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Arkansas State University Arkansas State University

ARCH: A-State Research & Creativity Hub ARCH: A-State Research & Creativity Hub

Student Theses and Dissertations

6-2-2023

Austentatious Aspirations: How Janeite Women Writers Create Austentatious Aspirations: How Janeite Women Writers Create

and Expand Their Own Cultural Communities Through Recounting and Expand Their Own Cultural Communities Through Recounting

and Adapting Jane Austen's Original Works in Literature and Film and Adapting Jane Austen's Original Works in Literature and Film

Kerri L. Bennett

Arkansas State University

, klbennett@astate.edu

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Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, Film and Media Studies Commons, and the

Women's Studies Commons

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Cultural Communities Through Recounting and Adapting Jane Austen's Original Works in Literature and

Film" (2023).

Student Theses and Dissertations

. 190.

https://arch.astate.edu/all-etd/190

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AUSTENTATIOUS ASPIRATIONS: HOW JANEITE WOMEN WRITERS CREATE

AND EXPAND THEIR OWN CULTURAL COMMUNITIES THROUGH

RECOUNTING AND ADAPTING JANE AUSTEN'S ORIGINAL WORKS IN

LITERATURE AND FILM

Kerri L. Bennett

A Dissertation presented to the faculty of Arkansas State University in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

ARKANSAS STATE UNIVERSITY

May 2023

Approved by

Dr. Lauri Umanski, Dissertation Director

Dr. Janelle Collins, Committee Member

Dr. Robert Lamm, Committee Member

Kerri L. Bennett

iii

ABSTRACT

Kerri L. Bennett

AUSTENTATIOUS ASPIRATIONS: HOW JANEITE WOMEN WRITERS CREATE

AND EXPAND THEIR OWN CULTURAL COMMUNITIES THROUGH

RECOUNTING AND ADAPTING JANE AUSTEN'S ORIGINAL WORKS IN

LITERATURE AND FILM

In comparison to Jane Austen’s purportedly quiet, unassuming life, her six novels

have had an ostentatious and extensive impact upon Anglophone literature, culture, and

history, particularly through the innumerable adaptations that have been created, written,

and produced by her most ardent admirers. As such, this research explores the ways that

their various literary and filmic adaptations of Austen’s original narratives both create

and expand their communities. Additionally, this project situates Janeite cultural

production within the framework of Jacques Derrida’s theory of archival expansion, as

well as the scholarship of Claudia Johnson, Abigail Derecho, and Sarah Glosson, among

others. The texts examined within this study were gathered from within the ever-

expanding collection of Austen pastiche which has been widely and consistently

produced within the two centuries that have passed since Austen made her professional

debut in 1811. One reason that Austen’s work has been so oft adapted is that her

characters are distinctly realistic and thereby remain relatable to audiences despite the

passage of more than two hundred years. Austen’s works are also inherently malleable, a

characteristic that renders them particularly suited to adaptation for various mediums

including stage plays, films, web series, and social media posts. Even as they present

readers with Austen’s minutely detailed interpretation of Regency England, her narratives

compel her most avid followers to spend more time in that place. Many fulfill this need to

form a friendship with Jane by adapting her novels. Through their reworkings, these

Janeites are keeping her plots and characters fresh, exposing new audiences to her genius,

and ultimately ensuring that this unique community of Austen admirers will exist and

expand for generations to come. This research shows that so long as Janeite women

writers retain the realism with which Austen originally imbued her characters, their

adaptations will successfully protect and prolong Jane Austen’s literary afterlife.

DEDICATION

To my Big Daddy, my Partner, W.T. Outlaw, whose love and adoration for me

never wavered.

To my beloved mentor and friend, Dr. Victoria Han Spaniol. I will always be

honored that you chose me. I would neither be the teacher nor the academic that I am

without your tough, invaluable guidance. For once, you were wrong, though—you never

did fall off that pedestal.

To paraphrase Miss Austen, I have lost an excellent grandfather and a self-

proclaimed Chinese Mother. I miss and love you both.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I cannot find the words to convey just how indebted and grateful I am to the

members of my dissertation committee. Nevertheless, I shall attempt it: Lauri, thank you

for seeing my potential and seeking me out, even when I thought this was the wrong path

to take; thank you, too, for adopting me into your chosen family. Janelle, thank you for

your unwavering support; you never fail to make me feel seen and appreciated and to

remind me that my work is valuable. Thank you for being so much more than my

professor and mentor, more than a department chair under whom I worked, more than a

wonderful colleague; thank you for being my friend and fellow Janeite, for believing in

me and this project, and for sticking by me even when it would have been easier for you

to step back. Rob, thank you for facilitating that Young Writers’ Workshop all those

years ago. Neither of us knew it then, but that week at the Hemingway-Pfeiffer House

irrevocably changed the trajectory of my life. You are much of the reason I even set foot

on the A-State campus in the first place, so thank you, too, for everything that has come

after. There is perfect poetry in my academic career at A-State beginning and ending with

you. I love each of you.

To my former professors whose friendship I now cherish: My Dearest Poppa,

Jerry Ball, thank you for loving me and calling me your Sunshine. I have no doubt that

without you, I would not be in the position I am today. You may not be my father by

blood, nor I your daughter, but I am so glad for the fatherly love and guidance you have

vii

always given me. You are terrible, Poppa, with your wicked-sharp humor, but you

always know exactly what to say to make me smile, and I love you for it! Cathey

Calloway, I will never forget the day that you called me into your office after class. I was

a terrified sophomore who could not, for the life of me, fathom what I had done to upset

you. I sat nervously at your invitation; then you asked me the most astounding question—

Are you an English major? —and for the first time since class ended, I drew an easy

breath. I had just made the decision to switch my major and minor and completed the

paperwork a few days before, and so I was indeed an English major! Though you

couldn’t have known how I struggled with that choice, you certainly affirmed it. Thank

you for your continuing affirmation, your wisdom, your guidance over these many years.

Also, thank you for advising me to apply to PhD programs because I would “be great” in

one. You have taught me so much, helped and advised me so much, that there is no way

to recount it all here, but know that I love you and am grateful for all of it. Bob Schichler,

thank you for all the interesting class discussions on any manner of British history,

literature, and culture ranging from Sutton Hoo and Beowulf to William Blake and

beyond. I know you are happy in New York, but I miss seeing you and gleaning from

your wealth of knowledge. Marcus Tribbett, thank you for assigning Levine’s Highbrow-

Lowbrow. Our discussions were the germ that became my Chapter One. Erik Gilbert, you

taught me so much in the space of one term; thank you for the push toward Janeites and

the lens through which to study women writers’ culture and heritage.

To my colleagues: Carmen Williams, my dear friend and unofficial dissertation

coach, thank you for giving me the inestimable advice to relate as much of my

coursework as possible to my dissertation topic and to collect just one source per day

viii

along the way. It pains me to think of how much longer and more arduous this journey

would have been without you. Dixie Keyes, my world would be so much narrower if Rob

hadn’t advised me to take your National Writing Project course as a grad student. We are

kindred creatures in so many ways—our wildly curly hair; being journal junkies and

book hoarders (or better yet, book dragons); our love for good coffee to accompany good

books; our fondness for weekend trips for massages and taking daytrips when the mood

strikes; italiano nights; and our passion for creating student writers who become teachers

of writing. Thank you for the years of friendship and support and for seeing the academic

I could be. I would not have made it this far without you. LaDawn Fuhr, thank you for

always being my PIC! Thanks for the collaborations and the pep talks, the encouragement

when I was frustrated, and the fun times working the Delta Symposium. Thank you, too,

for connecting me with Linda and Harry. You played such a large part in my success, and

I could not have gotten this far without you! Love you! Kristen Ruccio, from the first

moment we met at the 2019 Pre-semester workshop, I knew we were kindred spirits! I am

forever grateful that we sat together that day, and I am so glad to have you in my life

professionally as a supportive Writing Program Director, but I am exceedingly glad to be

your friend! I love you, Work Bestie!

To my closest friends from Fall 2019 Heritage Studies Cohort, Jenn Hardaway

and Shobhi Kandasamy, you two are forever my favorites! Thanks for the late-night chats

and all the help studying, not to mention the emotional support and commiseration. I

wouldn’t have survived our coursework without you!

To my family: Momma and Daddy, thank you for the most perfect childhood; for

showing me what real, unconditional love is; for teaching me the value of hard work,

persevering, and enduring; for believing in me when others might have relegated me to

mediocrity. I would never have gotten to this point without y’all. Brittany, we may have

fundamentally different views of life, and we may drive each other totally crazy, but my

little sister loves me just as fiercely as she fights with me—and that’s very fiercely

indeed! Thanks for Walt, who is a great brother-in-law…most of the time. Thank you,

too, for my babies! Caleb and Creed, Sissy loves you boys SO STINKING MUCH!!!

Meme, I love you bunches! Thank you for covering me in prayers my whole life—for the

hedge of protection I know that gives me—for spoiling me, for my second home, for the

BEST meals (especially the desserts), the warmest hugs, and helping Momma give me

the most perfect of childhoods. I know you love me bunches, but I love you more! I am

so thankful for both my Bennett family and my Outlaw family! We are a large, loud

bunch, and we love each other like nobody else! UT and AL, there are too many things

for which I am thankful, but I am grateful for all the laughs, the adventures, and that one

idea that I still cannot believe you helped me with…

To Deanna Dillon, Holly Melton, Brittney Osborn, and Courtney Guest, thank

you for being my best friends who became my sisters, for loving me despite my high-

strung, perfectionist tendencies. I do know I am hard to live with, but you never let me

down, and I COULD NOT do life without y’all. I will love you forever. To Kathryn

Stansbury, there are not enough words, ink, or paper. Thank you for letting me be Tut-

Tut. Thank you, too, for my babies. Madalyn and Rebekah, Tut-Tut loves you THIS

MUCH!!!

x 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
TABLE OF ILLUSTRATIONS ...................................................................................... xiii 
INTRODUCTION: WHERE SHALL I BEGIN? ............................................................... 1 
Defining Heritage ........................................................................................................... 3 
 Relationship to Heritage Studies & Interdisciplinary Elements ..................................... 7 
 Situation within Austen Scholarship & Cultural Studies ................................................ 9 
 Purpose & Structure ...................................................................................................... 13 
 
CHAPTER ONE: I MUST KEEP TO MY OWN STYLE & GO IN MY OWN WAY .. 18 
The Earliest Janeites ..................................................................................................... 21 
 A Brief Sketch of Austen’s Life & Literary Career .................................................. 21 
 Austen’s Literary Afterlife Begins ............................................................................... 33 
 Changing Culture, Shifting Celebrity ........................................................................... 34 
 Austen’s American Adventures .................................................................................... 37 
 Miss Austen Makes Her Appearance at Last ............................................................ 38 
 Jane, the Pop Icon: The Origin of Austenmania ....................................................... 42 
 The Adaptable Austen ............................................................................................... 44 
 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 48 
 
CHAPTER TWO: I WRITE ONLY FOR FAME ............................................................ 50 
The Invisible Woman of Letters ................................................................................... 52 
 Erasing the Earliest English Authoresses ................................................................. 52 

xi 
 
Englishwomen Become Visible at Last .................................................................... 58 
 Obsequiousness & Obscurity .................................................................................... 61 
 Supple Brains over Sweet Beauty: The Women of Letters Emerge ......................... 64 
 Austen’s Contemporary Inspirations ............................................................................ 67 
 Fanny Burney ............................................................................................................ 67 
 Mary Wollstonecraft ................................................................................................. 71 
 Maria Edgeworth ...................................................................................................... 81 
 Austen’s American Counterparts .................................................................................. 85 
 Petty and Graceful: Rediscovering Extraordinary Letters Written by Ordinary 
American Women ..................................................................................................... 88 
 Early America’s Most Learned Lady ........................................................................ 92 
 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 101 
 
CHAPTER THREE: PAPER WILL HARDLY HOLD IT ALL ................................... 103 
The Janeites: Austen’s Most Ardent Admirers ........................................................... 105 
 Early Adaptation & Austen’s Leap across the Pond ................................................... 108 
 The Not-So-Secret Society of Janeites ....................................................................... 117 
 Cultural Creation & Archival Expansion .................................................................... 130 
 Storytelling as Cultural Preservation .......................................................................... 136 
 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 140 
 
CHAPTER FOUR: THANKFULLY TURN TO BOOKS ............................................. 142 
Befriending Jane & Patronizing Her Library .............................................................. 153 
 Radical Relatability: Reworking Pride and Prejudice ........................................... 155 
 A Traditionalist’s Tale: Trollope’s Sense and Sensibility ....................................... 157 
 Adapting the Act for YA: Kate Watson’s Seeking Mansfield ................................ 159 

xii 
 
Appreciated by Austen Alone: Juxtaposing Jane’s Emma &Three of its Retellings
 ................................................................................................................................. 163 
 Finding Friends & Searching for Captain Wentworth: Jane Odiwe’s Adaptation of 
Persuasion ............................................................................................................... 172 
 Horror-loving Heroines: Val McDermid’s Modernized Northanger Abbey .......... 181 
 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 188 
 
CHAPTER FIVE: I CANNOT IMAGINE BETTER ACTING..................................... 192 
Jane Jumps from Page to Screen: Female Janeites & their Filmic Adaptations ......... 207 
 Sense and Sensibility Packaged Perfectly: Emma Thompson’s 1995 Screenplay .. 207 
 Universally Acknowledged as Truly Adaptable: Pride and Prejudice Reworked by 
Women Writers, Directors, and Producers ............................................................. 212 
 Mansfield Park & the Price of Producing a Successful Adaptation of Austen’s 
Problematic Novel .................................................................................................. 244 
 Austen’s Emma: A Heroine’s Complexity Reimagined as Cluelessness or 
Implausibility .......................................................................................................... 248 
 Screen Adaptations of Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, & Austen’s Other 
Posthumous Publications ........................................................................................ 260 
 Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 266 
 
AFTERWARD: DARE TO BE AN AUTHORESS ....................................................... 269 
Précis ........................................................................................................................... 272 
 Implications ................................................................................................................ 275 
 Limitations .................................................................................................................. 279 
 Adapting Austen for Social Media & Beyond ............................................................ 280 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 286 
SOURCES CONSULTED .............................................................................................. 300 
 
   

xiii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: “Mr. Darcy’s Wet Shirt.” ................................................................................ 195

Figure 2: “Mr. Darcy’s Hand Flex.” ............................................................................... 198

Figure 3: “Pride & Prejudice Theatrical Poster.” ............................................................ 235

Figure 4: “Austenland Theatrical Poster.” ...................................................................... 238

Figure 5: “Cher’s Epiphany.” ......................................................................................... 254

Figure 6: “Darcy’s Proposal Meme.”.............................................................................. 282

INTRODUCTION: WHERE SHALL I BEGIN?

“Where shall I begin? Which of all my important things shall I tell you first?”

—Jane Austen in a letter to her sister Cassandra, dated 15 June 1808

Stories have always held great importance in my life. Perhaps this is because I do

not remember a time when I did not know how to read them. Thanks to my Kindergarten-

teaching momma, even before attending school, I could read the simple Dick and Jane

primers with which many American children began their literacy journeys in those days. I

was not only an early reader, but also a voracious one, devouring books so quickly that,

to this day, my Third-Grade teacher still recalls struggling to find stories for me to read

that were both content and reading level appropriate. At almost the same time that I was

falling in love with reading other peoples’ stories, I began to realize that I wanted to tell

my own. At six, I already knew I wanted to be a writer and was constantly imagining my

own characters and plots. Some of those early stories, scrawled in Number 2 pencil on

Dot-Matrix printer pages, illustrated in crayon, and bound with a staple or two, likely still

sit in a long-forgotten box somewhere in my parents’ house.

Or perhaps my love of stories comes from my tall tale-telling daddy. Growing up,

one of my favorite parts of the evening was when Daddy would tell me a bedtime story.

He had done this every night of my life as far back as I could remember. Each time I’d

crawled into bed, he would begin his story the same way: “When I was just a little bitty

boy…” and I never knew just what might come next.

What I did know was that my father’s story was going to involve a memory from

his childhood that had stuck with him. He might tell me how, as a small boy left to his

own devices in rural Southeast Arkansas, he would crawl into the open space under his

parents’ house where it was cool and fight ferocious battles with his tiny tin soldiers or

plow miniature fields with his toy tractor and a stick. He might recall building a treehouse

with his cousins and trying to stay inside it for a whole night while getting eaten up by a

swarm of thirsty mosquitos. Or, best of all, he might tell me about a time when he was a

good bit older and snuck onto a neighbor’s property at dusk to steal a watermelon from

the patch! I can still hear his voice as he described his daring escape:

All at once I heard gunshots, and I took off running! I was running so low to the

ground that my shirt pocket was picking up dirt clods! I was running so hard and

so fast that the telephone poles I passed looked like fine teeth in a comb!

He described the events so well that I could actually see, in my mind’s eye, an adolescent

version of my father running barefoot across the field, headed for home as fast as he

could go, without even a single watermelon for his trouble! Now, should he ever be

asked, my father would quickly say that he is not a good writer, but I will always believe

that is just another of his tall tales.

Either way, I am just as enamored of stories as that small girl was. And though I

have not yet achieved the New York Times Bestselling status of which my younger self

dreamed, stories are still an integral part of my life. Like any self-respecting academic, I

am a bibliophile who has long since run out of space, and so I stack the stories that I

cannot keep from collecting in any place where they might fit. These days, I spend much

of my time teaching students that they can tell their own stories and be good at it, no

matter how badly they believe they write.

Defining Heritage

The academics and bibliophiles of modern-day are not the only ones preoccupied

with saving stories. That particular obsession stretches much further back in time. When

early humans purposefully placed colorful pigments on rock and created the first known

cave paintings about 32,000 years ago, in France, in what is now known as the Chauvet

Cave, they were attempting to preserve and remember something, be it a bull, reindeer, or

other animal, collections of full handprints, “big dots made with the palm of the hand,”

and other more abstracted shapes. These people made their marks, preserved their stories,

having no notion of how long those images would remain “like a frozen flash of a

moment in time.” The meaning and symbolism of these cave paintings elude modern

man; nevertheless, their existence continues to preserve a tiny bit of their creators’ past.

But what the paintings do say is this—since that period, and perhaps even before, humans

have felt compelled to find ways to keep and remember people, places, and events over

time: first through drawings, then through oral repetition, and at last through the written

word.

It has been said that there are only a few stories in the world that are told over and

over, albeit in new and creative ways. In telling those same stories again and again,

mother to daughter to granddaughter down through time, the stories begin to be treated as

“valued objects and qualities . . . that have been passed down from previous generations.”

This transfer of meaning is what most academics would call “heritage.” For Johnathan

Schifferes, working to create the Heritage Index in Great Britain, heritage can be

Cave of Forgotten Dreams, directed by Werner Herzog (Creative Differences, 2010), DVD

(History Films, 2010).

“anything that is inherited from the past, which helps us interpret the present and plan for

the future.” And though he applies the term to elements of material culture, in Heritage

Studies: Stories in the Making, Bowe et al. expand the concept of heritage to include “the

realm of the intangible, practices and traditions, know-how and beliefs and diverse forms

of expressions.” A narrative, being a valued object and an inherited tool, can certainly fit

all three descriptions.

Not only are narratives prized possessions, but they also form the framework

through which people view and understand their world. As such, people groups then draw

their very identities from these stories that they spread among and about themselves.

Thus, heritage can be seen as the process by which a community’s identity is developed,

nurtured, and propagated through sharing sacred stories. In The Heritage Machine:

Fetishism and Domination in Maragateria, Spain, Pablo Alonzo González writes

“heritage is a cultural process, linked with meanings, representations, identities,

memories and policies.” Creating and passing down a narrative is surely one process of

preserving those same meanings, representations, identities, memories, and policies for a

particular group.

Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.v. “heritage,” http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/86230;

Jonathan Schifferes. “Mapping Heritage.” RSA Journal 161, no. 5563 (2015): 10.

www.jstor.org/stable/26204427; Meghan Bowe, Bianca Carpeneti, Ian Dull and Jessie Lipkowitz, editors.

Heritage Studies: Stories in the Making (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 1.

http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.library.astate.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=726127&sit

e=eds-live&scope=site

Pablo Alonso González. “The Emergence of Heritage.” In The Heritage Machine: Fetishism and

Domination in Maragateria, Spain, 17-67. (London: Pluto Press, 2019), 17.

www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv86dhrk.6.

As intangible culture, these narratives can be examined as part of history as well

as heritage, and yet the two are not synonymous. Heritage, for the purpose of this study,

is the collection of stories—the essence of cultural meaning and value—that lies beneath

the impersonal sets of facts and dates recalled together as history. Granted, due to its

interdisciplinary nature, interpretations of heritage will vary, depending upon the lens

through which the elements of culture and history are being studied. Heritage is an aspect

of history, but an individual may identify with a particular culture and heritage that the

accepted historical narrative avoids or overlooks, and so, depending upon who is being

asked, history may or may not intertwine with heritage. Thus, one community’s heritage

may directly contradict the heritage (and to a larger extent, the history) that is accepted by

another community. An example of this might be the “historical” story of Christopher

Columbus wherein he is cast as a heroic explorer who discovered America. In reality,

Columbus did sail the “ocean blue” in 1492, but he never actually made it farther than the

Caribbean islands, and what is worse, he brutalized the indigenous populations he

encountered. Because these facts did not fit the accepted narrative, they were forgotten in

history. Thus, despite the darkness beneath the inaccurate schoolyard rhyme, many Italian

Americans still venerate Columbus as part of their “heritage,” while others have renamed

Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples Day to celebrate the heritage of the people

Columbus devalued and oppressed and disassociate it from him.

If history and heritage can contradict themselves, and members of a single

community can claim different heritages, then who determines the people, places, and

events that are remembered as part of a specific heritage or history, thereby also

See Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.v. “history,” https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/87324.

determining those who are not? This question, like humanity, is complex. Formerly,

history and heritage appearing in official narratives were always decided by an elite few

who wielded power and influence over others. However, recently scholars have begun re-

examining history and who it distinguishes, from the bottom up, bringing recognition to

the people, places, and events previously edited out of official narratives—communities

who were considered the “wrong” gender or skin color, despite their significant cultural

contributions.

Taking this “micro” approach is equally important when studying heritage. All

human beings have worth, and so, each distinct culture has inherited an equally

significant heritage story from past members. In Schifferes’s view, it is places that “carry

forward communal “cultures and memories” over time. However, narratives can do the

same and do so even more effectively because they are not bound by geography. People

take their precious past with them wherever they go through the stories they tell. This

portability allows heritage narratives to act as “foundations on which people construct

their identity and [shape] the distinctive character of a place.” It also allows diverse

cultures to interact with and influence one another, creating new, diverse heritage stories

to pass on to future generations.

The intangible nature of a community’s culturally significant stories makes them

difficult for heritage studies professionals to record tangibly because, to do so, the

narratives’ essence must be altered. This is why Ioannis Poulios finds that attempting to

preserve an artifact “actually brings about the opposite result.” That is, something organic

is always lost in preservation because of inorganic intervention. However, for Schiffferes,

Schifferes, “Mapping Heritage,” 10.

a cultural aspect’s “significance is defined . . . through uniqueness and scarcity,” and this

is a logical approach to preservation. If a narrative is rare and obscure, then preservation

could be worth the cultural cost, since Poulios warns that the “authenticity of heritage is

non-’renewable’ and the care for future generations.” Therefore, heritage professionals

must continue to make difficult decisions. Otherwise, many narratives could be

permanently lost, doing a disservice to humanity to come.

According to Freeman Tilden’s Interpreting Our Heritage, “Whether or not he is

conscious of it, Man seeks to find his place in nature and among men,” and he

instinctively does so through narrative. The valued moments and memories preserved

within these narratives are the lenses through which communities view themselves and

their realities. People define themselves and each other through the portable pieces of

heritage that they pass down to one another, gaining a tiny bit of immortality each time a

memory of an event, place, or person long gone is recounted. The Eleventh Doctor, a

fictional yet astute observer of the human race, put this preoccupation with narrative

identities best: “we’re all stories, in the end. Just make it a good one, eh?”

