Chawton Great House,” she writes.
Like Dooley, American academic Devoney Looser is an interested observer of pop culture’s embrace of all things Austen, and is not above some light-hearted riffs herself. She has an alter ego called Stone Cold Jane Austen who comes out to play when Looser skates in a local roller derby. Her website depicts her in a miniskirt and tights patterned with the author’s portrait. For her new book The Making of Jane Austen, which will have an Australian launch at the conference, she has produced a tonguein-cheek YouTube video (yes, there is skating).
Looser can quite truthfully claim Austen has shaped her life. Apart from being her academic focus, it was because of Austen that she crossed paths with George Justice, an Austen scholar and editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Emma who is now her husband. “We met over an argument about Mansfield Park, which is his favourite and my least favourite Austen novel,” says Looser by phone from her Phoenix office. “He said to me, ‘Why don’t you love it? I love Fanny Price’. And I said, ‘Well I don’t like Fanny Price. She’s too much like me. She’s boring.’ And he says that was the moment when he knew he was going to marry me.”
Pride and Prejudice is Looser’s favourite Austen novel. Given to her in her teens by her mother, it sparked what has become a lifelong Austen journey. “If that’s a cliched answer, I don’t care,” says Looser. “That is my favourite, it remains my favourite.”
Persuasion has risen in her estimation as she’s grown older “because I think it just deals with time in such interesting ways”. She is also a fan of the novella Lady Susan, written as a series of letters mostly by or to the scheming, immoral character of the title. It was never submitted for publication by the author.
A film adaptation, written and directed by Whit Stillman, was released last year under the title Love & Friendship. “I was thrilled when Whit Stillman did [that] because I think it showed that Jane Austen isn’t the stereotyped, carriage-bonnet niceness that people might associate with her.”
That filmmakers are even now finding fresh ways to depict Austen’s novels is testimony to their enduring appeal.
“There are so many layers and levels on which Jane Austen novels can be read,” says Looser. “You could approach them, as many first-time readers do, as love stories and they are very satisfying love stories. But that’s only one layer. They’re also amazing stories of power and control, and how the social structures worked for individuals as they try to find their way in the world. They open up a series of questions, rather than telling us ‘here is how to live’.”
Many have. One of the myriad Austen-themed books which publishers hope will catch the 200th anniversary wave is Jane
Austen’s Tips for Success, a compendium of quotes grouped under different headings. Under “Love”, for example, we find this from Pride and Prejudice: “To be fond of dancing is a certain step towards falling in love.” For “Marriage” there is this from Emma: “If a woman doubts as to whether she should accept a man or not, she certainly ought to refuse him.” Under “Poor Behaviour”: “Where there is a disposition to dislike, a motive will never be wanting.” ( Lady Susan).
While her characters might dispense advice, Austen’s tone is never prescriptive or hectoring. “There’s something quite special going on in the novels because they don’t hit us over the head with ‘here is how to behave perfectly or poorly’,” says Looser. “Even her least admirable characters are not punished very severely or often in the ends of the novels, and that was unusual for her times, and it’s unusual now.”
Think of Maria (Bertram) Rushworth in Mansfield Park. When her infidelity becomes public, she is sent to live with her aunt. “Aunt Norris is one of the most heinous, hateful characters in the book,” says Looser. “So in a way they … are each other’s punishment.” In Pride and Prejudice, Lydia Bennet’s elopement with George Wickham is resolved without scandal. “In other kinds of novels from that period you might see that character die or come to a more tragic end, because if you’ve made this terrible choice you must be slapped down in a way that is more dramatic. And, in a way, Austen is making a choice that is more true to what would actually happen to a person from a comfortable family who made a wrong moral turn.”
Personally, Looser says she has grown out of her likeness to Fanny Price, and her opinion of Mansfield Park’s lead character has softened. “She has a quiet strength and I guess I have a greater appreciation for that than when I was a more timid, quieter person myself,” she says. “I had a harder time appreciating those parts of her as strengths because I saw them in myself as weaknesses.”
That kind of self-reflection is what makes literature relevant to readers of all generations. “I’m showing the ways literature has you think about your life,” she says. “Jane Austen has helped me think about how I might want to be in the world. The characters I admire spin around in my head as ways to be or become.”