Relationship to Heritage Studies & Interdisciplinary Elements

Because I have chosen to define heritage as the process by which a person or

people group’s identity and belonging is developed, nurtured, and propagated through

Ibid., 10; Ioannis Poulios, “Introduction: Definition and Development of Conservation – the

Concept of Authenticity,” in The Past in the Present: A Living Heritage Approach - Meteora, Greece,

(London: Ubiquity Press, 2014) 11-14.

Freeman Tilden. Interpreting Our Heritage, third edition. Chapel Hill: The University of North

Carolina Press, 2009. 13.

https://is.muni.cz/el/1421/podzim2017/MUI_338/Interpreting_Our_Heritage__Chapel_Hill_Books_.pdf;

Doctor Who, Season 5, episode 13, “The Big Bang,” written by Steven Moffat, directed by Toby Haynes,

featuring Matt Smith, Karen Gillan, Alex Kingston and Arthur Darvill, aired June 26 2010, BBC1. BBC,

2011, Blu-Ray.

sharing sacred stories from the past, I can easily include Jane Austen’s novels, short

fiction, and letters—which are undoubtedly a type of written story—within that scope.

Additionally, because so little is known for certain about Austen’s life, many stories have

emerged and become part of her mythos. Her original stories as well as the mythos

surrounding her have inspired countless women across the globe to tell their own stories

and add to those that Austen began 200 years ago. These stories mix the modern era with

the world of Austen so that they are nearly inextricable.

Like all areas of heritage studies, this study is interdisciplinary. In it, I have

examined scholarly, critical, and popular sources through the lenses of history, literature,

and culture. Jane Austen and her works are pieces of British history, and at the same time

her novels are considered “great works of literature” which have certainly had an impact

upon society and become a popular culture phenomenon.

Over the past two centuries, the unspecified “Lady” who authored Sense and

Sensibility has risen from anonymity to become an undisputed cultural icon with millions

of fans who continue to emulate her world and works though adapting her original texts

in a variety of new and creative ways. But how did this cult-like devotion begin, and what

has propelled the world’s interest into the full-on obsession aptly named “Austenmania”?

Tracing Jane Austen’s path to popularity and the subsequent formation of the group of

her admirers who would eventually become known as Janeites required an investigation

of the ways that Austen has been portrayed to her readers as well as the ways that they

have viewed her and her novels from the time she made her literary debut 1811 until

present day. Changing perceptions of Austen throughout time have allowed what was

once an elite group comprised solely of Anglo-Saxon Men of Letters to expand into a

diverse female-dominant population estimated to number in the millions that stretches

across the globe.

Today, the Janeites are a distinct community who are just as enamored of Austen

as Kipling’s fictionally eponymous World War I soldiers were, except they no longer feel

the need to keep their admiration a secret. And yet, public displays of affection for her

did not originate with Kipling or his ilk. Almost as soon as audiences began to openly

express their appreciation of Austen–and Jane’s identity was revealed publicly–

adaptations of her work appeared, the earliest known instance of which is Old Friends

and New Fancies: The Imaginary Sequel to the Novels of Jane Austen, written by

Englishwoman Sybil G. Brinton and first published in 1913, predating Kipling’s short

story by more than ten years. This research examines Janeite culture, Janeites’ propensity

to create adaptations, and the subsequent impact of these adaptations Austen’s status as a

pop culture icon and global brand.

Situation within Austen Scholarship & Cultural Studies

I began this exploration of the ways Jane Austen’s most ardent admirers share

their own stories to continue their communion with her by rereading each of the six

original Austen novels published. Then I reread many of the fine biographies of her life

that have been written, beginning, of course with Henry Austen’s “Biographical Notice”

which originally appeared in the front of the first edition of Northanger Abbey and

Persuasion, which he and Cassandra Austen edited and published together in December

Rudyard Kipling’s “The Janeites” is a short story published in MacLean’s Magazine in 1924. It

is one of the earliest known uses of the term “Janeite” in print. Rudyard Kipling, “The Janeites,”

MacLean’s Magazine (May 15, 1924): 20-21, 49-53; See Sybil G. Brinton, Old Friends and New Faces:

An Imaginary Sequel to the Novels of Jane Austen (London: Holden & Hardingham, 1913), Project

Gutenberg, 2013. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43741/43741-h/43741-h.htm.

1817, after their sister’s death in July of that year. Next, I read the two earliest book-

length records of her life, James Edward Austen-Leigh’s A Memoir of Jane Austen: and

other Family Recollections (1869), and Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters: a Family

Record by Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh and William Austen-Leigh (1913), though all

three of these, the earliest records of her life, were carefully edited by the Austen family

to present her to the public as a pious, proper woman of her time, and as a result, the Jane

Austen portrayed in them is admittedly one-dimensional when compared to the Jane

Austen who exchanged letters with family and friends, and indeed the narrative voice

heard in her works of fiction. Such suppression, which has erased much of the authentic

Austen from her public persona, is regrettable but unsurprising, considering “the complex

relationship between male authors and their female subjects,” created by the widespread

practice of overwriting, which Diane Watt argues has both fragmented and artificially

colored the works of women writers for centuries. To gain Jane’s own insight, or at least

the closest approximation of it available, I also consulted Deirdre Le Faye’s renowned

works Jane Austen: A Family Record (2004), and Jane Austen’s Letters (2011), which

were indispensable primary sources containing Jane Austen’s letters and other Austen

family papers which augment Richard and William Austen-Leigh’s biography.

In addition to the extant letters and the Austen family’s accounts, modern

biographies, including Paula Byrne’s Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things (2014), Claire

Tomalin’s Jane Austen: A Life (1999), Claire Harmon’s Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen

Conquered the World (2010), and Lucy Worsley’s Jane Austen at Home: A Biography

Diane Watt, Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650–1100, (London,

Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 4. See Chapter Two in this book.

(2017) are all informative depictions of what we know about Austen and her life written

by women, and though these researchers cannot recover all that has been overwritten and

erased about Austen since 1817, they have provided a much fuller picture of her than the

one her relatives presented. Lord David Cecil’s A Portrait of Jane Austen (1979) and

David Nokes’s Jane Austen: A Life (1997), are well-researched and enlightening

Austenian biographies penned by British Men of Letters, and they have undoubtedly

influenced this study. Additionally, American-born academic Park Honan’s Jane Austen:

Her Life (1987), proved helpful, not only regarding Austen’s life, but also concerning the

contexts within which her works were written.

Other works providing useful contextualization were Marilyn Butler’s Jane

Austen and the War of Ideas (1975), Claudia Johnson’s Jane Austen: Women, Politics,

and the Novel (1988), Le Faye’s Jane Austen: The World of Her Novels (2003), Rachel

M. Brownstein’s Why Jane Austen (2011), Katie Halsey’s Jane Austen and Her Readers,

1786-1945 (2012), Helena Kelly’s Jane Austen, the Secret Radical (2016), and Devoney

Looser’s The Making of Jane Austen (2019). I also frequently consulted Jane Austen in

Context (2005), edited by Janet Todd, and The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen

(2014), edited by Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster.

Moving from the world of Austen and her novels and into the various literary and

filmic adaptations of them that have been produced for her legions of admirers, Deidre

Lynch’s edited collection, Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees (2000), was

informative, but not so much as Johnson’s Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures (2012) to

which I returned again and again. Deborah Yaffe’s Among the Janeites (2013) also

helpfully contrasted the experiences of Janeites before the advent of Austenmania with

their experiences since 1995. Bridget Draxler and Danielle Spratt’s more recent Engaging

in the Age of Jane Austen: Public Humanities in Practice (2018) provided evidence and

support throughout this study, both on why Austen is taught in schools and universities

and how her works remain relevant. Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield’s Jane Austen in

Hollywood (2001) was an enlightening, if not dated, source on Austenian films, as was

Sue Parrill’s Jane Austen on Film and Television: A Critical Study of the Adaptations

(2002). As such, Byrne’s more recent The Genius of Jane Austen: Her Love of Theatre

and Why She Works in Hollywood (2017) was central to the fifth chapter of this book.

Yet, of all the works on Jane Austen’s fandom and cultural production which I

encountered as I wrote, Sarah Glosson’s Performing Jane (2020), is the most important

for the purposes of this book, as it traces:

the pursuits of Austen’s most enthusiastic readers, individuals who—past and

present—read and reread Austen’s novels, watch and re-watch Austen screen

adaptations, collect and curate ‘Austenalia,’ and who thrill to discuss ‘Jane’ and

anything related to her novels, personal life, or the times in which she lived.

Additionally, it “emphasize[s] the activities of these enthusiasts, seeking to theorize and

contextualize them and recognizing individuals as fans even in contexts in which that

term might not at first glance appear well suited.” In short, she has written a history of the

Janeites, and as such, much of her work coincides with this one. However, in contrast to

Glosson, this study centers upon a particular sect within the Janeites—the women writers

driven to fill that emptiness which Virginia Woolf felt so keenly and which all Janeites

Sarah Glosson, Performing Jane: A Cultural History of Jane Austen Fandom, (Baton Rouge:

Louisiana State University Press, 2020), 13.

encounter once they have finished reading the six original novels—the ones who adapt

Austen, creating something new.

In terms of cultural studies, I drew some from Stuart Hall’s foundational essay

“Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’” (1981), wherein he likens the flow of what is

viewed as popular within a particular culture or society to that of riding an escalator.

However, I drew more heavily from Lawrence Levine’s book Highbrow Lowbrow (1988)

when interpreting Austen’s popularity as well as the way it inspires new Janeites.

Lawrence’s theory that “the perimeters of our cultural divisions” are “permeable and

shifting rather than fixed and immutable,” along with Jacques Derrida’s “Archive Fever:

A Freudian Impression” (1995), an article in which Derrida re-envisions the archive as a

perpetually unfinished public collection of stored information which anyone can access

and to which anyone can contribute texts, are central to my work. Glosson’s book

references Derrida’s archon concept along with Abigail Derecho’s article “Archontic

Literature: A Definition, a History, and Several Theories of Fan Fiction” (2006).

Together, these form the foundations upon which this study is built.

Purpose & Structure

In the process of writing this book, I have examined the Janeites, Austen’s most

ardent admirers. They are a well-established community with its own cultural aspects

which I have explored and attempted to interpret. Though some Janeites content

themselves with reading every extant word of Austen’s, others cannot. Instead, these

women are compelled to build upon the stories that Jane’s genius generated in order to

Ibid,13.

Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988) 8.

prolong the time they spend in communion with her—a desire they satisfy by creating

their own adaptations and sequels to Austen’s novels. Through their reworkings, these

Janeites are keeping Austen’s plots and characters fresh, exposing new audiences to her

genius, and ultimately ensuring that this unique community of Austen admirers will exist

and expand for generations to come.

This research builds upon the wealth of scholarship that so many other academics

have observed about Austen while also adding to the current understanding of her

influence upon literature and popular culture, and women who are Janeites in particular.

The almost constant publication of Austen’s most famous works (despite their having

been penned two hundred years ago) as well as the frequency at which those works have

adapted for film and television only confirm her relevancy and place within popular

culture. Her novels continue to flex and bend with the current culture, reaching new

audiences. Many of Austen’s original novels have inspired other authors to create their

own sequels such as Linda Berdoll’s Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife and the follow-up Darcy &

Elizabeth: Nights and Days at Pemberley. Still others have adapted Austen’s plots and

characters for modern readers—most famously, Helen Fielding, whose novel Bridget

Jones’s Diary was followed by two sequels, and this series has, in turn, been adapted into

three feature-length films. Yet Austen’s influence does not stop there. Modern novelists

have also begun to reimagine nineteenth-century texts with added popular fantasy

elements, as is the case with Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and Pride and

Prejudice and Zombies, the latter having been further adapted for the screen. Thus,

Austen’s current cultural popularity makes this topic of research timely and important for

present-day and future scholars alike. In this way, the Janeites who continue to create

derivative works are continuing to share Jane Austen’s stories and ensuring her

appreciation in future generations.

Though I have examined many literary and filmic texts, the proliferation of

archontic works which have been created and added to the body which I will call

Austen’s library since Austen herself began to write her Volume The First sometime

during 1788, at age twelve, until the present makes the inclusion of all such texts an

impossibility, even narrowing the scope of this research as I have to that of works created

by female Janeites. Therefore, there are many literary adaptations that are merely

mentioned by name, and there are still a greater number that were not discussed at all, as

I attempted to select the works that were the most popular or the most capable of

attracting new Austen admirers. The same is true for the films I have discussed, though

fewer of them have been left out, as fewer films have been made than books written.

Though this study is limited, it does cover the essential archontic texts which have

undoubtedly contributed to Jane Austen’s status as a literary and cultural icon as well as

the genesis and expansion of the Janeite community during the last two centuries.

Aside from this introduction and the afterward, the book is divided into five

chapters. Chapter One uses Levine’s work to explain the differing perceptions of

Austen’s work over time as well as the different types of pastiche Janeites have created in

light of those perceptions. The second chapter maps the genealogy of women of letters

from which Austen descended, and therein traces the shared literary heritage of all the

Janeite writers whose works are discussed in this text. Chapter Three concerns the

Janeites themselves, from the elite number of British men of letters who first expressed

their admiration for Austen’s novels in their published essays and reviews, to the diverse

and widespread group of people, particularly the women, from all walks of life who now

make their own literary and film contributions to the ever-growing collection of

Austenian adaptations. The third chapter also explains the process of cultural production

which takes place when Janeites create their own archontic texts through the lens of

Derrida and Derecho’s work. Chapter Four juxtaposes Austen’s six original novels with

female-authored modern literary reworkings of them. The fifth chapter examines some of

the most successful filmic adaptations of Austen which were either written or produced

for the screen by women. Finally, the afterward looks past the two traditional means of

adaption and toward two currently popular mediums made available to Janeites via the

Internet—vlogs and other YouTube web series as well as TicTok videos—which, when

combined with the sustained demand for new books and films, have the potential to

propel Jane’s fame well into the future.

Beginning with Brinton, who wrote the earliest known book-length adaptation of

Jane Austen’s works 110 years ago, and continuing today, Austen’s most devoted readers

have expressed their admiration through adaptation. Initially, these adaptations were all

written works, as were Austen’s original texts; however, as technology has advanced and

societal limitations that once excluded almost all women from the Janeite community have

changed, and a multitude of creative reworkings have been published in various mediums

throughout the world. Unlike the initial acolytes, modern Janeites can enjoy reading Bridget

Jones’ Diary in paperback or via eBook, whichever they prefer, or they can watch the film

adaptation of the same name along with its three sequels. Aside from books and movies,

there are also Austen adaptations in the form of plays, graphic novels, a few web-exclusive

series, and a growing number of TicTok videos. As this research will show, Austen’s works

continue to compel Janeites to create their own original adaptations, and the successful

marketing of these adaptations along with anything else related to Austen has cemented

her status as a pop culture icon.

CHAPTER ONE: I MUST KEEP TO MY OWN STYLE & GO IN MY OWN WAY

“I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed

again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.”

—Jane Austen in a letter to Rev. James Stanler Clarke, dated 1 April 1816

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Jane Austen fan in possession of a

good copy of Pride and Prejudice must be in want of an adaptation. But, after more than

two hundred years, what is it that continues to compel so many to adapt and recreate not

only Austen’s most famous work, but anything she wrote, finished or not?

Jane Austen’s distinctive style has been recognized as that of a literary genius by

much of the world for the last seventy years, since F.R. Leavis, and later Ian Watt, and

other scholars took notice of her work and began studying it mid-nineteenth century, but

prior to that, her name and works were celebrated by few. A successful author towards

the end of her life, Pride and Prejudice was indeed the most fashionable thing to read in

London when it debuted in the spring of 1813. Her identity, at that point, was an open

secret in England, deduced by clever readers or revealed to them proudly by her brother

Henry, should he have heard that they admired her work. Sadly, Austen would only live

long enough to publish two more novels, and after her death in the summer of 1817,

though her siblings did publish another pair of her books, it seemed that her popularity

had peaked; sales slacked off, and soon her name and novels would be left to gather dust

This is my tongue-in-cheek adaptation of the opening line of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

on shelves like those of so many other women writers. And yet, such would not be her

fate. Jane Austen’s is a long and complex afterlife that is now as vibrant as her natural

life was inauspicious and brief. Widespread love of her six novels has propelled her far

past Warhol’s “fifteen minutes of fame” and given her immortality as a cultural and

literary icon.

Part of her sustained modern popularity is because of the heavy influence the

digital world has upon everyday life. The rapid dissemination of information on the

Internet coupled with various social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter;

as well as other outlets like online magazines, personal blogs, discussion boards,

websites; and other forms of media, such as film and television; have led to the formation

of “fandoms,” that is groups of fanatic “enthusiasts for some amusement or for some

artist,” possible for nearly any aspect of culture. One such fandom is devoted to Jane

Austen.

Though Austen was an Englishwoman who wrote during the Georgian period

about events taking place during the Regency and gained relatively little public

recognition in her lifetime, posthumously she has attracted a steadily increasing cult

following of devoted fans worldwide, referred to as “Janeites,” and less commonly

“Austenites.” Initially mostly comprised of scholars, academics and other members of the

literary community, such as Henry James and Rudyard Kipling, over time the group has

expanded to include any number of people from any country with varying levels of age

and education who profess a “self-consciously idolatrous enthusiasm for ‘Jane’ and every

Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “fandom,” updated March 2020, accessed on April 28, 2020,

https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/68041?redirectedFrom=fandom&.

detail relative to her.” As the Jane Austen Society of North America’s website tagline so

concisely attests: “6 novels. 200 years. Millions of fans.” Along with the large number of

Janeites, there have been myriad adaptations of her published novels (as well as at least

three of her unfinished works), created by authors, filmmakers, actors, and other artists.

Aside from the books and films Austen and her writing have inspired, there is also

a sizable niche market of Jane Austen-themed products and collectibles available for

purchase by private consumers. Items such as action figures, board and card games,

buttons, figurines, jewelry, period-accurate clothing, scarves, shoes, socks, stickers, tote

bags, T-shirts, tea and all manner of accouterments, video games and software, wall art,

and any number of other types of merchandise are easily obtainable all across the Internet

and at bookstores and other storefront distributors who target Janeites. Even a quick

Google search for “Jane Austen merchandise in America” generates more than twelve

million hits for American websites alone. Thus, even across the pond, Jane’s is a

household name. Despite being a British author and literary icon, the American obsession

with Jane Austen has made her an integral part of pop culture in the United States and, by

extension, the world.

Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Janeite,” updated March 2020, accessed on April 28, 2020.

https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/100725?redirectedFrom=Janite&. Deidre Lynch, “Cult of Jane Austen.”

In Austen in Context. Edited by Janet Todd et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 94.

According to Jane Austen in Context, this term was coined by George Saintsbury in his 1894 introduction

to Pride and Prejudice as evidenced by the term’s entry in the OED (see reference above). The

aforementioned entry in the OED also lists “Janite” (Saintsbury’s original spelling), and “Austenite” as less

commonly used synonyms. This term originally had an elitist context as it was used to differentiate

Austen’s well-educated admirers from those within her general readership. However, its present

connotation is positive and more inclusive. Claudia L. Johnson, “Austen Cults and Cultures.” In The

Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, Cambridge, edited by Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster, 189-

210. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997,

https://ezproxy.library.astate.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-

com.ezproxy.library.astate.edu/docview/2137989657?accountid=8363. “Home,” Jane Austen Society of

North America, accessed May 7, 2020, www.jasna.org.

It is on the Janeites that this chapter will focus. Though Austen’s earliest readers

did not refer to themselves as such, they are an integral part of Janeite cultural heritage

which continues to evolve, allowing current Janeites to produce new artifacts every day.

These cultural products, in turn, feed the fascination with all things Austen and compel

the production of even more pastiche as well as attract new Janeites to join participate in

the cultural exchange. By Expanding upon Lawrence Levine’s theory concerning the

malleability of culture and popular perception of the arts, I attempt to contextualize the

Austenmaina phenomenon and lay the groundwork for subsequent chapters focusing on

the Janeites and the shared culture they create and maintain through producing original

literary and film adaptations.

The Earliest Janeites

A Brief Sketch of Austen’s Life & Literary Career

It is believed that Jane Austen settled on professional writing as her primary

occupation in or before 1794, around the time she was eighteen. At that point, she had

already filled three notebooks with poems, short stories, and a complete novella. These

early works had only been read by her family; however, from that time onward, her

writing showed a marked move from juvenile themes towards more serious matters

suitable for public consumption. It would take her almost ten more years to sell her first

manuscript to a publisher who then refused to send it to press. After an additional ten

years, Thomas Egerton accepted Sense and Sensibility and published it on Wednesday,

October 30, 1811. Two decades had passed, but Austen had become a professional author

at last.

Park Honan, Jane Austen: Her Life. (CB Creative Books, 2017) 110, Kindle; this is a revised

edition of a book of the same name which was published by St. Martin’s Press, New York in 1988. Jane

Fortunately, it did not take twenty years for Jane’s work to begin attracting

admirers. The very earliest Janeites were, of course, other members of the Austen family

along with their closest friends, a small circle who were privileged enough to hear Jane

read her drafts aloud or with whom she shared early versions of her manuscripts. To be a

member of this select audience was an honor indeed, according to her nephew James

Edward Austen-Leigh, who writes that his aunt Jane was incredibly particular about who

had access to her unpublished works, so much so that while she was working on a piece:

She was careful that her occupation should not be suspected by servants, or

visitors, or any persons beyond her own family party. She wrote upon small

sheets of paper which could easily be put away, or covered with a piece of

blotting paper. There was, between the front door and the offices, a swing door

which creaked when it was opened; but she objected to having this little

inconvenience remedied, because it gave her notice when anyone was coming.

Likely her desire for secrecy, even among those with favorable opinions of her work, was

due to the perfectionism documented in Austen-Leigh’s A Memoir of Jane Austen, which

he again describes as a “carefulness with which she corrected her compositions and

rejected much that had been written.” And yet there were almost certainly other factors at

work as well. Someone as decidedly careful as Jane Austen would have not only wanted

to protect her work before publication, but also would have taken care to protect her

family after becoming published.

stopped writing in the Juvenilia notebooks in June 1793. The aforementioned novella, Love and

Friendship, is part of that three-volume set. Austen likely began work on Lady Susan (an epistolary novel

which was only published posthumously) in the fall of 1794. The manuscript she and her brother Henry

initially sold would eventually be published, but again, only posthumously (see footnote 9).

James Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen. (London, Richard Bentley and Son,

1870) 102.

Ibid., 103-104.

As Mary Poovey explains in the opening chapter of The Proper Lady and the

Woman Writer, the patriarchal conventions of the time–perpetuated by Thomas Gisborne

among others, though also supported by the protofeminist Mary Astell–held that to be

considered properly behaved and respected within society, women’s lives had to differ

starkly from men’s. Whereas educated men were encouraged to express their thoughts in

myriad ways, proper and respectable women were told to suppress their thoughts and

desires, especially within the public forum. Thus, to become a professional author whose

name was known publicly was a decidedly masculine pursuit and thereby one in which

proper ladies should never engage themselves. This risk is why preceding women writers

such as Ann Radcliff and Fanny Burney only revealed their identities to the public once

their literary careers were undisputedly successful. Poovey also points out that the

Janeites are not left to wonder about Austen’s opinion here, as Austen tells her readers

exactly what she thinks of the double standard; they need only to open Persuasion. In the

twenty-third chapter, Austen has her protagonist Anne Eliot remark that “Men have had

every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much

higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands.”

Jane Austen’s feelings about patriarchal restrictions aside, like most other women

writers of the nineteenth century, when her first four novels were published, they were

done so anonymously. For Austen, however, her anonymity seems to have been kept

merely in deference to societal expectations, not for lack of familial support and

appreciation. Two of Jane’s brothers and her father all displayed a keen interest in

Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary

Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984) 5;

Austen, Jane. Persuasion, Second Critical Norton Edition, ed. by Patricia Meyer Spacks. (New York:

W.W. Norton & Company, 2013) 165.

helping her writing career succeed. Doubtless, no matter their high opinions of her works,

the Austens would have also been concerned with maintaining Jane’s respectability in

public, even as she sought to publish, because not only did her family move on the

fringes of the English upper class, and they would not have wanted to weaken their

connections to the aristocracy, but also Jane’s father, the Reverend George Austen, was

the rector in Steventon, a rural village in Hampshire. As such, his livelihood would have

depended upon all the local members of the Austen family upholding his parishioners’

conceptions of propriety, and, as supportive as they were, they would not have wanted

Jane’s writing career to damage his reputation.

Though life as in a small community required a level of discretion which stifled

Austen’s authorial agency, her time there was fruitful as well. For it was in the Steventon

rectory that Austen spent the first twenty-five years of her life; there that she wrote those

three volumes of juvenilia; and there that she befriended Tom Lefroy, her only

documented love interest—and purportedly the inspiration for the indomitable Mr. Darcy.

Because Steventon was a country village, the reverend’s immediate family of ten was a

close-knit one, though Jane developed an even closer relationship with Rev. Austen than

with any of the other Austens, save her only sister Cassandra. Perhaps this was because

Rev. Austen had earned three degrees from St. John’s College at Oxford before joining

the clergy and had thus cultivated an affection for letters and learning similar to Jane’s

own. A forward-thinking father, he encouraged her love of books by allowing her to read

freely from his library along with that of a neighbor, his relationship with her appearing

reminiscent of the one shared by Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth and her own father, Mr.

Bennet.

In light of his affection for her, it is unsurprising that, regardless of the inherent

risk to his career, Rev. Austen was one of Jane’s strongest advocates, buying her paper

and ink despite the expense and attempting to have one of her early works published,

going so far as to write “an eloquent letter to the leading publishers, Cadell & Davies, in

London” in 1797. As contained in Rev. James Edward Austen-Leigh’s biography of his

aunt, A Memoir of Jane Austen, Rev. George Austen’s letter reads “I have in my

possession a Manuscript Novel, comprised in three Vols. [...] As I am well aware of what

consequence it is that a work of this sort should make its’ first appearance under a

respectable name I apply to you.” Sadly, such eloquent words were wasted; his request

was “declined by Return of Post” and the letter came back to him unopened.

Undaunted, or perhaps spurred on by this rejection, Jane continued to pursue a

writing career with her family’s support, completing at least three works in as many

years. She began this period by revising pieces she had begun beforehand. After First

Impressions, her next project, which she had started in 1795 or before, was Elinor and

Marianne, and she completed these revisions in 1798. When that was done, she turned

toward Susan, but paused her work on it to revise Sir Charles Grandison or the Happy

Man, a five-act play which she had begun in 1793. She then finished drafting Susan, in

1800.

Ibid., 143. James Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen. (London, Richard Bentley

and Son, 1870) 137; The manuscript in question may well have been First Impressions as she had

completed it that year.

First Impressions would later become known as Pride and Prejudice. As one might expect,

Elinor and Marianne is an early version of Sense and Sensibility. Susan would eventually be published

posthumously as Northanger Abbey. (This is not to be confused with Lady Susan.) Susan was the first

manuscript Austen ever sold. Unfortunately, Crosby & Company in London never published it, despite

Austen sending an irate letter six years later along with a newly revised edition, still entitled Susan, in

hopes of forcing the publisher’s hand.

In December of that year, Rev. Austen gave up his living at Steventon and retired,

passing his church to his eldest son James and thereby uprooting his family for the first

time in Jane’s life, effectively halting her previously prolific season. Thus, with her

father, mother, and sister, she settled in Bath during the spring of 1801. After a busy

eighteen months wherein the Austens frequently visited friends and family, and Jane

received (and ultimately rejected) her only known marriage proposal, she at last found

time for writing again and began to revise Susan in December of 1802. During the next

year she finished that book, and it was another early advocate, her brother Henry, who

acted on her behalf this time rather than her father. Henry was more successful than his

father had been and managed to sell the copyright for Susan to the London publisher

Benjamin Crosby in 1803; however, this turned out to be a mistake that delayed the

book’s release for fifteen years, meaning that neither Jane nor her father lived to see it.

In 1804, Jane began writing The Watsons as she waited for Susan to be published,

but she put it aside the following January when her father became ill. His decline was

“very sudden” according to Jane’s letter to her brother Francis (called Frank within the

family) who was a naval officer and away at the time. She wrote that:

An illness of only eight and forty hours carried him off yesterday morning

[Monday, January 21, 1805] between ten and eleven. He was seized on Saturday

with a return of the feverish complaint which he had been subject to for the last

three years... A physician was called in yesterday morning, but he was at that time

past all possibility of cure; and Dr. Gibbs and Mr. Bowen had scarcely left his

room before he sunk into a sleep from which he never woke.

She also noted that twenty-four hours beforehand, “he was walking about with only the

help of a stick—was even reading.” Devastated by the abrupt loss of “an excellent

Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh and William Austen-Leigh. Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters: A

Family Record. (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1913.) 180.

father,” and undoubtedly one of the world’s first Janeites, she put The Watsons aside

never to take up the project again.

Eventually, Jane recovered from the shock of losing her biggest supporter enough

to resume writing, and she completed Lady Susan sometime in 1805. Three years later,

after she, her mother, and Cassandra had been struggling to keep their lodgings in Bath

since losing Rev. Austen, Jane’s brother Edward Austin Knight gifted them a house to

live in on his estate in East Hampshire. Thus, in July of 1809, the Austen women moved

from Bath to Chawton Cottage, where Jane lived the remaining eight years of her life

until her declining health necessitated that she relocate near her physician in

Winchester.

While living at Chawton Cottage, Jane revised Elinor and Marianne, altering its

structure from that of an epistolary to a narrative and changing the title to Sense and

Sensibility. Henry likely submitted this version of the manuscript to his publisher,

Thomas Egerton sometime in 1810, and Egerton agreed to publish the book on

commission. As she waited once for Sense and Sensibility to go to press, Austen began

Mansfield Park early in 1811. In the fall, Egerton made good on his word and released

Sense and Sensibility, noting only that its author was “A Lady.” Jane Austen’s debut

novel proved successful in the eyes of critics and readers alike, so despite paying the

printing costs along with a sales commission to Egerton, Austen was able to profit a tidy

Ibid., 181.

Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures (Chicago: The University of Chicago

Press, 2012) 173. Edward Austen was made the heir of Thomas and Catherine Knight, wealthy but

childless relatives of his father. It had been Knight who named Rev. George Austen the rector at Steventon.

Edward eventually inherited three estates from Knight: Chawton, Godmersham Park, and Winchester.

sum of £140 by the time the first 750 copies sold out two years later. When adjusted for

inflation, this is equivalent to approximately £12,049 or $14,529 in 2022.

Along with Mansfield Park, Jane worked on making global revisions to First

Impressions in 1811. This process continued into 1812, until she finished the manuscript

and sold the copyright to Egerton for £110, who then published about a thousand copies

of it under the title Pride and Prejudice on January 28, 1813. Her second novel proved

even more successful than the first, as another edition of Pride and Prejudice, likely 750

copies, was ordered a mere nine months after its release, which was around the same time

that Sense and Sensibility sold out, causing a second edition of Sense and Sensibility to be

printed then as well. Unfortunately, under the publication arrangement for Pride and

Prejudice, any profits over the initial £110 that Austen had been paid belonged to

Egerton, thus she lost at least £340 (£25,765/$31,019 in modern currency) on the first

two editions of that book alone. Ironically, this would eventually become her most

popular work.

Aside from a lack of profits, Pride and Prejudice also brought about the loss of

Austen’s anonymity. When originally published, it was listed as written “by the author of

Sense and Sensibility,” perhaps a marketing technique Egerton used to build upon the

positive reaction her first novel had received. This, coupled with newspaper

advertisements leading up to the January release and immediate approval of literary

critics, meant that Pride and Prejudice was the talk of English society in the spring of

Jan Fergus, “The professional woman writer,” In The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen,

2nd edition, eds. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 1-

9; Thomas Egerton had previously published The Loiterer for Henry and James Austen in 1790, which was

a collection of periodical essays.

Ibid., 10-11.

1813. Deidre Le Faye credits three reviews written at the time as the likely reason for

Pride and Prejudice’s immense popularity. The first was published in The British Critic

in February, the second in The Critical Review in March, and the third was published in

The New Review in April. Regardless of how Pride and Prejudice came to their attention,

erudite readers were now speculating about which “Lady” had written it and Sense and

Sensibility, and the small circle of those who knew Jane’s identity began to grow.

In a letter to Frank, which she wrote that fall, Jane discusses the supposed risk of

using the names of his ships in her work-in-progress, Mansfield Park, after he had

advised her that doing so would allow readers with connections to the navy to deduce that

an Austen had written the book. In her reply, she admits:

I was previously aware of what I had laid myself open to; but the truth is that the

secret has spread so far as to be scarcely the shadow of a secret now, and that, I

believe, whenever the third [book] appears, I shall not even attempt to tell lies

about it.

In the same letter, she explains at least part of her reasoning for believing that her identity

had been revealed as well as illustrates how proud their brother was of her success:

Henry heard P. and P. warmly praised in Scotland by Lady Robert Kerr and

another lady; and what does he do, in the warmth of his brotherly vanity and love,

but immediately tell them who wrote it? A thing once going in that way—one

knows how it spreads, and he, dear creature, has set it going so much more than

once.

Though Jane was grateful to both of her brothers for their support, it seems that she

would have been happier if she had been able to remain anonymous as evidenced by the

Deirdre Le Faye, Jane Austen: A Family Record. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2004), 195-96.

William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters: A

Family Record, (London: Smith, Elder & Co.) 281.

Ibid., 281.

conclusion of this letter, where she writes that in contrast to Henry, Frank had done her

“the superior kindness” of keeping her identity secret as she “wished.” Le Faye found

even earlier evidence of this wish in an 1811 letter from Cassandra wherein she begs that

another of their brothers, Edward, and his family refrain from telling anyone that Jane

had written Sense and Sensibility.

On the heels of Jane’s previous success, Egerton accepted Mansfield Park in

1813, so in January of the following year, she began to work on Emma in the meantime.

On May 9, 1814, Egerton published Mansfield Park on commission, Austen having likely

learned from her previous mistake with Pride and Prejudice. Mansfield Park’s first

edition printing was probably slightly larger than both the first editions of her previous

books, but the printing was done so more cheaply than others were. As it sold out faster

than even Pride and Prejudice had, Mansfield Park became the most profitable of

Austen’s books for her during her lifetime. Curiously, it was ignored by critics at the

time. For the second edition of Mansfield Park, Austen changed publishers, this time

using John Murray, who, though more prestigious than Egerton, published it in 1815 at

what turned out to be a loss.

By the time that Austen sent Emma to Murray in the fall of 1815 “all attempts to

keep her name secret…had ceased, and though it had never appeared on a title-page, all

who cared to know might easily learn it.” However, in his Memoir, her nephew

questioned whether this recognition was due to her literary success or to the fame of one

of her enthusiasts. The Prince Regent and future King George IV of England was an

Ibid., 281; Le Faye, Jane Austen: A Family Record, 188.

John Murray also published works by Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott.

admitted bibliophile and “great admirer” of Austen’s novels, so much so that he “read

them often, and kept a set in every one of his residences.” Upon learning her identity

from Henry Austen’s physician, the Prince sent word to her through his librarian Rev.

James Stanier Clarke that “she was at liberty to dedicate [her forthcoming novel] to” him.

Thus, Jane agreed to dedicate Emma to him, though she must have been displeased to do

it. In a letter to Martha Lloyd, wherein she discusses the Prince Regent and his wife,

Princess Caroline of Brunswick, Jane wrote “Poor woman, I shall support her as long as I

can, because she is a Woman, & because I hate her Husband.”

In an ironic twist of fate, this same prince who Austen hated had been a Janeite

since the start of her career, unbeknownst to her. In fact, the Prince Regent was one of the

first to purchase Sense and Sensibility, though this information did not come to light for

more than two hundred years. In 2018, when Nicholas Foretek, a PhD student from the

University of Pennsylvania, was researching printing and publishing in the eighteenth

century, he found a “bill of sale” in Winsor Castle’s Royal Archives indicating that on

October 28, 1811, the Prince Regent “bought a copy of Sense and Sensibility for 15

shillings from his booksellers, Becket and Porter.”

Regardless of why it happened, Jane Austen’s literary career was undoubtedly

successful by 1815, and so Murray offered to purchase the copyrights for Emma, along

with Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park from her for £450. Though Henry rejected

that offer because he and Jane felt the sum was too small, he fell ill soon after, leaving

Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen, 118; Le Faye, Jane Austen’s Letters, 216-17; The

Prince Regent had a famously ill-suited marriage; each was unfaithful to the other, and the pair separated

quickly after their only child, Princess Charlotte, was born.

Alison Flood, “One of Jane Austen’s earliest buyers revealed as Prince Regent—who she

‘hated,’” The Guardian, July 25, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/25/jane-austen-buyer-

hated-prince-regent-sense-and-sensibility.

Jane to conduct further negotiations. She and Murray ultimately agreed that Emma would

be published on commission, but as Jan Fergus calculates, this was another mistake.

Emma did not sell quite as quickly or as well as her first two novels had done, and since

the second edition of Mansfield Park had not produced a profit, the cost of its publication

was deducted from the sum of Emma’s sales. As such, Austen only made a little more

than £38 on Emma in her lifetime. This was also the last of her books that she would live

to see in print.

Before sending Emma to Murray, Jane began writing what she called The Elliots

on August 8, 1815. She would complete this book faster than any other, finishing her

edits to chapters ten and eleven almost exactly a year later on August 6, 1816. It was also

her last finished novel. Austen had begun to feel unwell sometime during that spring, and

Le Faye contends that Austen was aware that her illness had worsened in May of 1816,

when she “arranged to visit Cheltenham to drink the spa water” which was being touted

as a curative for ailments of the liver and spleen. Jane and Cassandra spent two weeks

there, but Jane’s health did not improve. Still, she had finished The Elliots and Henry had

finally bought the rights for Susan back from Crosby, so she began to revise it in 1816,

renaming the protagonist Catherine at that time. Jane also felt strong enough to begin a

new book called The Brothers (later published as Sanditon) in January of 1817, but she

stopped in March after writing only eleven chapters, likely too weak to continue. With

Jane’s health steadily declining, she made her will on April 27, 1817, and a month later,

Cassandra took her to Winchester to see the physician, John Lyford who had treated the

Austens previously. Under Lyford’s care, she recovered some, but then her symptoms

Fergus, “The professional woman writer,” 13-14.

returned, and unfortunately, little could be done for her. Jane Austen died of what

scholars now suppose was either Addison’s Disease or Hodgkin’s Lymphoma at half past

four on the morning of July 18, 1817. Henry would publish The Elliots for her at the end

of the year, packaging it with Susan, though they were retitled Persuasion and

Northanger Abbey respectively. He also added his “Biographical Notice” to the front of

the four-volume set. In this tribute, he revealed to her readers “that the hand which

guided that pen is now mouldering in the grave” and finally named her in print as the

author of her six works.

Austen’s Literary Afterlife Begins

Despite her popularity in the last years of her life, critics took little notice of

Austen’s posthumous works. Only two critical reviews were published for the set

containing Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. Le Faye notes that the reviewer who

published in the March 1818 edition of the British Critic did little more than grumble and

“pay some very backhanded complements” to Austen; however, the critic writing for The

Edinburgh Magazine was appreciative of the novels “and even prophetic” when he

claimed “the delightful writer of the works now before us, will be one of the most

popular of English novelists.”

Contrasting criticism aside, Austen’s admiring readers continued to buy her books

for a few years after her death. Claire Tomalin takes the release of Egerton’s cheaply

produced two-volume third edition of Pride and Prejudice, published in 1817, as

Le Faye, Jane Austen: A Family Record, 236-240; Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life,

London: Penguin Books, 2000) 270-72. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Norton Critical Edition, edited by

Susan Fraiman (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004) 191.

Le Faye, Jane Austen: A Family Record, 259-60; Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, editor, Austen

Papers, 1704-1856, (London: Spottiswoode Ballantyne, 1942) 34-38.

assurance of the work’s popularity, but she points out that Murray’s release of the set of

posthumous works was not lucrative. Early sales of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion

earned £500 for Cassandra, but these waned quickly, and of the 1,750 copies that were

printed, 282 of them were remaindered in 1820. This liquidation marked the beginning of

the only brief span in history when Jane Austen’s works were out of print. How then, did

Jane Austen’s name ever make it across the Atlantic, much less inspire Austenmania?

Fate would leave it up to Leavis.

Changing Culture, Shifting Celebrity

Aside from the “Internet Celebrities,” or social media personalities who rapidly

rise to fame because of a popular post and subsequently descend into relative anonymity

or irrelevancy just as rapidly when a new post overshadows theirs, certain authors—such

as Austen—along with artists and musicians and their works, especially those from

European countries, have long been revered by Americans to such an extent that they

seem too sacred and too much of a cultural fixture to be appreciated properly by all but

the most educated. In other words, even though, they are well-known names, some

popular culture icons are perceived as too high brow for most people, namely literature

by Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Cervantes, and the like; Italian operas such as La Traviata by

Giuseppe Verdi, and works of early modern art such as those created by Salvador Dalí.

Interestingly, though, this reverence has not always existed in the United States.

Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life, 277.

I specifically reference La Traviata here because it is famously included in Garry Marshall’s

enduringly popular 1990 romantic comedy Pretty Woman, starring Richard Gere and Julia Roberts, which

was adapted for the stage in 2018 as Pretty Woman: The Musical. In the film, Edward Lewis (Gere), a

wealthy businessman, is newly single and needs a woman to act as his girlfriend temporarily in order to

secure a lucrative corporate acquisition. Because he desires no emotional attachments, he makes a business

arrangement with Vivian Ward (Roberts), a beautiful prostitute whom he happens upon. During their time

together, he takes her to see La Traviata. This point is significant in my argument because the plot of

In actuality, American culture is not static, as the generality above illustrates, nor

has its current stratification always existed. Lawrence W. Levine’s Highbrow Lowbrow:

The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America emerged from this realization. In his

book, Levine argues that “the perimeters of our cultural divisions have been permeable

and shifting rather than fixed and immutable.” Because of this flexibility, cultural

mainstays such as Shakespeare’s plays, works of fine art, and classical Italian opera have

been appreciated differently over time. Thus, though Shakespeare’s works have been

considered by American readers to be the most inaccessible for several decades, this was

not always the case. Levine proves this by tracing the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays

were incorporated into the fabric of American culture—and this chapter hopes to do the

same with Austen’s novels.

In the early eighteenth century, plays, and especially those penned by

Shakespeare, were the main form of entertainment for all elements of the public, much as

they had been when they were originally performed in the Globe Theatre. And yet,

despite their popularity and the prestige of the author’s name, they were not revered as

they are today. Though Shakespeare was widely known and often venerated, he was not

considered sacrosanct. Instead, his work was parodied in many forms, and straight

versions of his dramas were almost always accompanied by farces. This treatment was

possible because, in the early nineteenth century, America had what Levine describes as

Marshall’s iconic film echoes that of Verdi’s opera, effectively illustrating that the content of the opera is

accessible and relatable to American audiences, even if the language in which it is written is not.

Additionally, in the film, the experience of going to the opera is portrayed as surprisingly pleasant for

Vivian, who initially does not believe she is sophisticated enough to fit in with Edward’s crowd, and yet,

she is so delighted by the operatic performance that she cries, proving that even a “lowbrow” prostitute can

appreciate “highbrow” operatic entertainment.

Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988) 8.

“a rich shared public culture” that allowed all segments of the population to experience

artistic elements such as Shakespearian theater, Italian opera, art museums, and classical

music. Due to this shared culture, the general public was familiar with and could even

quote passages of Shakespeare by heart, not only because they had memorized his work

as school children and often seen his plays, but also because Shakespeare’s verses

saturated their culture in accessible, relatable ways. The same sorts of adaptations and

presentations were happening in opera houses as well, which are discussed in Levine’s

second chapter.

One might wonder, how, then, if “[t]he human Shakespeare who existed for most

of the nineteenth century could be parodied with pleasure and impunity” did the “sacred

Shakespeare… displac[e] him”? Levine cites several reasons, and chief among them is

that a gradual shift took place in American culture over the course of the next half-

century that fundamentally altered its structure so that it was no longer “less

hierarchically organized, [and] less fragmented into relatively rigid adjectival boxes” than

American culture in the mid- to late-twentieth century. This shift into a tiered hierarchy

of “highbrow,” “middlebrow,” and “lowbrow” classifications of entertainment altered the

way Americans imagined their own culture, and originated an elitist attitude, claiming

that the general population was only able to appreciate Shakespeare, opera, and classical

music (and other European cultural imports) for base, “wrong” reasons.

Because of this elitism, progressively, specialized theaters began to appear, which

catered to the affluent rather than the general population; other theaters aimed their

productions at the populace. This meant that works, such as Shakespeare’s, were now

Ibid., 15-17, 89-90, 9.

appropriate only in specific “‘legitimate’ theatrical circles” comprised of “discrete

audiences” while contemporary productions were relegated to vaudeville and burlesque

theaters and movie houses. Simultaneously, there was a push for cultural authority and

patriotism that separated the American from the European, which culminated in the Astor

Place Riot in the spring of 1849. Thus, by the turn of the century, there was a definite

division between the sophisticated, “highbrow” forms of entertainment that the social

elite attended and the more common, vulgar forms that the common people attended.

Levine also points to similar shifts in Italian opera and classical music. At the

onset of the nineteenth century, this genre of music was enjoyed by the American masses,

rich, poor, Northern or Southern. Also, similarly to Shakespeare, opera was an integral

part of culture that could be experienced in a variety of settings. Opera’s move from the

realm of the popular to the elite is tied, according to Levine, to the “structural transition”

that symphonic music experienced. As band concerts and performances began to gain

popularity in response to extravagant attempts to increase their public entertainment

value, operas began to be marketed to more exclusive audiences. Eventually, elitism

promoted by Theodore Thomas, John Sullivan Dwight, and Henry Lee Higginson did the

same for symphonic performances, leaving “pop concerts” to the general public whose

pleasure would have supposedly compromised the artistic value of the orchestral music.

Austen’s American Adventures

Ibid., 74, 70, 60, 75-79, 9, 63-67.

Ibid., 104.

Miss Austen Makes Her Appearance at Last

The hierarchical structure of modern American popular culture is certainly a

product of hegemonic, elitist thinking which has eroded the shared culture of the

eighteenth century so much so that the thought of an approachable Shakespeare, an

accessible art museum, or a comprehensible opera is nearly unfathomable to modern

mass audiences. Such was the case when American scholars of British literature began to

focus their studies upon Jane Austen. A plethora of scholarship was published on Austen

by British literary critics early in the twentieth century. This culminated with the opening

line of F.R. Leavis’s 1948 publication, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James,

Joseph Conrad, which reads, “The great English novelists are Jane Austen, Henry James,

and Joseph Conrad.” Later in the first chapter, he explains that the works of a group of

“minor novelists,” Austen’s among them, are all “living classics” which are of great

significance. He praises Austen over even Henry Fielding, author of Tom Jones, whom

Sir Walter Scott had famously named Father of the English Novel, saying,

Fielding deserves the place of importance given him in the literary histories, but

he hasn’t the kind of classical distinction we are also invited to credit him with.

He is important … because he leads to Jane Austen, to appreciate whose

distinction is to feel that life isn’t long enough to permit one’s giving much time

to Fielding … Fielding made Jane Austen possible by opening the central

tradition of English fiction.

Leavis then traces Austen’s literary lineage to Samuel Richardson, and from

Richardson to Fanny Burney:

Here we have one of the important lines of English literary history—

Richardson—Fanny Burney—Jane Austen. It is important because Jane Austen is

one of the truly greatest writers, and herself a major fact in the background of

other great writers .... In fact, Jane Austen, in her indebtedness to others, provides

F. R. Leavis. The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad. (London: Faber

& Faber, 2011), chap. 1, GoogleBooks.

an exceptionally enlightening study of the nature of originality, and she

exemplifies beautifully the relations of the ‘individual talent’ to tradition. … [S]he

not only makes tradition for those coming after, but her achievement has for us a

retroactive effect: … she creates the tradition we see leading down to her. Her

work, like the work of all creative writers, gives meaning to the past.

Such high praise caught the attention of Ian Watt, a British literary critic and

historian who was a professor of English at Stanford University. In his book The Rise of

the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, which he published in England

and America in 1957, he praises Austen’s “minute presentation of daily life” and writes

“Jane Austen’s technical genius manifests itself” in that “she dispensed with the

participating narrator”, and “instead she told her stories after Fielding’s manner, as a

confessed author.”

Watt explains:

Jane Austen’s variant of the commenting narrator, however, was so much more

discreet [than Fielding’s] that it did not substantially affect the authenticity of her

narrative. Her analysis of her characters and their states of mind, and her ironical

juxtapositions of motive are as pointed as anything in Fielding, but they do not

seem to come from an intrusive narrator but rather from some august and

impersonal spirit of social and psychological understanding….

At the same time, Jane Austen varied her narrative point of view sufficiently to

give us not only editorial comment, but … psychological closeness to the

subjective world of the characters….

Jane Austen novels are also the climax of many other aspects of the eighteenth-

century novel.… [I]t was Jane Austen who completed the work that Fanny

Burney had begun, and challenged masculine prerogative in a much more

important manner.…

In Jane Austen … the advantages of the feminine point of view outweigh the

restrictions of social horizon which have until recently been associated with it.

Ibid., chap. 1, GoogleBooks.

Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. 2nd American ed.

(1957; repr., Berkley: University of California Press, 2001), 296-297.

Ibid., 297-299.

Watt’s glowing critique coupled with Leavis’s, as well as several others published

from about 1930 until that time, did not escape the academics in the United States, who

subsequently began to publish their own scholarship on Austen, a proliferation that

continues today. They also began to teach her novels to students enrolled in their

university literature courses. Hence, eighty-eight years after Austen’s nephew Edward

Austen-Leigh published her official biography, A Memoir of Jane Austen, and made her

posthumously well-known to the British public, one of the greatest English novelists had

finally made her acquaintance with some American readers.

In 1940, just a few years before Leavis listed Austen as a great English author, the

earliest American film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, starring Greer Garson as

Elizabeth Bennet and Sir Laurence Olivier as Mr. Darcy was released by MGM. Notably,

Aldous Huxley wrote the screenplay. With so many big names involved in the movie, it

is no surprise that it was well-received by film critics in the U.S. Bosley Crowther, a

reviewer for The New York Times when the film was released, proclaimed it “the most

deliciously pert comedy of old manners, the most crisp and crackling satire in costume

that we in this corner can remember ever having seen on the screen.” Of the novel’s

author, he wrote:

Jane Austen … was an independent miss with a quick and affectionate eye for the

nice little foibles and follies of her frivolous age. Tolerantly, she comprehended

the harmless absurdities of her middle-class provincial society, the trembling and

dithering that went on in a household full of girls when a likely bachelor hove into

the vicinity. And she had an incomparable wit and a facility with the pen to put

down all she saw and felt in one of the most delightful of English novels. And

with an instinct such as Hollywood can seldom boast. Hunt Stromberg and his

associates have managed to turn out a film which catches the spirit and humor of

Miss Austen's novel down to the last impudent flounce of a petticoat, the last

contented sigh of a conquering coquette.

And Crowther was not its only admirer. It won the 1941 Academy Award for Best Art

Direction. However, despite its star power, celebrated screenwriter, and critical acclaim,

the film was a flop, costing MGM $241,000, which would amount to approximately

$4,425,000 in 2020. Today, aside from Janeites and cinephiles, this initial American

adaption has slipped from the public consciousness. Thus, despite having jumped across

the pond, at last, Jane Austen had not yet made an indelible impact on American

culture.

Although she was commonly taught in college and high school English literature

courses by the 1970s, Austen was still not popular reading in the U.S. Her language,

though admittedly concise, was considered difficult because of its distinctively Georgian

rhythm and vocabulary. However, in the 1970s and ’80s, several television adaptations

made their way from the U.K. to the U.S. as part of the Masterpiece Theater television

series which brought BBC productions to American viewers, yet Masterpiece Theatre

traditionally attracts a limited viewing audience, as it is known for airing quality

“Pride and Prejudice” Watch TCM, TCM.com, Turner Classic Movies, last updated 2020.

http://www.tcm.com/watchtcm/titles/2153; Olivier became fixture in the British West End district and then

parlayed his theatrical success to the silver screen, where he made a name for himself playing dashing

leading men, such as Mr. Darcy, Heathcliff, and Maxim de Winter, and received numerous awards and

critical acclaim. Greer Garson was also a well-known West End import to Hollywood. She was one of

MGM’s most popular leading ladies of her day and is remembered for her Academy Award-winning

performance as Mrs. Miniver, two years after Pride and Prejudice was released. Bosley Crowther, “THE

SCREEN IN REVIEW; 'Pride and Prejudice,' a Delightful Comedy of Manners, Seen at the Music Hall—

‘South to Karanga’ Given at the Rialto and 'Pier 13' at the Palace At the Rialto,” The New York Times,

August 9, 1940, 0. Accessed on May 6, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/1940/08/09/archives/the-screen-in-

review-pride-and-prejudice-a-delightful-comedy-of.html.

“OSCARS Ceremonies: 1941,” Oscars.org, The Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences, last

modified February 2020. https://www.oscars.org/oscars/ceremonies/1941; Devoney Looser, The Making of

Jane Austen. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017) 263. This figure was obtained using the

film’s production costs and sales figures as explained in endnote 8. A currency calculator then yielded the

adjustment for modern inflation.

adaptations of classic literature. One of these miniseries was an adaptation of Pride and

Prejudice released in America in 1980. This version remained truer to Austen than

Huxley’s screenplay had, and it was appreciated by critics and its elite viewing

audiences. At last, Austen had arrived on American TV screens, but she was still “too

highbrow” to achieve mass appeal. This is likely due to MGM’s earlier attempt to

“bolste[r] her popular reputation and enhance[e] the economic potential of her symbolic

capital” in which they carefully “marketed and deployed [Austen] as an artistically

valued authority who dramatizes the ‘proper’ maturation process of the young woman.”

Strangely, the American obsession with all things Austen would stem from a remake of

this miniseries which would air in the same format on the American Arts &

Entertainment channel (A&E), though it would take another fifteen years for that to

happen.

Jane, the Pop Icon: The Origin of Austenmania

When production first began on a new Pride and Prejudice adaptation for BBC

and A&E, no one could have predicted the level of success the resulting miniseries could

achieve. Even twenty-five years after its American debut, this version still receives the

most press and is arguably the most famous adaptation of Jane Austen’s work to date. It

even spawned the term “Austenmania,” which refers to the cultural phenomenon

Michael Kramp, The Potency of Jane, or the Disciplinary Function of Austen in America.”

Studies in Popular Culture 22, no. 2 (1999): 20. Accessed April 24, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/41970370;

A&E, as its name implies, was also known for its highbrow adaptations of classic literature at the time and

tended to attract audiences who appreciated literature, arts, and classical music. Currently, though, it is

mostly known for its reality television series, which would be considered lowbrow entertainment.

surrounding the rapid manufacture of cinema productions, books, and other merchandise

which began after the miniseries’ release and continues into the present.

When it was in production, this version of Pride and Prejudice was not supported

by a widespread advertising campaign. None of its cast members were especially well-

known in the U.S., and like the previous adaptation, this one kept large chunks of

Austen’s dialog intact, much to the delight of Janeites. The one significant difference in

this version as compared to others is that the scriptwriter Andrew Davies wanted to

include more scenes shot outdoors, where the earlier miniseries took place mostly

indoors, leading it to feel a bit like a recorded stage play.

It was one of Davies’s additional outdoor scenes that completely changed

Austen’s image in the American collective consciousness. In it, Mr. Darcy has just

returned to Pemberley, his country estate in Derbyshire. It has been a long, tiring ride on

horseback, and when he reaches a pond, Darcy impulsively decides to jump into the

water, almost fully clothed. Because Austen’s narrative point of view focuses solely on

Elizabeth Bennet, and readers only see Darcy the way he presents himself to her, Darcy

had never behaved so freely before. He had never been seen in a soaking wet, open-

collared white shirt before either. Suddenly, the stuffy, standoffish Mr. Darcy had leapt

off his dusty page and become a human being, and a handsomely desirable one at that!

Americans wanted to know more about Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, and

especially, the mysterious Mr. Darcy that everyone was talking about. Colin Firth, who

Pride and Prejudice, directed by Simon Langton, featuring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, aired

on January 14-16, 1996, on A&E (A&E and BBC, 1995), 10th Anniversary Limited Collector’s Edition

DVD, disc 3.

Ibid., disc 2.

was virtually unknown within the U.S. prior to Pride and Prejudice’s debut in the fall of

1995, made Mr. Darcy (as well as himself) the kind of sex symbol that MGM had hoped

Olivier would, especially in America, and all at once, Jane was popular with everyone

from the posh to the plain!

Since that time Austen’s place in American pop culture has remained secure. In

the intervening years, many film and television adaptations of all six of her completed

novels have been produced. Yet, Austen’s American popularity came at the price of what

she might term her literary “respectability.” Just as she had been in her native England,

Austen was initially revered by her American devotees. Many Janeites published sequels

to Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and the rest of her works, the

majority reverently keeping the settings and characters from Austen’s sacred texts largely

intact and merely extending her storylines, as some continue to do. After Austenian

pastiche became more marketable, though, nothing remained sacrosanct.

The Adaptable Austen

Once appreciated for her novels’ realistic depictions of social situations

encountered by members of the landed gentry—instead of the lives of the exceedingly

Early traditional or reverent sequels include Sybil G. Brinton’s 1913 publication Old Friends

and New Fancies: The Imaginary Sequel to the Novels of Jane Austen, one of the earliest known sequels to

Austen’s works (which will be discussed further in Chapters 3 and 4 of this book); L. Oulton’s 1923

completion of The Watsons; T.H. White’s 1932 book Darkness at Pemberley, a locked-room mystery

involving Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth’s children; Naomi Royde Smith’s 1940 novel Jane Fairfax, a sort of

sequel to Emma; and Cedric Wallis’s 1956 play The Heiress of Rosings, a sequel to Pride and Prejudice

about Anne de Bourgh; to name but a few. The number of sequels seems to have grown steadily since

about the 1970s and then increased exponentially after the BBC miniseries Pride and Prejudice was

released in 1995. These adaptations contrast sharply with the irreverent or radical sequels published in the

second half of the twentieth century and after, such as Helen Fielding’s 1996 publication of Bridget Jones’s

Diary, an epistolary sequel to Pride and Prejudice set in the 1990s; Val McDermid’s 2014 eponymous

sequel to Northanger Abbey, and Brigid Coady’s 2018 publication of Emma Ever After, a contemporary

new adult adaptation of Emma; (the three of which will also be discussed further in Chapter 4 of this book),

along with uncountable others.

poor or the opulently wealthy as was common in the period—and her adept use of irony

and humor to illustrate the foibles of British society, such as the practice of primogeniture

and the patriarchal mores that limited women’s social and economic independence as

adults, now her works were being revised for modern audiences. This is a reversal of

what Levine says happened when the human Shakespeare became revered. Austen’s once

immutable novels and their demure covers adorned with Regency art were given modern

makeovers to include titles like Pride and Prejudice: The Wild and Wanton Edition and

covers decorated with kissing couples or smoldering glances. Beneath the cover, readers

could find newly inserted steamy bedroom scenes between Elizabeth and Darcy as well

as the lives of their offspring. And even more recently, adaptations such as Pride and

Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters present Austen’s

original text blended with additional content “complete with romance, heartbreak,

swordfights, cannibalism, and thousands of rotting corpses.” There is also a bevy of

sequels, not only to Austen’s works but to the modern mashups as well.

But these alterations were not limited to the printed or digital page. Along with

the aforementioned film and television adaptations, many others have been produced

since 1995. As Dianne Sadoff points out with just a few recent film remakes such as

Victoria H. Spaniol, “Untitled Lecture” (lecture, Arkansas State University, Jonesboro, AR, Fall

2006); The landed gentry was an aristocratic British social class of titled landowners which was considered

below the nobility. The males earned their livings through managing the country estates on which their

families lived. Some members were wealthier and more respected than others, as seen in Pride & Prejudice

through contrasting the social status of Mr. Bennet, Elizabeth’s father (who has a small estate and few

social connections), with that of Mr. Darcy (who has a very large estate in Derbyshire, is accepted in the

royal court, and has an income roughly equivalent to £16,000,000 today); On “irreverent” sequels and

reworkings, see Pride and Prejudice: The Wild and Wanton Edition by Annabella Bloom and Jane Austen

(2011), Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife: Pride and Prejudice Continues (2004) and its sequel Darcy and

Elizabeth: Nights and Days at Pemberley (2006) by Linda Berdoll, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters

by Jane Austen and Ben H. Winters (2009), their sequels, and many others. Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-

Smith, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2009), publisher’s description.

Becoming Jane (2007), Bride and Prejudice (2004), and Pride and Prejudice (2005),

they “update[e] and repurpose[e] Austen's heroine, her stories, and the author's life story

for a new century and a new spectator…Readers of Austen's novels, whether historical or

contemporary, and spectators of the films adapted from them purchase very different

cultural products” than Austen’s original readers did. Thus, one could argue that the

revisionist treatments of Austen in the new millennium were altruistic efforts to maintain

her relevancy with younger audiences. But the sheer marketability of her works, even the

unfinished ones, speak to a slightly more capitalist motive, as evidenced by the 2019

Sanditon miniseries and the 2016 feature film Love & Friendship. The former is based

upon an unfinished novel, and the latter is based loosely upon the more fragmentary

works Lady Susan and Love and Friendship. Yet taking such liberties is nothing new.

After all, Levine would likely point to the flexible nature of American culture which

allowed similar adaptations to Shakespeare’s works during the eighteenth century to

explain the ease with which all of Austen’s works are vulgarized.

According to Bridget Draxler and Danielle Spratt, these sequels and other

adaptions which fundamentally alter Austen’s original texts are remakes that should be

viewed positively, as they are “opportunities [for educators] to engage in issues that are

important to our students” and to create moments to explore “how gender, culture, and

identity relate to the literature we read (no matter when it was written) and how the

literature exemplifies real-world issues that are worthy of discussion.” Thus, despite

commodification, Austen and her works can be used in ways that may restore part of her

Dianne Sadoff, “Marketing Jane Austen at the Megaplex,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 43, no.

1 (2010): 1. Accessed April 26, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/27764374.

respectability. Because students can be drawn into Austen’s world by such explorations,

she can then be discussed within the context of her literary accomplishments along with

her newly acquired sensationalism.

In a different publication, Sadoff quotes Davies who believes that “The BBC will

continue to [make classic-novel adaptations] because it is one of the things that people

expect the BBC to do.” She agrees, writing, “there will always be an audience for classic

serials and film adaptations of nineteenth-century British fiction and, Andrew Davies

cheekily suggests, a production company or television network eager to provide them.”

As she rightly reminds readers, it is not that Austenmania is back, revived once again for

the newest generations, but rather that it has never died down in the first place, and this is

not only due to the Janeites,

but advertising and marketing, cinema spaces, and exhibition practices created

such cultural frenzy. Although a multiple-movie deal or sequels to, prequels to,

and remakes of a property, all generally owned by one studio or its corporate

parent, constitute what critics now call a “franchise,” the “Austen franchise,”

broadly defined, has shaped the production, reception, and marketing of heritage

film.

After more than 200 years of appreciation, Jane Austen has become a brand.

According to Sadoff, it is so large and pervasive that “mixing style and modes, can be

exploited to sell a product, whether high-cultural, middlebrow, popular, or mass-cultural,

to a largely female audience across a wide range of exhibition windows.” Doubtless,

everyone who has ever read Austen would agree, but what accounts for Austenmania’s

Whitney Mannies, Gabriela Almendarez, Bridget Draxler, and Danielle Spratt. “Conclusion.” In

Engaging the Age of Jane Austen: Public Humanities in Practice, 211-26. (Iowa City: University of Iowa

Press, 2018) 217-219. Accessed April 24, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv7vctj5.13.

Dianne F. Sadoff, “Epilogue: Mass Culture and Global Heritage,” In Victorian Vogue: British

Novels on Screen, 245. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Accessed April 28,

2020. www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttsc0g.10.

continuity, and in turn Austen’s sustained marketability? Is it due to her depictions of

ordinary life and her narrative voice, which her original critics and admirers have been

quick to praise? In the opening chapter of Why We Read Jane Austen, Rachel Brownstein

points to the power of hope within Austen’s pen:

Jane Austen remains on the collective mind partly because her novels have shaped

our culture, and ideals, and our feelings, creating an accessible alternative

world—because of what [Lionel] Trilling called the hope she holds out, that we

can be different, intelligent and loving, and learn to know and value distinction,

and have it, as well. Also because we remain interested in the constitution of “we”

in couples, families, and communities, those abstract social bodies which depend

on the difference between being “in” or “out.”

Conclusion

It is with the hope, then, that Jane Austen’s brand continues to engender new

appreciation for her genius from multitudes of diverse readers—thereby inspiring future

Janeites well after the next two hundred years—that I leave you, gentle reader. It may be

an optimistic hope, but I daresay it is not a naive one. For American culture is not static,

nor has its current structure always existed. In centuries past, the so-called “highbrow”

aspects of culture were freely accessible to the general, “lowbrow” public. Yet, as Levine

proves in the first two chapters of Highbrow Lowbrow, changes in philosophy over time

gradually created the levels of culture which are familiar in present day. Additionally,

American culture was never homogeneous; instead, it was “replete with ethnic, class, and

regional distinctions,” and yet the members of this heterogeneous body interacted freely

with one another in the public sphere. Though the general public once benefited from

shared culture as exemplified through widespread familiarity with aspects of fine art,

Rachel M. Brownstein, “Why We Read Jane Austen.” In Why Jane Austen?, (New York:

Columbia University Press, 2011), 68. Accessed April 26, 2020. doi:10.7312/brow15390.6.

music, and drama, there were always members of the elite ruling class who feared the

degradation of “tradition” and “taste” which they believed members of the

“undisciplined,” “uneducated,” poorer lower classes caused. As such, rich, well-educated,

influential white men attempted to create unity and order in public spaces, which they

perceived as chaotic, through imposing “rules, systems of taste, and cannons of behavior

of their own choosing” that were meant to modify the behavior of the “lowbrow”

population “so that their modes of behavior and cultural predilections emulated those of

the elite.”

Over the last thirty years, Austenmania in America has created a successful

market for commercially produced Austen-themed merchandise that continues to be

produced. Though this has provided mass audiences with more equitable access to

Austen, it is also driven by consumerism which robs her of the literary respectability she

once held in the eyes of her admirers. Whether she is loved or her appreciated for her

literary acumen or the smoldering sex appeal of Fitzwilliam Darcy’s newest incarnation,

it is obvious that the American obsession with Austen shows little signs of waning.

Levine, 9, 173-177.

CHAPTER TWO: I WRITE ONLY FOR FAME

“I am very much flattered by your commendation of my last Letter, for I write only for

Fame, and without any view to pecuniary Emolument.”

—Jane Austen in a letter to her sister Cassandra, dated 14 January 1796

Jane Austen had been a writer for more than twenty years before Sense and

Sensibility was initially published in 1811. However, her name continued to be

unacknowledged in print during her lifetime, her works attributed rather vaguely to “A

Lady” or “The Author of Sense and Sensibility,” etc. And yet, her identity slowly grew

towards becoming common knowledge and was indeed known by most of her English

readers in 1813 with the publication of her second novel Pride and Prejudice because the

book had become all the rage during its spring debut. Though pleased with her novels’

success, letters from Cassandra and Jane herself to their relatives prove that Jane was

displeased that her anonymity had been compromised.

Putting aside the facetious words above that were written to Cassandra, given that

Jane chose not to have her name affixed to either of the subsequent novels that she lived

to see printed, despite the public’s awareness of it, it takes no great leap to conclude that

fame was actually an unintended consequence of Jane Austen’s literary success. Inspiring

the kind of following that would become the Janeites is quite likely another, though the

William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters: A

Family Record, (London: Smith, Elder & Co.) 281; Deirdre Le Faye, Jane Austen: A Family Record, 2nd

edition, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 188.

works in her juvenilia do show that she began her literary endeavors by adapting and

satirizing popular publications of her period, a form of imitation similar to that of the

Janeites who, in turn, adapt her novels. According to Kate Halsey:

The juvenile effusions in [Austen’s Juvenilia] volumes are all, without exception,

parodies of particular works, authors or genres that we know to have been read by

the young Austens together. These individual works include […] Goldsmith’s

History of England [(1844)], Charlotte Lennox’s Female Quixote (1752),

Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753–4), and Berquin’s L’Amide l’Enfance

(1782–3).

For example, Austen’s play Sir Charles Grandison or the Happy Man, A Comedy is

indeed a parody of her favorite novel, Samuel Richardson’s The History of Sir Charles

Grandison, itself a parody of his previous works. In Jane Austen and Her Readers, 1786-

1945, Halsey writes that Austen “ruthlessly digested” Richardson’s original into “a brief

humorous skit,” but that is not the only time Austen would draw from Richardson’s

beloved book. Austen also included “diminished and comically exaggerated” versions of

Charles Grandison (the character) in her other early pieces. As an adult, Austen would

also pay further tribute to Richardson in Northanger Abbey, having Catherine

Mooreland’s mother read Sir Charles Grandison often.

Thus, through her own experience, Austen understood that creative readers were

wont to draw upon the published works they admired when writing for their own

amusement. However, as there is no indication that Austen ever intended her juvenilia for

public consumption, and coupling her desire for anonymity with the fact that each of the

works she did choose to publish was original fiction rather than derivatives, it is doubtful

that she would have set out to draw a cult of devoted followers or could have even

Kate Halsey, Jane Austen and Her Readers, 1786-1945, (London: Anthem Press, 2012), 21.

Ibid., 38.

conceived of the degree to which she and her works would eventually be venerated.

Rather, it is more likely that she, as so many of her foremothers, was conditioned by

society to feel undeserving of signing her work and thereby taking her rightful place

beside the likes of Sir Walter Scott, Henry Fielding, and Samuel Richardson, regardless

of its import. Ironically, Austen’s mastery of prose along with her adoring readers

throughout time have so enshrined her in the literary cannon as well as in popular culture

that her name has eclipsed theirs; hers is the name that is now much more well-known in

the minds of the general public than those of her aforementioned male counterparts, and I

daresay she would have appreciated the satire.

Given that, unlike Austen, the vast majority of influential women writers of the

past have been marginalized to the point of total erasure, large swaths of both the heritage

and history of this community of women writers have been cut away. As such, this

chapter aims, in the least, to gather the stories of some of our literary foremothers and

weave together a tapestry of women writers, tracing the threads of the earliest known

authors and tying them in with Austen. Though the fabric of this family tree can never be

completely mended, stories of protofeminist writers are nevertheless worthy of

restoration and preservation. Often, they labored anonymously and did not write for

fame; few received sizeable fortunes for their efforts, yet every Janeite is indebted to

them. For without them, our community of women writers could not exist.

The Invisible Woman of Letters

Erasing the Earliest English Authoresses

Austen and her nineteenth-century contemporaries were by no means the first

women whose literary achievements were erased or ignored by their own society. The

marginalization of Englishwomen is rooted in the patriarchal culture of Britain which

existed long before the Duke

of Normandy invaded in 1066. There is evidence of literate women, nuns and

other clergywomen like Hugeburc, who authored works of religious poetry and prose as

far back as the eighth century if not before. Though historians typically cite Marie de

France, Julian of Norwich, or Margery Kempe as the earliest of Englishwomen to write

full works, Diane Watt argues that evidence points to their predecessors’ existence,

though many of the contributions of those women writing in Old English before the

twelfth century have been “rendered invisible” because “for better or worse, English

literary history is very much governed by periodization and teleology.” These artificial

delineations mean that the ongoing study of women writing before this time is

fragmented, and “in relation to major surveys of literature…early women’s literary

culture continues to be overlooked by most academics.” However, there are other

difficulties when attempting to recognize these writers, such as the anonymous and

fragmented forms in which much of their surviving materials exist, as well as:

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), s.v. “Hugeburc”; Diane Watt, Women,

Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650–1100, (London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 92.

Hugeburc or Hygeburg was a Benedictine nun at the abbey in Heidenheim in what is now Germany, and

she is the first known Englishwoman to author a complete work. It takes the form of pair of hagiographies

referred to in English as The Life of Saints Willibald and Wynnebald, which she wrote between 778-780.

Describing herself only as an ‘indigna Saxonica,’ or “unworthy Saxon woman,” Hugeburc hid her name in

a cipher between these narratives, and her identity was not known until the cipher was decoded in 1931 by

Bernhard Bischoff; The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle

Ages to the Present, (London: B.T. Batsford, Ltd., 1990), s.v. “Marie de France”; Marie de France is the

earliest known female poet in England, writing from the middle of the twelfth century until early in the

thirteenth century, though her works are recorded in an early French dialect. Unlike Hugeburc, her identity

is ambiguous, as only her given name is known. It is certain that prior to 1189, she composed a dozen Lais,

dedicated to “the King,” which was probably Henry II of England. She also translated more than a hundred

“Aesopic Fables” that she dedicated to “Count William” and wrote The Legend of the Purgatory of St.

Patrick. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, editors, A Book of the Showings to the Anchoress Julian of

Norwich, (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1978), 33-38; The author known as Julian of

Norwich was an anchoress living in St. Julian’s Church in Norwich, England from the late fourteenth

century until her death sometime around 1416. She was “thirty and a half years old” when she became

mistaken assumptions about medieval women’s illiteracy and lack of education,

and about literary production, circulation and consumption, combined with a

refusal to acknowledge the importance of writing in languages other than English

(especially Latin) to the English literary tradition, has meant that a wealth of

evidence about the deep past of early medieval women’s literary history has been

overlooked.

Because of these issues, even if individual works written by women before the Norman

Conquest have been acknowledged by scholars, often they have not been viewed

contextually, as part of the greater body of female-authored works and recognized for

their significance within English literary history and culture.

Another element of erasure that Watt identifies is overwriting, which she defines

as “the complex relationship between male authors and their female subjects” including

“the ways in which texts can attempt to control and circumscribe female autonomy.”

According to her, the earliest known examples of a man revising women’s writing are

found in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, which was finished in 731. Watt argues “that

Bede ‘overwrote’ the women’s lives in the sense that he wrote over, and thus partially

obliterated accounts, whether written or oral, that had been produced in the abbesses’

deathly ill. As a result, she had visions of the Passion of Christ on May 13, 1373. She spent the next twenty

years praying and searching for meaning behind the visions, writing two versions of the events known as

the Short Text and the Long Text. Both texts were written in English, the vernacular at the time. The Short

Text, which exists now only as a copy, is believed to have been written soon after she recovered. The Long

Text, which is the product of the years she spent meditating on the meaning of her visions, was written

much later and was likely revised over a long period of time. Both manuscripts together are referred to as

Revelations of Divine Love. If Revelations of Divine Love is not the earliest known book written by an

Englishwoman, then it is the oldest surviving work by an anchoress. Margaret Gallyon, Margery Kempe of

Lynn and Medieval England, (Norwich: The Canterbury Press, 1995),1-58; Margery Kempe was born

Margery Brunham in King’s Lynn (then known as Bishop’s Lynn), England about 1373. She was a devout

Catholic, and after her first child was born, she began having visions and revelations from God, Jesus

Christ, and Mary the Mother of Jesus as well as other Biblical figures. She dictated these religious

experiences to scribes who wrote The Book of Margery Kempe in 1433 or ‘44. In the Book, Kempe

describes many pilgrimages she takes, including one to Norwich to visit Julian the anchoress who became

her “friend and counselor” during the visit, which lasted several days. This spiritual memoir is often

referred to as the earliest autobiography written by an Englishwoman, but this is debated because the Book

is written in third person, where Kempe herself is called “this creature” in a show of religious deference to

God and Christ. Watt, Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650–1100, 6-7.

Ibid., 8.

own monasteries.” Unfortunately, overwriting and other marginalization practices have

continued into modern times, and Watt points out that even:

twentieth-century translations, such as those by Edward Kylie (1911) and

Ephraim Emerton (1940) do not include all of the women’s letters, and some of

the women’s letters—namely those of the nun Berthgyth—have only recently

been published in translated form in their entirety.

Considering that women’s voices have consistently and oftentimes deliberately been

concealed or left out of English literary works since the earliest ones were composed, it is

no wonder that so much of what was once erased has had to be rediscovered or that so

much more remains unrecovered still today.

Protofeminism in Europe & Early Attempts at Evading Marginalization

Attitudes of unworthiness such as Hugeberc’s are understandable considering that

during the Middle Ages, as a whole, women were viewed as property, valuable only for

their ability to reproduce, since both their bodies and intellects were thought to be

considerably weaker than men’s. After all, they were the descendants of Eve, unable to

resist temptation and incapable of rational thought. Thus, even women with religious

vocations were denied access to advanced learning through theological schools or

universities, which at the time involved:

The classical form of instruction with a teacher and textbooks, the artes liberales,

a sophisticated curriculum, training in Latin and logic, the privileged institutions

of education and scholarship, the studium generale, the universitas of students

and teachers, the licentia docendi.

Ibid., 4 and 22.

Ibid., 70.

Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, editor, Seeing and Knowing: Women and Learning in Medieval

Europe 1200-1550, (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2004), 7.

Fortunately, as Hugeberc, Hildegard of Bingen, Juliana of Cornillon, and others prove

“although some people (in particular women) had no access to formal theology and

sacred learning, they nonetheless demonstrated considerable knowledge.” Through divine

revelations from the Holy Spirit, Juliana herself was said to have “acquired knowledge

that was perceived to be compatible with what the doctors derived from books;

knowledge.” She was literate, however, since she wrote a Latin office for the Feast of

Corpus Christi, which she also invented. Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe would

each gain her knowledge in the same mystic fashion.

Though the majority of Medieval women writers authored religious texts which

were derived from visions, not all female authors produced works of piety. As noted,

Marie de France wrote lais describing courtly rather than divine love, and her fables

espouse social morality and a scholar’s duty to preserve the past in writing. Two hundred

years later, Christine de Pizan became the earliest known professional woman writer by

publishing similarly secular-themed works. de Pizan is significant in women’s literary

history not only because she argued against the predominant sexist beliefs concerning

women’s trustworthiness and reasonability, but also because she was heavily involved in

Maud Burnett McInerney, “Introduction: Hildegard of Bingen, Prophet and Polymath,” in

Hildegard of Bingen: A Book of Essays, ed. by Maud Burnett McInerney, (New York: Garland Publishing,

Inc., 1998), xix-xx; Hildegard of Bingen was born into an aristocratic German family around 1098. While

still a small child, she began having religious visions and was sent to the monastery of St. Disibod. She

would go on to become an abbess and would eventually record the visions she had been experiencing since

childhood in three works: Scrivas, Liber Vitae Meretorium, and Liber Divinorum Operum. She also wrote a

book of songs called Symphonia, an encyclopedia of natural history called Physica, and a medical text

called Causae et Curae. Mulder-Bakker, Seeing and Knowing: Women and Learning in Medieval Europe

1200-1550, 2-12. Catherine Saucier, “Sacrament and Sacrifice: Conflating Corpus Christi and Martyrdom

in Medieval Liège.” Speculum 87, no. 3 (2012): 683. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23488495. Juliana of

Cornillon or Saint Julian of Liège was a canoness at the monastery in Mont-Cornillon in modern-day

Belgium. She lived there from around 1205 until her death in 1258. She is credited as being the composer

of the earliest version of the Animarum cibus, a chanted prayer that is part of the Liturgy of Hours or Opus

Dei and the Mass of Corpus Christi.

the production of her printed works, going so far as to ensure that her illustrator was also

female, and she was likely the first woman to gain that level of control over the public

presentation of her texts. The popularity of de Pizan’s works as well as their radical

content favoring women paved the way for Laura Cereta, a fellow Italian and

protofeminist writing during the Renaissance. Though her circulated letters espouse

Gospel teachings, Diana Robin notes that Cereta’s “woman-centered, feminist voice, [is]

reminiscent of Christine de Pizan” particularly because “the values of friendship,

commonality, and community among women and the sharing of work and thought by

women are promoted and exemplified” through it. Cereta’s concept of a “long and noble

lineage: a generositas” or “family tree of women geniuses” through which she relates

“prophecy to scholarship and erudition,” is important in that it contrasts starkly with the

thoughts of leading men of the period like Boccaccio. Robin translates Cereta’s

philosophy about such learned women thusly: “All human beings, women included, are

born with a right to an education.” By calling for equal education, Cereta expands the

earlier concept of respublica litterarum to include women so that her respublica

mulierum becomes the ideal intellectual community in which women throughout the

western world can engage in critical thought in order to create their own literature and

scholarship regardless of geopolitical boundary or culture (which is similar to de Pizan’s

Citié des Dammes), finally making space for the Woman of Letters to stand next to her

intellectual counterpart.

Susan Signe Morrison, A Medieval Woman’s Companion: Women’s Lives in the European

Middle Ages. (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2016), 161-65; Christine de Pizan was born in Venice in 1364. Her

father Thomas served as astrologer to Charles V of France and moved the family to Paris to join the French

court when she was four. He supported her desire to learn and gave her “an extraordinary education,” even

finding a “fellow scholar for her” to marry when she was 15. Unfortunately, by the time she was 25, both

her father and husband were dead, and with two children to support, she began to earn money as a scribe.

Englishwomen Become Visible at Last

Despite centuries of medieval nuns’ clever subversion of patriarchal oppression

and outspoken Italian protofeminists like de Pizan and Cereta calling for a women’s

republic of letters, an egalitarian exchange was slow in coming. From the time Hugeburc

hid her name in the hagiographies of her brothers, it would take almost nine hundred

years for an Englishwoman to publicly claim authorship of her own works and evade

most attempts at erasure, at least temporarily. The first such person to “earn her living

solely by her pen” was Aphra Behn, and unlike most of the known women writers who

preceded her, she was neither openly religious nor a nun, though it is said that she

considered taking up that vocation in the event that her literary career was unsuccessful.

She lived and wrote during the Restoration, a hundred years before Jane Austen,

publishing her plays, poetry, and fiction between 1670 and 1689. Like Austen, she would

die relatively young at 48, with the last of her known works published posthumously,

nearly ten years afterwards in 1698.

When her husband, Johan Behn died early in their marriage, Aphra supported

herself by spying in Antwerp for Charles II of England. However, after the king refused

She then progressed into authorship of Letters which she publicly exchanged with Charles VI’s secretary,

Jean de Montreuil, in what became known as the Querelle des Femmes. In her replies to Montreuil, she

expressed protofeminist beliefs, including the idea that comparing someone to a woman was a compliment

rather than an insult. Afterwards, she began writing longer works, and two of them Le Livre de la Citié des

Dammes and Le Livre des Trois Vertus, cemented her status as a famous author in her own lifetime. Diana

Robin, trans. and ed., Laura Cereta: Collected Works of a Renaissance Feminist, (Chicago: The University

of Chicago Press, 1997), 19-23 and 72-75; Laura Cereta was born in Brescia in 1469. Like de Pizan, her

father supported her education and, when she was seven, he sent her to a nearby convent where the prioress

taught her to use the quiet periods during early morning and late night, or what Cereta calls vigiliae, to

study and write. Her formal education ended at eleven, but she continued to write and study on her own.

She was married at fifteen, just as de Pizan had been, and widowed a year later. As an adult, she too wrote

many letters to friends and family that emphasized the authentic female experience and refuted her critics.

Cereta collected more than eighty of these letters in a manuscript, which was circulated throughout Italy in

the late fifteenth century, but it would not be professionally published for two hundred years.

Janet Todd, Aphra Behn: A Secret Life, (London: Bloomsbury Reader, 2017), 8.

to pay her debts, she began working as a translator and scribe for the King’s Company

and the Duke’s Company players, putting others’ plays to paper to earn money and avoid

prison. Discovering an aptitude for play writing, Behn began to compose her own

dramas, the most successful of which was The Rover, first performed in 1677, beginning

her writing career anonymously. Behn then used the pseudonym Astrea, naming herself

for the Greek goddess of justice and innocence, on subsequent plays before ultimately

calling herself Mrs. A. Behn in the rest of her works. Not only was she a prolific

playwright, but she was also likely the author of the first English novel, be it Oroonoko:

or, the Royal Slave (1688), which is often touted as such, or—as Todd, Gardiner, and Orr

debate—her earlier epistolary work Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister

published in three volumes from 1684 to 1687, though this longer work was initially

released anonymously.

Regardless of which work should be credited as the earliest novel, during her

lifetime, Aphra Behn was listed publicly as the author of five works of fiction along with

nearly a dozen plays, though more works, including three poetry collections, are usually

attributed to her. Because she was willing to behave contrary to societal expectations and

openly publish pieces containing “immoral” subjects such as male impotence and the

depiction of the sexual exploits of females as well as males, she had many contemporary

critics and detractors. Nevertheless, her work proved popular during her lifetime, and

thus, she became a role model for subsequent generations of women writers. Behn has

Judith Kegan Gardiner, “The First English Novel: Aphra Behn’s Love Letters, The Canon, and

Women’s Tastes.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 8, no. 2 (1989): 201–22.

https://doi.org/10.2307/463735; Leah Orr, “Attribution Problems in the Fiction of Aphra Behn.” The

Modern Language Review 108, no. 1 (2013): 30–51. https://doi.org/10.5699/modelangrevi.108.1.0030.

made such an indelible impact that in the seminal work on women’s fiction A Room of

One’s Own, first published in 1929, Virginia Woolf writes:

All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, which

is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was

she who earned them the right to speak their minds. It is she—shady and amorous

as she was—who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you tonight: Earn

five hundred a year by your wits.

And yet Behn was also problematic because as Woolf admits, Behn sacrificed “certain

agreeable qualities” in her writing, that are art and authenticity, for profitability. As Janet

Todd puts it, “she did not conform to the notion of what a woman author should be, a

suffering soul working against patriarchal oppression, in deep conflict with men.”

Secondly, like her predecessors writing in medieval abbeys, Behn’s works often defied

classification, neither conforming to the norms of the seventeenth century, nor the genres

into which scholars might attempt to place them afterwards. Additionally, she was a

Tory, a conservative, rather than liberal as one might expect such an enlightened woman

acting ahead of her time to be. Like most, Todd finds her views inconsistent, noting that

Behn “was a patriarchalist in state politics, a Cartesian in psychology, and a contract

theorist in family matters.” It is appropriate, then, that Oroonoko, Behn’s brief novel

concerning an African prince tricked into slavery and his ill-fated love for Imoinda,

which read as sentimental and romantic in its time, can now act as “the very model” of

the modern literary “issues of race, gender, and class.” Unfortunately, for these reasons,

as well as her widely-known relationships with John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester; John

Hoyle, an openly bisexual London lawyer; and other libertines; she was purposefully

Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own” Feedbooks, Project Gutenberg: 55.

http://seas3.elte.hu/coursematerial/PikliNatalia/Virginia_Woolf_-_A_Room_of_Ones_Own.pdf.

excluded from the literary cannon despite her remarkable success and concerted efforts to

make her own mark among men of letters. Behn was not celebrated until recently, when

her behavior and works began to fit more comfortably into given genres and motifs.

Obsequiousness & Obscurity

Despite Behn’s commercial success, she continued to experience marginalization,

initially among her contemporaries, and later from male scholars who came afterwards

and chose not to include her works among the canonical literature that they deemed

worthy of study. Such practices are reminiscent of the societal pressures that led

Hugeburc to consider herself “unworthy” of direct attribution, all the while believing that

each of her two brothers was worthy of his own recorded narrative. Even as she claimed

authorship in a cipher, when writing The Life of Willibald, she apologized to her readers

for being “corruptible by the feminine frailty of the fragile sex, neither supported by the

prerogative of wisdom nor elevated by the industry of great strength.” Along the same

vein, Julian of Norwich warns her readers:

Botte God forbede that ye shulde saye or take it so that I am a techere. For I

meene nought so, no I mente nevere so. For I am a woman, lewed, febille, and

freylle.

In her chapter “Female Authority,” Amy Appleford argues that despite this attitude of

humility, Julian of Norwich is “an unproblematic figure” in terms of authorial attribution

because she is not only:

one of the few women writers of the period we can identify by name, date, and

place but, remarkable among medieval vernacular writers of either sex, her works

can claim a continuous reading history down to the present.

Ibid., 54; Todd, Aphra Behn: A Secret Life, 22-25.

Watt, Women, Writing and Religion in England and Beyond, 650–1100, 93.

Liz Herbert McAvoy and Diane Watt, eds, The History of British Women’s Writing, 700-1500,

Volume One (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 223.

Because of the strength of her provenance, Appleford contends that Julian is:

the only woman writer working in English in the Middle Ages who seems to answer

to Virginia Woolf’s paradigm of a ‘mother’ ‘to think back through’, presenting a

partial answer to the ‘problem of antecedents’ that… plague both women writers

themselves and the project of constructing a continuous feminist literary history.

However, this perspective does not account for the ambiguity of Julian’s name as a

religious rather than a personal identity, since the author of Revelations of Divine Love

was but the first of several in a line of anchoresses to inhabit the cell at the Church of St.

Julian, making it unclear whether the author’s given name really was Julian or whether

she (and each of the successive anchorites after her) could have been referred to as Julian

simply because her cell was attached to that particular church. Whichever the case,

Julian’s manuscripts, being carefully preserved in copies, have fared better than that of

her acquaintance Margery Kempe, whose Book was lost at some point after the

Restoration and was known to scholars only through references to it in contemporary

works until a copy of it was rediscovered by Hope Emily Allen in 1934.

The self-effacement exhibited by Hugeberc and Julian of Norwich, and, even to

some extent, Margery Kempe—who referred to herself in the third person—is

comparable to Marie de France’s contentment with writing “Marie ai num, si sui de

France” as a way of preserving her identity “pur soie remembrance.” However, her

attempt at preservation is challenging when, as Finke and Shichtman point out, this

method of imprecise attribution means that the Fables epilogue “seems almost another

fable [itself] with its generic names.” They press on, questioning, “how many Maries and

Ibid., 223-24

Ibid., 232.

Williams [“Count William” is the name Marie lists for her patron] were there in the

French-speaking world of the twelfth century?” Wogan-Browne and Short dig even

deeper into the problem of Medieval authorship, conversely suggesting that the

“darkness” surrounding Marie’s identity which Finke and Shichtman bemoan could have

been beneficial to the author. This is a valid point considering that the ubiquity of Marie’s

name might have aided her in avoiding total obscurity, as the work of a woman named

Marie from France with an inauspicious patron might easily and purposefully be

overlooked in a literary culture built upon privileging male voices. Handily, though, there

are several historical Maries from France of varying prominence who could have been

writing poetry at the appropriate time and could potentially be the author of these works,

giving each of them greater opportunity for exposure and circulation. Wogan-Browne and

Short explain:

after all, what would be lost if we say that only the Fables are by a Marie “de

France”? What we are talking about here is 102 fables extant in 25, mostly later

thirteenth-century manuscripts in England and Europe, 15 of them preserving the

epilogue naming Marie de France. This is not a mean survival by manuscript

culture standards.

Add to this that the number of unsigned manuscripts attributed to Marie de France in

modern times keeps expanding, and Wogan-Browne and Short are difficult to refute.

Sadly, the emergence of Aphra Behn did not eliminate the oppressive societal

structures which had driven those noble women of old such as Marie de France and

Harriet Spiegel, ed. and trans., Marie de France: Fables, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,

1994), 256; Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman, “Magical Mistress Tour: Patronage, Intellectual

Property, and the Dissemination of Wealth in the ‘Lais’ of Marie de France.” Signs 25, no. 2 (2000): 479.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3175563; Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and Ian Short. “Recovery and Loss:

Women’s Writing Around Marie De France,” in Women Intellectuals and Leaders in the Middle Ages, eds.

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis, And John Van Engen, (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer,

2020), 176.

Julian of Norwich, in whom a “genius of a sort must have existed”—those whom Woolf

terms “mothers” and who make up the branches of Cereta’s generositas— to obscure

their identities. If that were so, Jane Austen likely would not have chosen to attribute

Sense and Sensibility to “A Lady” or declined to attach her name to Emma and Mansfield

Park, even though it had become common knowledge in light of Pride and Prejudice’s

wild initial popularity. Rather, she might have signed her own name to each of her

published works as her brothers had done theirs and, in turn, earned the adoration of the

entire Anglophone world a century sooner than she did. Instead, because of “the

narrowness of life that was imposed upon her,” Austen carefully hid her name and

manuscripts during her lifetime, and surviving family members hid the personal details of

her life after she died, forever obscuring her from the generations of Janeites who would

want to know more about the woman behind the pen.

Supple Brains over Sweet Beauty: The Women of Letters Emerge

While Behn was still abroad spying for King Chares II in 1666, Mary Astell was

born. The Astells of Newcastle upon Tyne were members of the gentry, a distinction

which Christine Mason Sutherland argues “affected not only [Mary’s] sense of her own

identity but also her opportunities.” Astell was taught at home alongside her brother by

their uncle, a member of the Anglican clergy, but he died when she was thirteen, ending

her educational instruction. Nevertheless, she continued to read and educate herself on

her own. The early death of her father during the previous year left the family of four

struggling to provide for themselves, and no way to provide Mary a dowry. According to

Ruth Perry’s biography of her, these hardships caused Astell to leave provincial life at

Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own,” 41, 57.

twenty-one and head “for London, a tough, raucous, and corrupt urban center” where she

successfully wielded “intelligence; independence; hard work; fierce principles, and the

companionship of other women” to become “the first English woman of letters” despite

facing the continued “struggle against an ideology of gender that, at best, assigned sweet

beauty, not supple brains, to Eve and her modest daughters.”

Astell’s literary career was supported not only by other literary women; such as

Lady Ann Coventry, Lady Elizabeth Hastings, Lady Catherine Jones, and the poor but

erudite Elizabeth Elstrob; but also by male patrons like Reverend John Norris and

William Sandcroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, who helped her financially and connected

her with the bookseller and publisher Rich Wilkin. Writing from 1694 until 1709, Astell

produced six books, a two-part pamphlet, and a book of letters written between herself

and Rev. Norris. Sutherland notes that nine total works is “not a large output, but [those

works are] of a quality that ensured her status as a celebrity at the time.”

Writing on themes of friendship, marriage, and religion and politics, Astell largely

held conservative views in terms of culture and social structure, especially in relation to

the worship of God. However, her first pamphlet A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the

Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest, which Wilkin had published for her in

two parts (released in 1694 and 1697 respectively) was radical in its plan for establishing

a women’s college. In Part One of the Proposal, Astell argues that:

Women were they rightly Educated, had they obtain’d a well inform’d and

discerning Mind, they would be proof against all those Batteries [that is,

displaying vanity concerning their beauty or money due to pride and self-love],

Christine Mason Sutherland, The Eloquence of Mary Astell, (Calgary: The University of

Calgary Press, 2005), xi-xiii; Ruth Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist,

(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), xi.

Sutherland, The Eloquence of Mary Astell, xiv-xv; Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell, 7-8

see through and scorn those little silly Artifices which are us’d to ensnare and

deceive them. Such an one would value her self only on her Vertue, and

consequently be most chary of what she esteems so much. She would know, that

not what others say, but what she her self does, is the true Commendation and the

only thing that exalts her.

Having explained that women’s largest obstacle to being happy and prosperous was the

lack of opportunity for a formal education equal to that offered to men, Astell proposes a

solution reminiscent of Cereta and de Pizan:

to erect a Monastery, or if you will (to avoid giving offence to the scrupulous and

injudicious, by names which tho’ innocent in themselves, have been abus’d by

superstitious Practices,) we will call it a Religious Retirement, and such as shall

have a double aspect, being not only a Retreat from the World for those who

desire that advantage, but likewise, an Institution and previous discipline, to fit us

to do the greatest good in it; such an Institution as this (if I do not mightily

deceive my self) would be the most probable method to amend the present and

improve the future Age.

Though it is for this proposal, with its protofeminist sentiments, which she is best

remembered today, Perry points out that Astell “would have been surprised to know what

posterity has made of her.” Astell saw herself a philosopher rather than an activist, as she

was concerned with the nature of the mind and the soul as well as the delineations of

government, and because of this, Astell “would have been horrified by the implied

radicalism of the label ‘feminist.’”

That Astell is no feminist heroine makes her just as problematic as all the

contradictions that Aphra Behn espoused. Once more, difficulty fitting a woman’s works

into predetermined categories, such as polemicism over philosophy or politics over

Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest

Interest, (London: Richard Wilkin, 1697), Project Gutenberg, 26,

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/54984/54984-h/54984-h.htm;

Ibid., 41.

Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell, 12-13.

theology, or vice versa, is likely one of the reasons that Astell’s works were no longer

considered fashionable by the time she died in 1731. And though George Ballard

expressed his admiration for them in the middle of the eighteenth century, they were soon

forgotten again. Centuries of marginalization and neglect meant that even Mary Astell, an

indisputable mother of women’s literature through her role as England’s first Woman of

Letters, was suffering a fate akin to Behn’s until Perry published her Astell biography in

the mid-1980s, and academics rediscovered her.

Austen’s Contemporary Inspirations

Fanny Burney

By all accounts, the Austens’ life in Steventon was a quiet one, and they were a

tightly bonded group until the boys began to leave home for college and career. Aside

from letter writing and putting on dramas, the children entertained themselves with

reading books and writing letters. Jane Austen, like all the reverend’s family members,

was widely read in terms of English literature of the period. She is known to have greatly

admired William Cowper’s and George Crabbe’s poetry and Samuel Richardson’s

novels, of course, as well as the works of many more authors, including Dr. (Samuel)

Johnson, who, though mostly forgotten now, was “the most distinguished man of letters

in English history.” Alongside these learned men, Austen read and was influenced by

contemporary women writers in England, Fanny Burney foremost among them.

Frances Burney, later Madame d’Arblay, or more commonly, Fanny Burney,

“was one of the best-known and most highly respected novelists of her generation,” and

after her death, she even managed to begin a “posthumous career as the leading journalist

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), s.v. “Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784).”

of the Georgian age.” However, she authored not only novels and her famed Diary and

Letters of Madame d’Arblay, 1768-1840, but also plays and a biography of her father, Dr.

Charles Burney. Because of her well-connected family, Burney moved in influential

circles and became acquainted with many prominent figures of her time, including the

aforementioned Dr. Johnson and Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, wife of the

“Mad” King. Burney kept her Diary throughout her life, and it is through these entries

that readers learn about her interactions with England’s famed and influential. Her Diary

also reveals that her earliest manuscript was “Caroline Evelyn,” a work which Harman

describes as “a sad tale of abandonment and ill-usage, which ended with the young

heroine dying in childbirth.” Unfortunately, it would be burned, along with all her other

juvenilia, in a bonfire that Burney lit on her fifteenth birthday. “Caroline Evelyn,” was

not lost entirely, however, as Burney reworked parts of the story into her debut novel,

Evelina, whose titular character is Caroline Evelyn’s daughter.

Evelina, or The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World was initially

published 1778, but like all of Burney’s novels, it went unsigned, not even bearing “the

conventional tag ‘By a Lady,’” that Austen herself would use on Sense and Sensibility

because Burney did not think her father would approve of her writing career. Evelina was

a critical and commercial success; however, since her brother, posing as the book’s

editor, was ill-equipped to negotiate payment, Burney only profited twenty guineas

(about £21) for her copyright, while the bulk of the money Evelina made went to

Burney’s publisher, Thomas Lowndes. Because Evelina is a novel of manners and uses

Claire Harman, Fanny Burney: A Biography, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), xvii; 45.

satire to critique aspects of English society, it is considered a precursor to Austen’s

works. This is unsurprising, since Austen’s admiration of Fanny Burney is undeniable.

Burney published her second novel, Cecilia, or the Memoirs of an Heiress in

1782, this time selling her copyright for £250 to Thomas Payne and Thomas Cadell. The

English critic Q. D. Leavis claims that it is this particular book which inspired Austen to

write her most popular novel, telling a not unsimilar story in Pride and Prejudice while

using more “realistic terms” than Burney. Whether one accepts the whole of Mrs.

Leavis’s argument, Mark Schorer agrees that it is in Burney’s second novel that Austen

“found her title unquestionably and probably her theme.” When examining the pertinent

passage in the fifth volume of Cecilia, this author can do little more than nod in

agreement with Schorer:

“The whole of this unfortunate business,” said Dr Lyster, “has been the result of

PRIDE and PREJUDICE. Your uncle, the Dean, began it, by his arbitrary will, as

if an ordinance of his own could arrest the course of nature! and as if he had

power to keep alive, by the loan of a name, a family in the male branch already

extinct. Your father, Mr Mortimer, continued it with the same self-partiality,

preferring the wretched gratification of tickling his ear with a favourite sound, to

the solid happiness of his son with a rich and deserving wife. Yet this, however,

remember; if to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you owe your miseries, so wonderfully

is good and evil balanced, that to PRIDE and PREJUDICE you will also owe their

termination:

Ibid., xxv and 91. Jane Austen would have a similar experience when selling Pride and

Prejudice’s copyright to Thomas Egerton for £110 in 1812. Because she was not entitled any of its profits

above that initial sum, she lost at least £340 (£25,765/$31,019 in modern currency) on the first two editions

alone. Dissatisfied with that arrangement as well as the one she had entered into with Benjamin Crosby in

1803, wherein he purchased the copyright to Susan (published posthumously as Northanger Abbey) but

refused to publish it, this would be the only work that she published through the sale of copyright.

Thomas Cadell would reject the manuscript, likely Pride and Prejudice, that Rev. George

Austen sent him on behalf of Jane in 1797, returning it to Austen unopened. Mark Schorer, “Pride

Unprejudiced,” The Kenyon Review 18, no. 1 (1956): 75. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4333636; Schroer

quotes Leavis, but he does not list any reference information for the quotation. Fanny Burney, Cecilia, or

Memoirs of an Heiress by the Author of Evelina, in Five Volumes, Vol. V, (London: T. Payne and Son and

T. Cadell, 1782), 379-80; The capitalization and use of italics in this passage are Burney’s own.

Since Burney repeats the phrase “PRIDE and PREJUDICE” three times in this passage,

Austen would have been hard pressed not to notice it, and even if she did not consciously

recall Burney’s words when renaming First Impressions, which is doubtful, what reason

is there to believe that Austen did not at least absorb them subconsciously?

Burney learned from losing profits on the sale of the copyrights of her first two

books, though she had managed to make more money on Cecilia than Evelina, and so her

third novel, Camilla: A Picture of Youth, was published by subscription in 1796. Three

hundred people were named on the subscription list before Camilla was printed, and even

more people added their names after the book was released. These included Burney’s

“fellow novelists Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth, and a ‘Miss J. Austen’ of Steventon

in Hampshire.” Were this not evidence enough to prove Austen’s admiration of Burney,

Austen also mentions both Camilla and Cecilia in her own Northanger Abbey, calling

Burney’s novels:

work[s] in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most

thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the

liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-

chosen language.

Because Austen used Burney’s works, along with Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, as

examples in the above passage defending the importance of novels, Harmon, too, calls

Austen Burney’s “devoted fan,” noting that Austen “particularly admired Camilla” as

evidenced by the number of times the title is mentioned in Austen’s surviving letters and

the fact that there are many parallels between Camilla and Pride and Prejudice, such as:

the similarity of Sir Sedley Clarendel’s haughty behavior at the provincial ball to

that of Darcy at Meryton; Camilla’s detention at Mrs. Arlbury’s house because of

Harmon, Fanny Burney: A Biography, 260. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, (New York: W.W.

Norton & Company, 2004), 22-23.

the rain to that of Elizabeth Bennet and her sister at Netherfield; and the musical

ineptitude of Indiana…to that of Mary Bennet.

In addition to these instances involving Camilla and Pride and Prejudice, Harmon also

notes similarities between Camilla and both Emma and Mansfield Park as well.

Arguably, though Fanny Burney is an undeniably important figure in the annals of

English women writers, she is even more important in the context of Jane Austen’s

literary lineage. Without Burney, Austen may never have revised First Impressions, the

masterpiece known as Pride and Prejudice might never have been printed, and the

phenomenon of Austenmania would never have begun. Without Burney, there would

likely be no Jane Austen, literary genius, at all.

Mary Wollstonecraft

Another of Austen’s female contemporaries was Mary Wollstonecraft, whose

unconventional life and works have inspired generations of feminists following her. The

solidly middle-class Wollstonecrafts were certainly not as well-to-do as Fanny Burney’s

family, lacking high social status and powerful connections. Thus, it is unfortunate that

despite her grandfather’s success as well as the economic opportunities available to

Mary’s “moderately wealthy” father as a weaver in London, Edward John Wollstonecraft

was uninterested in his father’s silk business and quickly squandered his inheritance

when his many attempts to be a gentleman farmer and later delve into commercial

speculation failed. With each disastrous business venture, he became more drunken and

abusive towards his wife, causing Mary to act as her mother’s protector as well as the

part of a mother for her younger siblings. However, unlike her older siblings, Mary was

Harmon, Fanny Burney: A Biography, 260.

Ibid., 261.

given neither an inheritance from her grandfather, nor much attention from her parents,

leaving her bitter and dissatisfied with her home life as well as disillusioned with

traditional notions of love and marriage, notions which she then rebelled against in her

most recognized works.

Wollstonecraft was educated at a day school in the Yorkshire village of Beverley,

where she was likely taught how to be “marriageable and ladylike.” According to Janet

Todd, Wollstonecraft would have received instruction on “rudimentary French,

needlework, music, dancing, writing, possibly some botany and accounts.” More

ambitious or affluent parents also may have paid for their daughters to learn advanced

French, perhaps Latin and painting. In either instance, the emphasis was on the pupils one

day fulfilling the role of an accomplished lady rather than becoming a philosopher or

woman of letters, an educational approach contrary to the one Wollstonecraft would

initially advocate in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: With Reflections on

Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life, her first publication released in

1787. Outside of schooling, Wollstonecraft openly defied expectations for her sex as she

was known to read non-fiction books and newspapers and took an interest in social issues

and other aspects of national and local politics, all of which were considered masculine

pursuits.

Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life, (New York: Columbia University

Press, 2000), 4-11.

Ibid., 12-14; This concept of “an accomplished lady” is what Charles Bingley refers to in

Chapter Eight of Pride and Prejudice when discussing accomplished ladies’ plenteousness or the lack

thereof with his sister Caroline and Mr. Darcy in Elizabeth Bennet’s presence. Bingley himself says he

would be satisfied with a woman who exhibits the talents listed above, while Darcy wishes for a well-read,

intelligent woman in addition to the other requirements.

While Wollstonecraft was unhappy with much in her early life, she was able to

make a close friend of Jane Arden, whose father was a scientist and lecturer and whose

home was much happier than her own. Besides acceptance, John Arden also offered

Wollstonecraft a chance to continue the studies she had begun at her day school,

educating her alongside his daughter and offering her a chance at much-needed praise.

True to her rebellious spirit, according to the correspondence that she shared with Jane

when the latter was away from home, Wollstonecraft “sought to create herself as a

literary lady who never wrote frivolously of her feelings” or read the romances that other

young women enjoyed as patrons of circulation libraries, like Richardson’s Pamela or

any of Burney’s books. Rather, she preferred anthologies and women’s conduct manuals,

similar to one she would eventually publish.

When Wollstonecraft was sixteen, her father again moved the family, settling this

time in Hoxton, a village outside of London, “famous for its Dissenters,” making it an

appropriate location for Mary to finally find a sense of belonging, as her most famous

publications promote nonconformity. It is there that Wollstonecraft met Reverend Clare

and his wife, a couple who took an interest in her the way her parents never did, and who

also helped her further her education as well as provided the opportunity for her to meet

Fanny Blood, with whom she would form an even closer friendship than she had with

Jane Arden, as Jane proved to be much less devoted to Mary than Mary was to Jane.

By 1788, Mary Wollstonecraft was still unhappy in her parents’ home, but her

means of escape were limited as she had no dowry and, though she had taken on the role

Ibid., 18.

Ibid., 20-22.

of mother to her younger siblings, Wollstonecraft had no intentions to marry or becoming

a mother herself. This meant she had no choice but to leave home and go to work, so at

nineteen she went out to earn her own keep, once again spurning societal expectations for

a lady. Because it was unseemly for someone of her station to have an occupation outside

the family home, she found little opportunity for work besides a companion for elderly

women or a governess. Unfortunately, neither of these careers suited her touchy

temperament, and though she and Fanny Blood did manage to open a school with the

help of Mary’s sisters Eliza and Everina in Newlington Green outside of London, it

turned out to be but a brief venture, only “sustaining [the] four young women for two and

a half years,” chiefly because of the unanticipated cost of supplies coupled with Blood’s

marriage and subsequent departure to Lisbon in 1758.

Short-lived as it was, Wollstonecraft’s time in education proved influential in her

literary career. It was then that she developed her own pedagogy, which she promoted in

her first publication. She was also introduced to and developed a brief friendship with Dr.

Johnson, that great man of letters, and later in life, though her politics were much more

liberal than his, she would come to lean on his works “in moments of personal crisis.”

But, perhaps even more importantly, she met John Hewlett, a fellow educator who

launched her literary career by encouraging her to put her particular philosophy of

education to paper.

Though Wollstonecraft spent much of her life opposing marriage and did not intend to be a

mother, she did have romantic relationships, including one with Gilbert Imlay, who fathered her first child,

Frances, born in 1794. Wollstonecraft came to love Imlay so deeply that her opinion changed, and she did

want to marry him, but he refused. She eventually married William Godwin in 1797, five months before

their daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley was born. Like Hoxton, Newlington Green hosted a

community of Dissenters where Wollstonecraft was able to make many supportive friends and connections.

Ibid., 58.

Ibid., 61.

Hewlett was able to convince Joseph Johnson, a printer he knew, to publish

Wollstonecraft’s proposed conduct book with nothing more than an outline and his word

despite her having no prior publications; Wollstonecraft even received an advance of ten

guineas as part of the agreement he struck. She quickly finished Thoughts on the

Education of Daughters, and Johnson published it for her the following year in 1787.

Todd admits that though Wollstonecraft’s literary debut “did not startle the world,” it did

catch the eyes of the editors of a leading women’s journal at the time, who considered it

“worthy of wider circulation; in their view it treated female virtue, knowledge and

accomplishments in a ‘sensible manner’ while making ‘many judicious observations,’” so

they also published it in The Lady’s Magazine in three parts. Though she had embarked

upon a new career and would achieve some success with her first piece, without profits

from the school, Wollstonecraft still needed to find a steady means of income.

As the twenty-eight-year-old Wollstonecraft was taking a position as governess

for the aristocratic Kingsboroughs in Ireland and starting what would become her only

completed novel, Mary, A Fiction, the eleven-year-old Jane Austen was just beginning to

write her juvenilia at the rectory in Steventon. Unfortunately, Wollstonecraft did not get

along well with her employers or the children under her charge, so she was dismissed in

the fall of 1787 and once again needed income.

Wollstonecraft returned to London and reached out to her publisher, Joseph

Johnson, who helped her by swiftly arranging the publication of Mary and employing her

to write for the Analytical Review, a literary magazine he had founded with Thomas

Christie. Since the publication of Wollstonecraft’s anonymous reviews in this magazine

Ibid., 78.

coincided with Jane Austen’s adolescence, and the Austens were known for being widely

read, it is probable that Jane was exposed to them. Though there is no definitive proof,

Jessica McGivney explores the possibility that Austen was influenced by

Wollstonecraft’s book reviews as she wrote her juvenilia. This is an interesting

possibility because Wollstonecraft is known to have mocked fiction that she viewed as

“unworthy,” and, as previously discussed, most of Austen’s early writing presents her

own satirical versions of popular works. McGivney argues that if Austen had indeed been

reading The Analytical Review, “she would have noticed Wollstonecraft’s ridicule of the

cult of sensibility as well as earnest appeals to reason in arguing that this kind of

sensibility has ill effects.” McGivney then juxtaposes this with examples from Austen’s

juvenilia, in which “characters steeped in sensibility encounter others who are not and,

even if they don’t hold in contempt that lack of sensibility or ‘delicate feelings,’ are

completely unequipped to understand them.” The similarity is clear, but McGivney

acknowledges that Austen could have developed these ideas from other common sources

that predate Wollstonecraft, such as Charlotte Lennox’s Female Quixote.

McGivney discusses other connections between Wollstonecraft and Austen’s

early writings as well:

In addition to flaws in the composition of the novels themselves—affected

language, stock clichés, excessive appeals to sensibility, and improbability of

events (all ridiculed in the juvenilia)—Mary Wollstonecraft often ridicules works

for being imitations, copies, or derivatives of other popular works. This criticism

often overlaps, as Jane Austen would have noticed had she been reading the

reviews, with Wollstonecraft’s criticism of young, female, and especially young

and female authors.

Jessica McGivney, “‘Fevers, Swoons, and Tears’: What If Jane Austen Were Reading Mary

Wollstonecraft in the Analytical Review?” Persuasions On-line 41, no. 1 (Winter 2020).

https://jasna.org/publications-2/persuasions-online/vol-41-no-1/mcgivney/.

Ibid.

According to her, the elements that Wollstonecraft critiques “are either absent or

presented at an observer’s remove in Austen’s mature works.” It is true that Austen’s

Northanger Abbey, which was begun during the same period that Wollstonecraft was

publishing her book reviews, openly satirizes tropes of gothic literature such as the

supernatural, mystery and suspense, foreboding atmospheres and locales, the brooding

(anti)hero with a shadowy past, and the unfortunate heroine in need of his rescue.

Austen’s derisive tone in this novel is certainly reminiscent of Wollstonecraft’s in the

Analytical Review, and yet the similarities between these authors do not end with their

early works.

Just as Austen did not stop writing when she completed the three volumes of her

juvenilia, Wollstonecraft’s literary career was not confined to these early book reviews

and translations of others’ work. In 1788, the same year Johnson published Mary for her,

he also published Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations Calculated to

Regulate the Affections and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness, her only work written

for children, which Todd describes as “a sort of governess fantasy, in which children are

rescued from sophisticated aristocrats by a discerning surrogate, Mrs. Mason, as the

Kingsborough daughters were rescued by Mary Wollstonecraft.” Unlike its predecessors,

Original Stories from Real Life was popular enough to warrant three additional editions,

one notably illustrated by William Blake, and it stayed in print for the following two

decades. Using the education of two small girls as a frame story, Wollstonecraft

continues to promote her belief that the education of women should begin when they are

Ibid. Austen began writing Susan, which would eventually become Northanger Abbey, in 1789.

Wollstonecraft was writing for the Analytical Review from about 1788 to 1792.

young children, which she had first espoused in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters,

but this time in the form of simple stories meant to be read to the young girls for whom

she was advocating. After all, how could an inexperienced woman of twenty be expected

to choose a suitable husband and run a household while avoiding madness if she had not

been taught from an early age “that reason should cultivate and govern those instincts

which are implanted in us to render the path of duty pleasant?” Governing her

imagination and emotions while employing rational thought, Wollstonecraft argues, is the

only defense a woman has in a world bound to bring her disappointment.

In the fourteenth chapter of Thoughts on the Education of Daughters,

Wollstonecraft succinctly captures the plight so many middle-class women faced as

adults, being taught, as they still were, that they were the weaker sex. From her own

experience, she illustrates in stark relief the reason small girls needed someone out of a

fairytale, like Mrs. Mason, in their lives to provide them with practical ways to cope with

the hardships they would almost certainly face:

the sense we have of our weakness, though useful, is not pleasant. Thus it is with

us, when we look for happiness, we meet with vexations: and if, now and then, we

give way to tenderness, or any of the amiable passions, and taste pleasure, the

mind, strained beyond its usual tone, falls into apathy. And yet we were made to

be happy! But our passions will not contribute much to our bliss, till they are

under the dominion of reason, and till that reason is enlightened and improved.

Then sighing will cease, and all tears will be wiped away by that Being, in whose

presence there is fulness of joy.

A person of tenderness must ever have particular attachments, and ever be

disappointed; yet still they must be attached, in spite of human frailty; for if the

mind is not kept in motion by either hope or fear, it sinks into the dreadful state

before-mentioned.

Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life, 126-29; Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on

the Education of Daughters: with Reflections on Female Conduct in the More Important Duties of Life,

(London: J. Johnson, 1787), 2.

Ibid., 115-116.

Wollstonecraft would later expand this philosophy even more in her most famous work,

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Structures on Moral and Political Subjects,

which Johnson published for her in 1792.

Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in response to Charles

Maurice de Tallyrand, the French politician who, with his 1791 pamphlet Rapport sur

l'instruccion publique, fait au nom du Comité de constitution, “was helping to extend the

principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man by writing women out of” it. Though

William Godwin, her husband and biographer, claimed that writing A Vindication of the

Rights of Woman took her less than two months, one could easily argue that the speed at

which she completed the work was likely due to the fact that she had actually been

thinking and writing about the subject for many years. She admits as much in her

introduction to the book:

I have turned over various books written on the subject of education, and patiently

observed the conduct of parents and the management of schools; but what has

been the result?—a profound conviction that the neglected education of my

fellow-creatures is the grand source of the misery I deplore; and that women, in

particular, are rendered weak and wretched by a variety of concurring causes,

originating from one hasty conclusion. The conduct and manners of women, in

fact, evidently prove that their minds are not in a healthy state; for, like the

flowers which are planted in too rich a soil, strength and usefulness are sacrificed

to beauty; and the flaunting leaves, after having pleased a fastidious eye, fade,

disregarded on the stalk, long before the season when they ought to have arrived

at maturity.—One cause of this barren blooming I attribute to a false system of

education, gathered from the books written on this subject by men who,

considering females rather as women than human creatures, have been

more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than rational wives [affectionate

wives and rational mothers]; and the understanding of the sex has been so bubbled

by this specious homage, that the civilized women of the present century, with a

few exceptions, are only anxious to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a

Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life, 179.

nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect.

Wollstonecraft’s protofeminist rhetoric in both Thoughts on the Education of

Daughters and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman argues that so long as they are

given access to a good education, women are just as much rational creatures as men, and

Miriam Ascarelli believes that Austen “cared passionately about the two issues at the

core of Wollstonecraft’s work: the concept that women are rational creatures and the

belief that, in order for women to fulfill their potential as human beings, they must learn

how to think for themselves,” and points out that though Austen’s tone is “comic” and

much less abrasive than Wollstonecraft’s, they are both critiquing the “false education[s]”

that so many women received. Ascarelli is correct in her comparison of the underlying

themes in their work. Though superficially, as a novelist known for celebrating marriages

for love, Austen might appear to have little in common with the radical Wollstonecraft,

both women do share a common goal: portraying their society for what it was—unjustly

oppressive and dismissive towards women—with one confronting this inequality by

penning philosophical and political pieces while the other does the same through works

fiction. If this is the case, then why does Austen make no mention of Wollstonecraft in

any of her known works or extant letters? Ascarelli believes that this is because “it was

simply too dangerous” for Austen to do so. Considering the close-knit nature of the

Austen family as well as Jane’s dedication to it, openly aligning herself with the woman

Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, eds, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Vol. 5 (London:

William Pickering, 1989) 73. The brackets are Todd’s and Butler’s, illustrating the editing that took place

between the first and second printings of the text.

who “helped set the standard for what it meant to be a radical in the 1700s” would have

been a perilous pursuit indeed.

Maria Edgeworth

Though her name is no longer more easily recognized than Jane Austen’s as it

initially was, Maria Edgeworth, is nonetheless “exceptional,” as she was “the best paid

writer of her day,” even accounting for the most successful of her male contemporaries.

Much like Mary Wollstonecraft, Edgeworth had an unhappy childhood, expressed a

negative view of marriage in her novels, and was published by Joseph Johnson. Like

Austen, she critiques various aspects of the ton, including the ways its mores confined

women’s behavior, and whereas Austen made no known references to Wollstonecraft,

she was an open admirer of Edgeworth’s work, even sending Edgeworth an advance copy

of the first edition of Emma in 1816.

Edgeworth was born on the first day of 1768 in Oxfordshire, but her mother died

when she was five, and her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, became “too much

involved with his new wife” to pay attention to his “difficult child” until she began to

lose her sight in 1781. Afterwards, unlike Wollstonecraft however, Edgeworth and her

father reconciled, and she never married or permanently left his household. Once Maria

finished attending school in Derby and London, Richard encouraged his daughter to

continue her studies at home. As such, he had considerable influence on her and her

Miriam Ascarelli, “A Feminist Connection: Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft,” Persuasions

On-line 25, no. 1 (Winter 2004). https://jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol25no1/ascarelli.html.

Fiorenzo Fantaccini and Raffaella Leproni, eds. “Still Blundering into Sense”: Maria

Edgeworth, Her Context, Her Legacy, (Firenze: Firenze University Press, 2019), 9-11 and 158; “Lot 96,

[Austen, Jane],” English Literature, History and Children’s Books and Illustrations, Sotheby’s, updated

2021, https://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2010/english-literature-history-and-children39s-

books-illustrations-l10408/lot.96.html.

writing for the remainder of his life. Fortunately for Maria, he supported her literary

aspirations, save novel writing, and sometimes acted as her collaborator. She was also

able to use his social connections to meet leading men of letters such as Lord Byron,

William Wordsworth, and Sir Walter Scott, with whom she formed a longstanding

friendship and correspondence. Scott himself considered her work so influential that in

the general preface of his 1814 novel Waverley, he writes of the “extended and well-

merited fame of Miss Edgeworth,” his “accomplished friend,” and the “triumphs” that

she “so fortunately achieved for Ireland” in The Absentee, which he hoped to emulate for

Scotland in that particular book.

At fifteen, Edgeworth began acting as her father’s amanuensis and assistant on his

Irish estate, Edgeworthstown. Also, during this time, the schooling of more than a dozen

of her half-siblings was left to her. From this point forward, education became a major

concern for her and is understandably the subject of her first book, Letters for Literary

Ladies, which Joseph Johnson published in 1795. Included in it is a “debate on the merits

of feminism” in the form of correspondence between her father and Thomas Day. While

Day agrees with Rousseau that women should remain passive creatures and not receive a

formal education, Richard Edgeworth—and certainly Maria, since she agreed to publish

the exchange—“strongly advocat[es] the right of women to self-realization” and “defends

female education and argues that it should be the same as men’s.” She would return to the

topic in several of her subsequent works such The Parent’s Assistant (1796), Practical

Education (1798), Early Lessons (1801), and Essays in Professional Education (1809),

Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 1-7;

Walter Scott, Waverley or ‘Tis Sixty Years Hence, (London: Vintage Books, 2014), 9-10.

all of which had feminist leanings. However, as previously discussed in this chapter, it

was Edgeworth’s novels that Jane Austen admired the most.

Edgeworth “was at the height of her literary reputation” when Sense and

Sensibility was published, and so it is no wonder that her writing caught Austen’s

attention alongside Fanny Burney’s or that Austen would reference Belinda in her first

completed work. However, Edgeworth’s influence upon Austen goes much deeper,

according to Marilyn Butler, a descendant of Maria Edgeworth, in the definitive

biography of her ancestor:

Many of the techniques that Jane Austen later used so successfully—the subtly

revealing dialogue, the intelligent principal characters, the relation between the

intelligence of those characters and the continuously analytical narrative

tone—were all to be found first in Maria Edgeworth.

Butler also notes that Edgeworth’s writing exhibits an “almost pedantic interest in

documentation from real life,” with which she describes “a profusion of detail—facts

about customs [and] dress” that “give an entirely new richness to the portrait of society.”

Though Butler does refer to Edgeworth’s use of the colloquialisms of the Irish Midlands,

which Austen clearly does not employ and neither do Austen’s characters use elements of

British dialect outside those spoken by members of the ton or the landed gentry, Butler’s

description as quoted above could easily be directed at any of the four works Austen

published in her lifetime, as modern Janeites continue to appreciate the realism allowing

them to easily empathize with Austen’s Elinor Dashwood and Charlotte Lucas, despite

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), s.v. “Edgeworth, Maria (1768-1849)”;

Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 126-27. Edgeworth

wrote Practical Education with her father. In the fourth chapter of Northanger Abbey, Austen lists

Edgeworth’s Belinda along with Fanny Burney’s Cecilia and Camilla in her defense of the novel.

Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography, 307.

Ibid., 328.

the passing of two centuries, though her Marianne Dashwood and Elizabeth Bennet must

work towards accepting a point of view contrary to their own.

Butler is by no means the only one to remark on Edgeworth’s influence upon

Austen. In his chapter “Absent Despite Similarities: Maria Edgeworth and the Irish

Stage,” Fabio Luppi, citing H.S. Babb’s 1962 publication Jane Austen’s Novels: The

Fabric of Dialogue, writes that Edgeworth’s “highly dramatic approach to prose writing”

is similar to Austen’s, making them both “masters in reporting dialogue.” He also notes

that Sense and Sensibility was revised from an earlier manuscript which took the form of

a drama. Paula Byrne presents a similar argument—that Austen’s “interest in different

reactions to the same incident, and the depiction of strong emotion beneath the surface of

polite conduct” as seen in Sense and Sensibility is comparable not only to the works of

Edgeworth, but also two playwrights who became novelists, Henry Fielding and

Elizabeth Inchbald. While she points out the obvious, that “Austen knew Inchbald’s

adaptation of Lovers’ Vows, which she used in Mansfield Park,” Byrne further contends

that through Mansfield Park:

Austen explores female consciousness in four young women, and focuses upon

the comparisons and contrasts of female conduct in the courtship process. The

prototype for this type of narrative was her admired Sir Charles Grandison.

Richardson’s novel was among the first of its kind to describe female

consciousness in detail, and its depiction of Harriet Byron’s entrance into the

world was a theme taken up most successfully by female authors such as Fanny

Burney in Evelina (1771) and Maria Edgeworth in Belinda (1801).

Ibid., 394-95.

Fantaccini and Leproni, eds. “Still Blundering into Sense,” 162-63; Paula Byrne, The Genius of

Jane Austen: Her Love of the Theatre and Why She Works in Hollywood, (London: William Collins, 2017),

115-18; Austen’s interest in theatre and its influence upon her works is examined in-depth in Paula Byrne’s

Jane Austen and the Theatre, published in 2002, which was revised as The Genius of Jane Austen.

Ibid., 171.

Byrne’s comparison of Austen and Edgeworth is not confined to the works Austen wrote

or published in adulthood, however. She also notes that even in the early epistolary novel

Lady Susan, Austen:

recast inherited stage conventions by having the Londoners entering the country

and causing trouble, rather than the ingenues entering London society, as was

conventional both in stage comedy and the novels of Fanny Burney and Maria

Edgeworth. Lady Susan was an important transitional work. Unlike Love and

Freindship [sic], which merely parodied the novel-of-letters, this work is a serious

trial of the epistolary form.

Thus, as Byrne proves, Maria Edgeworth had as much direct influence upon Jane

Austen’s development as an author as did Fanny Burney, and perhaps even more so.

Without these contemporary women’s works to use as patterns, Austen’s distinctly

realistic portrayals of emotions and relationships through the female perspective might

not continue to strike her modern readers as authentic. The use of a playwright’s

techniques, especially those learned from reading Burney, Edgeworth, and Elizabeth

Inchbald, in large part allow Austen’s characters to leap so effortlessly from her

manuscripts not only onto the pages of derivative literary works, but also onto the screens

of film, television, and even live stage play adaptations as well.

Austen’s American Counterparts

Though she read and admired the work of other Englishwomen of letters such as

Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Lennox, and Jane West, the pens of Fanny Burney and Maria

Edgeworth appear to have wielded the most direct influence upon Jane Austen’s

undeniably successful writing style. And though Austen’s known contemporary reading

interests were limited to those of other English authors, that is not to say that the women

Ibid., 109.

in England were the only protofeminist figures using English to express themselves. On

the contrary, women in colonial America were not only writing privately, but a few were

even successfully printing and distributing their works in the public sphere.

Kristen R. Wilcox points out that in recent decades, the prevailing “myths that (1)

early American women wrote little and (2) ‘early America’ was the same thing as the

present-day northeastern United States” have been disproven by “scholars of women’s

literature [who] have identified important women’s writing spanning the full range of

New World experience, levels of literacy, social position, wealth, and national

orientation.” Though titanic figures like Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, and Sarah

Kemble Knight in colonial American women’s literature remain important, the focus of

most of the previous scholarship in the field was limited to the public genres this trio

chose to work in—poetry, captivity narrative, and diary—a practice that marginalized

early American women whose writing does not fall easily within these categories or who

were writing in other modes in much the same way that Austen and all the preceding

women writers discussed here were. Thankfully, since academics studying literary history

have begun to use a micro or bottom-up approach as opposed to the traditional macro or

top-down method as their lens, scholarship in the field “is no longer limited to the literary

verse and narratives penned by Anglophone women destined to die (even if they were

born elsewhere) within the borders of the territory that would become the United States.”

Ann Radcliffe famously wrote The Mysteries of Udolpho among other works in the gothic genre

which Austen parodies in Northanger Abbey. Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote is parodied in

“Henry and Eliza,” a story in Volume the First of Austen’s juvenilia. Sense and Sensibility contains many

allusions to Jane West’s A Gossip’s Story. A source of most of the similarities between both books is the

pairs of sisters who act as protagonists in each novel, the most obvious commonality of which is that the

romantically inclined sister in each one bears the name Marianne. See William Baker’s Critical Companion

to Jane Austen: A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work.

However, despite this move toward inclusivity, for Wilcox, the work of rediscovering

female voices that have been silenced is not done:

particularly when so many texts remain unexplored that can yield productively to

the tools of literary analysis. Conventional literary and historical scholarship

continues to find new ways to illuminate the discursive and intellectual contexts

in which women wrote.

Though Wilcox is right to be hopeful of the progress that continues to be made,

unfortunately, many more rediscovered texts still await in-depth examination.

One long-neglected text from the private sphere that finally received recognition

is Martha Ballard’s diary which she kept from 1785 until her death in 1812. It was

donated to the Maine State library in 1930 but never studied critically until Laurel

Thatcher Ulrich began to research Ballard and her work in 1982. By choosing to spend

the next eight years contextualizing and analyzing Ballard’s diary, Ulrich placed herself

in direct opposition to those who had deemed trivial the long running diary recording the

experiences of an early American midwife and healer living in New England with no

connection to famous historical figures. In publishing her work on Ballard, Ulrich proved

that “the petty struggles and small graces of ordinary life” in the diary—which even A

History of Childbirth in America, a feminist publication on midwifery from the 1970s,

dismissed—validate women’s stories in general and midwives’ stories in particular

within the context of preindustrial New England’s society.

Kirstin R. Wilcox, “American Women's Writing in the Colonial Period,” in The Cambridge

History of American Women's Literature, ed. Dale M. Bauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2012), 55.

Ibid., 66.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary,

1785-1812. (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 343 and 9.

Ballard’s diary is unique within the study of Anglophone women’s writing in that

it is one of the earliest examples depicting the authentic experiences of an American

woman for a prolonged period of nearly thirty years. In it, Ballard is presumably

recording her daily life without pretext; thus, when the accuracy of her entries is

accompanied by Ulrich’s extensive and meticulous research, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life

of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 illustrates that the cultural shift from

colonists to citizens of the Early Republic did not hinder women’s freedom of movement

in the public sphere regardless of the restrictions they faced in the private sphere. She

also demonstrates women’s impact upon the local economy through their promotion of

the cottage industry as well as how midwives, in particular, functioned as integral parts of

the service and medical industries. In preserving these perspectives, the importance of a

record like Ballard’s is clear. Her words are more than the trivium discounted as boring

and unworthy of scholarship by previous historians. As Ulrich writes, “Martha’s diary

fills in the missing work—and trade—of women,” but perhaps it goes even further.

Perhaps it works toward celebrating and acknowledging the historical value of the

forgotten women of postcolonial New England. They may not have been the wives of

presidents or Revolutionary War heroes, but they were courageous, heroic, and influential

all the same.

Petty and Graceful: Rediscovering Extraordinary Letters Written by Ordinary American

Women

In much the same way that Martha Ballard’s diary sat in a library, attracting little

more than dust for half a century, many other women’s works were similarly ignored

Ibid., 29.

until feminist scholars finally began working to recover the pieces of writing that had

been excluded from the literary cannon. Because of this erasure, Jennifer J. Baker finds

that “women of the Revolutionary and early national era had been doubly neglected by a

critical establishment that dismissed many American eighteenth-century writers as poor

imitators of their British counterparts.” Additionally, any works that did not highlight a

uniquely American experience or national identity were discounted. Many of these

neglected works were women’s private letters.

According to Baker, these letters were viewed as problematic because they:

often record the emotionally fraught process through which the colonies severed

ties with England, not to mention the horror with which Loyalists and pacifists

witnessed a civil war. Such writings also often reflect women’s priorities as

household mistresses rather than participants in nation-formation.

As the letters’ sentiments contradicted the prevailing national mythos, their dissenting

viewpoints were more easily ignored than explained. Nevertheless, it is important to

acknowledge the perspectives of “women writers who contemplated their place in civil

society outside the home or the relevance of their home lives for the national polity.”

Such suppression of the female voice is not surprising in light of the other ways it

has been marginalized throughout time. However, in Kacy Tillman’s study of the

influence of letters and letter writing on early American novels, she points out that

women were actually suppressed even before the importance of their letters was

downplayed or totally overlooked by historians and literary critics, since contemporary

Jennifer J. Baker, “Women's Writing of the Revolutionary Era,” in The Cambridge History of

American Women's Literature, ed. Dale M. Bauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 92.

Ibid., 93.

Ibid., 94.

social constraints of limited the scope of women’s epistolary writing, even as their letters

were meant to be a means of private communication. She writes:

Just as women must dress according to their station, so letters should adopt a tone

and style that fits their situation. Just as women must protect their bodies from

seduction, so missives must carefully regulate what they say to a suitor. While

letters offered a certain amount of agency to women, as a kind of paper body that

could travel long distances unaccompanied into the private rooms of men, women

could not control their letters once they circulated. Men and women could

intercept, change, misinterpret, redirect, and generally manipulate the paper body

as they saw fit. The same writer who used the letter for agency could be exploited

by her own missive…

This problem of controlling letters and limiting the damage they might cause after

they were dispatched was, of course, not a distinctly American problem. As such, it is

likely at least part of the reason that Cassandra Austen burned thousands of Jane’s letters

once her sister died, and though one hundred and sixty do remain, they are “scattered

round the globe from Australia to America,” as Austen’s definitive biographer, Deirdre

Le Faye explains. Knowing just how widely Jane’s once private correspondence has been

circulated in the last two centuries, it is surprisingly difficult to fault Cassandra and the

other surviving Austens—such as her brother, Henry Thomas Austen; her nephew, James

Edward Austen Leigh; and her grandnephew and his son, William Austen-Leigh and

Richard Austen-Leigh; who wrote the three earliest biographies of Jane between them—

for being so protective of Jane’s reputation and careful of the image of her that they

presented to the public in the first decades after her death, though their actions have

forever shroud aspects of the real Jane from popular view.

Kacy Tillman, “Paper Bodies: Letters and Letter Writing in the Early American Novel,” Tulsa

Studies in Women’s Literature, 35, no.1 (Spring 2016): 127-28.

Deirdre Le Faye, “Letters,” in Jane Austen in Context, ed. by Janet Todd, (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2005), 33. See “Biographical Notice” in

Though Austen had achieved fame in her lifetime, thereby at least ostensibly

necessitating the deliberate obfuscation of her personal life, such was not the case for

Baker’s doubly neglected women writing letters in America during the same time.

Rather, their work was summarily dismissed without thought, having subjects too

mundane to be of any import. Unless an author happened to have a famous husband as

did the redoubtable Abigail Adams, her extraordinary missives met a similar fate to

Martha Ballard’s diary. Among the fortunate rediscovered epistolary authors are Anne

Hulton, Mary Telfair, and Mercy Otis Warren; however, their works have only become

widely accessible within the last two decades, and the topics their letters discuss are

ironically exclusive, limited as they are to writing about what would be considered for

“genteel, Anglo, Protestant English-speaking women living in New England” to include

in their correspondence, though the missives penned by Harriet Gold Boudinot and Marie

Madeleine Hachard do provide the more diverse perspectives of a Caucasian woman

from a prominent New England family married to a Native American and those of a

Catholic nun originally from France respectively. Yet other women writers remain who

have thus far met an even worse end as their letters still await rescue from obscurity.

As for the rediscovered collections that are being studied, Theresa Strouth Gaul

takes issue with scholars grouping these “letters with other forms of life-writing like

journals and diaries rather than [considering] them as a distinct genre” and does not want

Theresa Strouth Gaul, “Recovering Recovery: Early American Women and Legacy's Future,”

Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 26, no. 2 (2009): 266. See Abigail Adams’s Letters edited

by Edith Gelles; Letters of a Loyalist Lady by Ann Houlton; Mary Telfair to Mary Few: Selected Letters

edited by Betty Wood; Mercy Otis Warren: Selected Letters edited by Jeffrey H. Richards and Sharon M.

Harris; To Marry an Indian: The Marriage of Harriett Gold and Elias Boudinot in Letters, 1823-1839

edited by Theresa Strouth Gaul; and Voices from an Early American Convent: Marie Madeleine Hachard

and the New Orleans Ursulines, 1727-1760 edited by Emily Clark.

“novels and other fictional forms” to be used “as the basis for analysis of epistolarity.”

Still, Tilman is right when she compares these letters with early American fiction because

so many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels—be they American or British—are

either presented in epistolary form or are dependent upon the letter as a pivotal plot

device. For instance, many of Jane Austen’s early drafts took the form of epistolary

novels, and arguably the resolutions of both Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion each

hang on their respective heroine’s receipt of a letter from her love interest.

Regrettably, neither society nor academe can ever fully recover all the women’s

perspectives that time and imprudence have erased. Nevertheless, remarkable progress

toward reclaiming the surviving voices has happened in the past thirty years. Now, not

only are the graceful words of Adams and Austen deemed worthy of study, but so are the

so-called petty words of the women whose names are unfamiliar, as they should be. For,

as Jane wisely wrote to Cassandra, there is a “true art of letter-writing, which…is to

express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth,” and

any woman who can accomplish this is extraordinary indeed.

Early America’s Most Learned Lady

Even a brief study of rediscovered early American women of letters would be

incomplete without the inclusion of genres outside of life-writing, since the female

novelists and pamphlet writers of that period have traditionally been overlooked as well.

One such woman is Judith Sargent Stevens Murray. Though well known in her day, the

name of “America’s first major feminist author” has long been overshadowed by names

Gaul, “Recovering Recovery: Early American Women and Legacy's Future,” 265.

Quoted in Le Faye, “Letters,” 40.

of more renowned proto- and early feminists such as Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, or

Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Murray was not only forgotten by the public, but by scholars as

well. Despite the rediscovery efforts that had begun in the 1970s, by the start of the

1980s, only “a few historians and literary scholars read and were intrigued by her,”

though for those who did take interest, Murray was seen as “someone whose views on

women’s rights were far more advanced and wide-ranging than those held by any of her

more well-known contemporaries.”

According to Sheila L. Skemp, Murray saw herself as “a true ‘Wollstonecraftian’”

concerned with the greater “conversation about gender issues that permeated elite public

discourse in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.” Fittingly, these themes

appear in most of her work, consisting of more than a hundred essays as well as two plays

and a novel along with collections of her poetry and letters published during her lifetime.

An Austen contemporary, her revolutionary essay “On the Equality of Sexes” was

originally published in Massachusetts Magazine, “the longest lived of all eighteenth-

century American magazines,” during March and April of 1790, two years before

Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published. As such, Sharon

M. Harris deems Murray’s work so crucial to the early women’s rights movement that

“no American woman writer until Margaret Fuller equalled [sic] Murray in intellectual

powers, in the breadth of genres in which she wrote, or in public recognition.”

Confoundingly, even as Murray made such significant contributions to women’s

literature and politics, she was disregarded for two hundred years.

Sharon M. Harris, “Judith Sargent Murray (1751–1820),” Legacy 11, no. 2 (1994): 152.

Sheila L. Skemp, First Lady of Letters: Judith Sargent Murray and the Struggle for Female

Independence, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), x; Sharon M. Harris, ed. Selected

Writings of Judith Sargent Murray, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), xv and xxiii; Quoted in

Like Wollstonecraft and many other protofeminists, Murray was incensed at the

prevailing ideas about women’s education, especially as they had been articulated by

Rousseau, and began writing what would become “On the Equality of Sexes” by about

1770. In it, she contradicts the belief that women’s minds are naturally weaker than

men’s, asking “Are we deficient in reason? we can only reason from what we know, and

if an opportunity of acquiring knowledge hath been denied us, the inferiority of our sex

cannot fairly be deduced from thence.” Thus, Murray explains that it is a lack of access to

education rather than a lack of ability to reason that limits women’s wisdom and areas of

interest. Through “contrary modes of education… the one is taught to aspire, and the

other is early confined and limitted [sic].”

For Murray, the consequences of this difference in education are painfully

evident, understanding, as she did, that once a young girl has:

arrived at womanhood, the uncultivated fair one feels a void, which the

employments allotted her are by no means capable of filling. What can she do? To

books she may not apply; or if she doth, to those only of the novel kind, lest she

merit the appellation of a learned lady; and what ideas have been affixed to this

term, the observation of many can testify. Fashion, scandal, and sometimes what

is still more reprehensible, are then called in to her relief; and who can say to

what lengths the liberties she takes may proceed. Meantime she herself is most

unhappy; she feels the want of a cultivated mind.

Harris from Bruce Granger, “The Massachusetts Magazine,” in Edward K. Chielens, ed., American

Literary Magazines: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (New York: Greenwood Press,

1986), 249-50.

In Emile, first published in English in 1763, Rousseau argues that because women are the

weaker sex, men and women “ought not to have the same education” and that “nature wants [women] to

think, to judge, to love, to know, to cultivate their minds as well as their looks. These are the weapons

nature gives them to take the place of the strength they lack and to direct [men’s]. They ought to learn

many things but only those that are suitable for them to know.” Further, he writes “the whole education of

women ought to relate to men. To please men, to be useful to them, to make herself loved and honored by

them, to raise them when young, to care for them when grown, to counsel them, to console them, to make

their lives agreeable and sweet—these are the duties of women at all times, and they ought to be taught

from childhood.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom, (New York: Basic

Books, 1979), 363-65. Harris, Selected Writings of Judith Sargent Murray, 5-6.

Ibid., 6. Italics are the author’s.

Wollstonecraft agrees. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, though she does admit

that women seem to possess a weakness of mind that makes them “entirely

dependent…on man, not only for protection, but advice,” she traces the cause of that

weakness not to nature, but to a system of education that relies upon:

neglecting the duties that reason alone points out, and shrinking from trials

calculated to strengthen [women’s] minds, [so that] they only exert themselves to

give their defects a graceful covering, [and] which may serve to heighten their

charms… Fragile in every sense of the word, they are obliged to look up to man

for every comfort.

She believed that if, on the other hand, girls were ever afforded the same educational

opportunities as boys:

we should quickly see women with more dignified aspects. It is true, they could

not then with equal propriety be termed the sweet flowers that smile in the walk

of man; but they would be more respectable members of society, and discharge

the important duties of life by the light of their own reason.

Both Murray and Wollstonecraft used their pens in the fight to “‘Educate women like

men,’” not, as Rousseau feared, to give women “power over men; but over themselves,”

yet only Wollstonecraft is widely celebrated for doing so.

Jane Austen, like Murray and Wollstonecraft, saw the value in educating women.

Though she did not publish a political treatise on it, descriptions of and comments made

by her fictional characters make Austen’s opinion clear. In the first chapter of Mansfield

Park, the cold, self-centered Mrs. Norris is in conversation with her brother-in-law, Sir

Thomas Bertram, regarding which of them will provide for their niece Fanny Price, when

she remarks “Give a girl an education and introduce her properly into the world, and ten

Todd and Butler, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, 131.

Ibid., 131.

Ibid., 131. Italics are mine.

to one she has the means of settling well, without further expense to anybody.” Though

Mrs. Norris is selfishly trying to convince Sir Thomas that taking charge of Fanny will be

of no trouble when she tells him this, the underlying motive does not detract from the

truth of her words. As the successful careers of Behn, Burney, Edgeworth and

Wollstonecraft all prove, an educated woman with social connections really could

provide for herself were she inclined to do so.

In the second chapter of the same work, Austen’s narrator paints an unflattering

picture of Fanny Price’s other aunt:

To the education of her daughters Lady Bertram paid not the smallest attention.

She had not time for such cares. She was a woman who spent her days in sitting,

nicely dressed, on a sofa, doing some long piece of needlework, of little use and

no beauty, thinking more of her pug than her children, but very indulgent to the

latter when it did not put herself to inconvenience, guided in everything important

by Sir Thomas, and in smaller concerns by her sister… As for Fanny’s being

stupid at learning, ‘[Lady Bertram] could only say it was very unlucky, but some

people were stupid, and Fanny must take more pains: she did not know what else

was to be done; and, except her being so dull, she must add she saw no harm in

the poor little thing, and always found her very handy and quick in carrying

messages, and fetching what she wanted.’

Austen’s Lady Bertram could easily stand in for Rousseau’s Sophie, his ideal woman,

who is weak, passive, will “put up little resistance,” and concerns herself with nothing

more than how she might “specially please [a] man.” Though such a woman pleased

Rousseau and his ilk, Austen’s disdain for her is obvious; no such character of Austen’s

is treated positively, even the unlikely heroine, Catherine Moorland.

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, Claudia Johnson, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company,

1998), 7.

Ibid., 16-17. Italics are the author’s.

Rousseau, Emile, 358.

In the fourteenth chapter of Northanger Abbey, while Catherine is conversing

with her new friends, the Tilney siblings, as they walk to Beechen Cliff, she begins to

feel “heartily ashamed of her ignorance.” However, the irony-laced voice of Austen’s

narrator informs readers that hers is:

A misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant.

To come with a well-informed mind is to come with an inability of administering

to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A

woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should

conceal it as well as she can.

The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by

the capital pen of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only

add, in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex,

imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a

portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire

anything more in woman than ignorance.

On the surface, Austen is pointing out that men prefer their wives to either be beautiful

imbeciles or beautifully ignorant, and as such, Catherine’s ignorance is an advantage

rather than a shortcoming. Yet the mocking tone beneath reveals what Austen is actually

saying—Catherine will remain at a disadvantage unless she begins leaning about more

than the superficial beauty and folly that is romanticized in gothic novels; she will be

shamefully ignorant since she only reads for pleasure and dislikes anything that might

“vex or weary” or “torment” her by requiring too much thinking on her part. Henry

Tilney, however, knows the value of reading for the acquisition of knowledge and teases

her about semantics in hopes of illustrating that value to her:

“That little boys and girls should be tormented,” said Henry, “is what no one at all

acquainted with human nature in a civilized state can deny; but in behalf of our

most distinguished historians, I must observe that they might well be offended at

being supposed to have no higher aim, and that by their method and style, they are

Austen, Northanger Abbey, 76. According to Susan Fraiman, the “sister author” is Fanny

Burney, and the vapid but “beautiful girl” is the character Indiana in Camilla.

perfectly well qualified to torment readers of the most advanced reason and

mature time of life. I use the verb ‘to torment,’ as I observed to be your own

method, instead of ‘to instruct,’ supposing them to be now admitted as

synonymous.”

It is only once Catherine has gained more life experience and learned that reality is

nothing like Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, that she finally gains the sort of

“understanding” that Henry cannot “think more highly of” in women. Only after

Catherine admits the mistakes her shallow point of view has led her to make about the

Tilneys does Austen see fit to reward her with a heroine’s happy ending.

Emma Woodhouse argues a point like that of Northanger Abbey’s narrator,

knowing that most men were not agreeable to equal education. In the eighth chapter of

Emma, Austen’s titular character is discussing Harriet Smith, her protégé, with George

Knightley, who says that Harriet is:

not a sensible girl, nor a girl of any information. She has been taught nothing

useful, and is too young and too simple to have acquired any thing herself. At her

age she can have no experience, and with her little wit, is not very likely ever to

have any that can avail her. She is pretty, and she is good tempered, and that is

all.

Echoing Murray and Wollstonecraft, Emma is quick to point out that men actually

encourage women to privilege beauty over knowledge, so the traits he is discounting are

actually beneficial to Harriet:

…supposing her to be, as you describe her, only pretty and good-natured, let me

tell you, that in the degree she possesses them, they are not trivial

recommendations to the world in general, for she is, in fact, a beautiful girl, and

must be thought so by ninety-nine people out of an hundred; and till it appears

that men are much more philosophic on the subject of beauty than they are

Ibid., 74-75. I choose not to view Henry Tilney’s tone as flippant or condescending as others

have admittedly done. Rather, I interpret it as a playful, clever attempt at aiding Catherine in coming to the

same realization on her own, as Jane Austen might do with her own readers.

Ibid., 79.

Jane Austen, Emma, George Justice, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012), 45.

generally supposed; till they do fall in love with well-informed minds instead of

handsome faces, a girl, with such loveliness as Harriet, has a certainty of being

admired and sought after, of having the power of chusing from among many,

consequently a claim to be nice. Her good-nature, too, is not so very slight a

claim, comprehending, as it does, real, thorough sweetness of temper and manner,

a very humble opinion of herself, and a great readiness to be pleased with other

people. I am very much mistaken if your sex in general would not think such

beauty, and such temper, the highest claims a woman could possess.

Though Knightley is surprised at Emma’s reply and tells her he does not believe it is true,

Austen would certainly agree with her, as evidenced even more plainly in a comparable

discussion from Persuasion.

In the twenty-third chapter of Austen’s final novel, when Anne Elliot and her

acquaintance, Captain Harville, are discussing differences between men’s and women’s

behaviors, she declares:

We certainly do not forget you as soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate

rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined,

and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You have always a

profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back into the

world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken

impressions.

Captain Harville questions her reasoning for thinking that women love longer than men

and alludes to Rousseau when he says, “I believe in a true analogy between our bodily

frames and our mental; and that as [men’s] bodies are the strongest, so are our feelings;

capable of bearing most rough usage, and riding out the heaviest weather.” This is an

Anne disagrees with his analogy, believing instead that women’s feelings are “the most

tender,” and the longest lasting, even if men’s feelings are “more robust” than theirs.

Ibid., 46.

Jane Austen, Persuasion, Patricia Meyer Spacks, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company,

2013), 164.

Ibid., 165-66.

100

As their discussion progresses, Captain Harville claims “that all histories are

against [Anne’s argument]—all stories, prose and verse…I do not think I ever opened a

book in my life which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy. Songs and

proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness.” Anne then responds by reminding him exactly

why all the books he has read tell the same story, insisting, much like Murray and

Wollstonecraft might, that “Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own

story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their

hands,” which is why the books he mentioned do not “prove anything” to her.

Unfortunately, and yet fittingly enough, their spirited discussion does not end with Anne

feeling that she has convinced Captain Harville of anything. Instead, like her creator and

so many other outspoken women before her, she has been rendered speechless, left

feeling that “her heart was too full, her breath too much oppressed.”

Though Early American women such as Martha Ballard and Mary Rowland could

in no way discern the fate or import of their life-writings, they unknowingly laid the

foundation for all the other women writers who would follow and expand into other

genres like Judith Sargent Stevens Murray and Susanna Rowson, America’s first best-

selling novelist. The pens of these pioneers are even responsible for the revolution which

made possible the production of Clueless, Amy Heckerling’s successful full-length

cinematic adaptation of Emma that she wrote and directed, and through which she

successfully presented Jane Austen to mass audiences in a different medium altogether.

Ibid., 166.

First published in England 1791, Susanna Rowson’s novel Charlotte Temple, A Tale of Truth

was originally published in America by Mathew Carey in 1794. This and Carey’s subsequent American

editions are said to have sold 50,000 copies within less than twenty years. Charlotte Temple remained the

best-selling novel in the United States until the release of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s serialized novel Uncle

Tom’s Cabin beginning in 1851. See Marion Rust, Prodigal Daughters: Susanna Rowson’s Early American

101

Conclusion

As this attempt at reconstructing part of the genealogical heritage from which

Jane Austen came has proven, she is but one in a long line of foremothers who eschewed

restrictive social conventions that actively silenced and marginalized them for thousands

of years. The earliest known Anglophone women writers, such as Hugeberc and Julian of

Norwich left their marks on literary history by fulfilling a religious calling even as they

reverently withheld their names. Their descendant Margery Kempe still wrote out of

religious conviction but was forthright with her identity. In the following centuries,

women began to write and publish secular texts as well. Some wrote as a means of

recordkeeping, others for creative self-expression, and still others espoused philosophical

or political change.

All early women of letters who took up their pens publicly were risking societal

backlash, thus most who did so maintained their anonymity. Some hid behind the

silhouette of “A Lady,” as did Austen. Others cloaked themselves in metaphorical

pseudonyms or masculine versions of their own names like the Brontës are known to

have done. And yet a few, such as Aphra Behn and Mary Wollstonecraft, already radical

in becoming writers as a means to support themselves aside from marrying, boldly

affixed their names to their work for the whole world to read. But even the most

successful among them could not write for fame alone, knowing that their words would

not be valued in the same way as men’s. With men writing the history books and

Women, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). Clueless, coupled with Andrew Davies’s

eponymous BBC miniseries adaptation of Pride and Prejudice which was also released that year, is

credited with creating “Austenmania,” the cultural phenomenon surrounding the rapid manufacture of

cinema productions, books, and other merchandise based on Jane Austen’s novels which began after these

films were released and continues into the present.

102

choosing the works worthy of inclusion in the literary cannon, even those women who

managed to make names for themselves in their own eras were not promised an escape

from being overwritten after falling out of fashion. In truth, that is precisely what

happened to many of them. Their stories have been marginalized to the point of erasure,

but they deserve a much better fate. Every acolyte of Jane Austen owes these and our

other as-yet-unrecovered matriarchs a great debt, and we should do more than lay flowery

words down in their memories. We should work to promote their rediscovery and renown

because these women writers are not only part of Austen’s literary heritage, but our own.

103

CHAPTER THREE: PAPER WILL HARDLY HOLD IT ALL

“I am extremely foolish in writing all this unnecessary stuff, when I have so many

matters to write about that my paper will hardly hold it all.”

— Jane Austen in a letter to her sister Cassandra, dated 9 December 1808

According to J.K. Rowling, “Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other

authors aspire,” a distinction which is particularly remarkable considering that Austen

only published six complete works, four within her lifetime, and was publicly unnamed

until after her death. How and why could the spinster daughter of an unassuming

Anglican rector possibly capture the imagination of the world posthumously, become a

cultural icon, and continue to captivate audiences for more than two hundred years? How

could half a dozen books published anonymously in the early nineteenth century inspire

an entire industry of adaptations at the end of the twentieth century?

In his 1957 introduction to Emma, Lionel Trilling explores these questions when

he discusses the “kind of people who like Jane Austen,” (such as the American author

Henry James) as well as why they might admire her. Trilling points out that fifty-two

years earlier, James attributed the public interest in Austen to:

J. K. Rowling, “From Mr. Darcy to Harry Potter by Way of Lolita,” Sunday Herald, May 21,

2000. http://www.accio-quote.org/articles/2000/0500-heraldsun-rowling.html. This J.K. Rowling quote has

been published on numerous websites, most often without direct attribution. However, my research has led

me repeatedly to what appears to have been a transcript of a BBC 4 radio broadcast, and though the cited

link is now broken, I have included it above. Additionally, this quote is used in the official “Publisher’s

Description” of Northanger Abbey on Apple Books as seen here:

https://books.apple.com/au/book/northanger-abbey/id437002585.

Lionel Trilling, “Emma.” Encounter 8, no. 6 (June 1957): 49. This article was originally

published as the chapter “Introduction,” in The Riverside Edition of Emma by Jane Austen (Cambridge:

104

the body of publishers, editors, illustrators, producers of the pleasant twaddle

magazines; who have found their ‘dear,’ our dear, everybody’s dear Jane so

infinitely to their material purpose, so amenable to pretty reproduction in every

variety of what is called tasteful, and in what proves to be saleable form.

Trilling contends that in addition to the press’ fixation on Austen and her profitability,

another reason for her popularity can “be found in [Austen’s] work itself, in some

unusual promise that it seems to make, in some hope that it holds out.”

Deidre Lynch agrees with Trilling in the opening chapter of Janeites: Austen’s

Disciples and Devotees, writing that there is indeed “something ‘interesting and

important’ in the record of adaptations, reviews, rewritings, and appreciations of Austen

that have accumulated” in the 189 years since Austen first published Sense and

Sensibility in 1811 and when Lynch’s edited book was released in 2000. Nearly twenty

years later, Christopher Nagle ponders the nature of Austen’s prolific presence in on-

stage productions adapted from her books, concluding that modern audiences “desire to

have closer, more immediate, emotionally charged engagement with her life and work.”

As an unabashed Austen admirer, I dare not dispute Trilling, Lynch, Nagle, or

even James, condescending as he might be. It is true that the kind of people who like

Austen do find something of interest and import in her work, and that something is a

close connection to the humanity of the characters she creates. Transcending time and

The Riverside Press, 1957). It was then revised and published as the chapter “Emma and the Legend of

Jane Austen,” in Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning by Lionel Trilling (New York: The

Viking Press, 1965).

Henry James, The Question of Our Speech: The Lesson of Balzac, Two Lectures (Boston:

Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1905), 62.

Trilling, “Emma,” 50.

Deidre Lynch, “Introduction: Sharing with Our Neighbors,” in Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and

Devotees, ed. Deidre Lynch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 5; Christopher Nagle, “Austen’s

Present Future Staging,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 61, no. 4 (Winter 2019): 474, Project

MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/741210.

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space, Austen somehow imbues her characters with emotions that continue to resonate

within readers two centuries after she put pen to paper, which allows her works to attract

audiences with the promise of an intimately shared experience that is most often

delivered, regardless of the form in which it is presented. That is Jane’s genius, creating

characters whose thoughts and actions remain relevant even now because though the

society she critiques has changed over time, humanity, at its core, remains essentially

unchanged.

The Janeites: Austen’s Most Ardent Admirers

If the unquestionably successful British author J.K. Rowling is to be believed, and

Jane Austen’s writing is indeed worthy of all other authors’ emulation, it is no wonder

that her six original novels have rarely been out of print since they were initially released,

and they have been adapted, continued, and rewritten countless times since they were

first published in the early nineteenth century. Though Austen wrote anonymously, her

works were much beloved by the English public upon release, and most of the first

printings sold out quickly. Rowling, famous for her own beloved literary creation—Harry

Potter and his Wizarding World—is by no means alone in her appreciation of Jane’s

genius. In the two hundred years since Austen’s siblings first revealed her name

posthumously to her readers, a cultish group of devoted followers has developed and

spread its Austenian obsession throughout the world.

Referred to as “Janeites,” initially, Austen’s most ardent admirers considered

themselves members of a sort of exclusive club consisting largely of scholars, academics,

and other members of the literary elite, such as Henry James and Rudyard Kipling. Yet

men of letters have never comprised the whole company of her devotees. Naturally,

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women have also been drawn to the sharpness of Austen’s satire and her astute critique of

British society, and unlike the fellows in their company, women can picture themselves

as her relatable heroines, perhaps finding familiarity with one of the Dashwood sisters, or

wishing they were as confident and fearless as Elizabeth Bennet instead of forced by

necessity to behave as practically as Charlotte Lucas does. Certainly, so-called “ordinary”

women have always enjoyed Austen’s works, but so have women of letters, such as Mary

Ann Evans, who served as editor of the Westminster Review. Evans, who would later

become much appreciated in the literary world herself when she wrote fiction under the

pseudonym George Eliot, bid longtime Janeite George Henry Lewes to compose “The

Lady Novelists” in 1852, an essay in which he calls Austen “the greatest artist that has

ever written, using the term to signify the most perfect mastery over the means to her

end.” Though it is indeed possible that Eliot was critical of Austen’s novels in an

anonymous article called “The Progress of Fiction as an Art,” which was published a year

later in the Westminster Review, New Yorker columnist Rebecca Mead effectively argues

that it is more likely that Austen’s influence upon Evans was such that “without Austen,

no Eliot” would exist, and she asserts that Eliot would only have commissioned Lewes’s

essay if she also appreciated Austen’s writing as he did.

If Eliot were indeed an early female Janeite as Mead asserts, she was not the last.

Nearly three-quarters of a century later, the brilliant British modernist Virginia Woolf left

no question of her affection for Austen, thereby cementing her status as a Janeite as well.

Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Janeite,” updated March 2020, accessed on April 28, 2020.

https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/100725?redirectedFrom=Janite&. George Henry Lewes. “Lady

Novelists,” Westminster Review (1852), in A Victorian Art of Fiction: Essays on the Novel in British

Periodicals 1851-1869, ed. John Charles Olmstead (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1979), 44.

Rebecca Mead. “Without Austen, No Eliot,” The New Yorker, January 28, 2013,

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/without-austen-no-eliot.

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In January of 1924, Woolf published a review of R.W. Chapman’s Novels of Jane Austen,

in Five Volumes in The New Republic in which she praises “the peculiar finish and

perfection of” Austen’s “art” and bemoans the fact that Austen died at 41 and did not live

to write six additional books because “It is impossible to say too much about the novels

that Jane Austen did write.” However, a single book review in a progressive journal must

not have adequately expressed the amount of indebtedness that Woolf believed she and

all other women writers should feel towards Austen. Five years later, she published her

influential 1929 book-length essay “A Room of One’s Own,” which lists Austen as one

of the literary foremothers who were able to achieve greatness despite the numerous

political and societal obstacles they faced. According to the fourth section of “A Room of

One’s Own,” Woolf’s narrator believes “Jane Austen . . . devised a perfectly natural,

shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it. Thus, with less

genius for writing than Charlotte Brontë, she got infinitely more said.” In the following

section, Woolf’s narrator even compares Austen’s work to that of an undisputed musical

genius, asserting that in her prose, “Jane Austen breaks from melody to melody as Mozart

breaks from song to song.”

Today, there are readers across the world with varying levels of education who

unabashedly admit to harboring a “self-consciously idolatrous enthusiasm for ‘Jane’ and

every detail relative to her” and count themselves Janeites. A rough estimate of the North

Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own” Feedbooks, Project Gutenberg: 64 and 68.

http://seas3.elte.hu/coursematerial/PikliNatalia/Virginia_Woolf_-_A_Room_of_Ones_Own.pdf. Ibid.,

“Virginia Woolf on Jane Austen: A review of the publication of R.W. Chapman’s edition of the Novels of

Jane Austen, in Five Volumes,” The New Republic, January 30, 1924,

https://newrepublic.com/article/115922/virginia-woolf-jane-austen. See also Virginia Woolf “A Jane of

One’s Own,” The Times Literary Supplement, May 8, 1913, https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/jane-austen-

woolf-archives/.

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American Janeites alone can be found on the header of the Jane Austen Society of North

America’s website: “6 novels. 200 years. Millions of fans.” Of course, a large number of

these Janeites are women writers themselves, and they, like so many of their sisters

before them have written scores of their own adaptations of those six books (as well as at

least three of Austen’s unfinished works), publishing derivative short stories, novels,

plays, screenplays and scripts and nearly every other form of written expression available

to them.

Early Adaptation & Austen’s Leap across the Pond

Aside from a brief period of about twenty years not long after her death, Austen’s

novels have remained popular and in print, first exclusively in England but by the 1840s

becoming available in America and eventually worldwide. Yet, as any Janeite can attest,

reading those six novels only results in agreement with Woolf— it is a pity that there are

not six more to enjoy. Readers are left wondering what happens after Austen’s

protagonists leave the church and ride away into their happily-ever-afters. Whatever

became of Margaret Dashwood? Did Lydia Bennet Wickham ever learn her lesson? Was

Kitty able to avoid her sister’s fate? Was Mr. Knightley really able to tolerate Emma for

the rest of his life? Such questions begged to be answered, and yet Austen’s pen had

stilled, leaving her public to its own imaginations. In response, rather quickly loyal

Claudia L. Johnson, “Austen Cults and Cultures,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen,

Cambridge, edited by Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1997), 232. Nicola Trott, “Critical Responses, 1830-1970” In Austen in Context. Edited by Janet Todd et al.

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 94. According to Austen in Context, this term was coined

by George Saintsbury in his 1894 introduction to Pride and Prejudice as evidenced by the term’s entry in

the OED (see reference above). The aforementioned entry in the OED also lists “Janite” (Saintsbury’s

original spelling), and “Austenite” as less commonly used synonyms. This term originally had an elitist

context as it was used to differentiate Austen’s well-educated admirers from those within her general

readership. However, its present connotation is positive and more inclusive. “Home,” Jane Austen Society

of North America, accessed on November 15, 2020, www.jasna.org.

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readers began to answer those questions themselves. Initially, members of the Austen

family, such as Jane’s nephew, Edward Austen-Leigh edited her previously unpublished

work and wrote endings for the fragments of Lady Susan and Sanditon during the late

nineteenth century in an attempt to satisfy readers’ curiosity while dutifully guarding

their Dear Aunt Jane and her beloved books from any who might interfere with them;

however, Austen’s readers were just as attached to her stories as her family was. For as

Deidre Lynch explains, “Jane Austen fosters in her readers, as most other literary giants

do not, the devotion and fantasies of personal access that are the hallmarks of the fan.”

Recently, Sarah Glosson quibbled with such high praise, arguing that “Lynch is

only half-correct: Austen indeed inspired devotion and fantasies of personal access, but

so too have many other literary figures.” While it is true that other figures, such as

Shakespeare and Chaucer, had developed devoted followings by 1839, Glosson fails to

account for depth of devotion, which is Lynch’s point. The fervor surrounding nearly all

other renowned authors in the literary cannon, even Chaucer, has decreased over time,

leaving mostly academic admirers to appreciate their genius after the passing of a century

or two, except for Shakespeare and Austen, that is, both of whom remain icons of current

popular culture.

As Austen’s juvenilia illustrates, imitation is one measure of the fervency of an

admirer’s devotion to a particular author or artist, an example being Austen’s devotion to

Samuel Richardson as evidenced in her adaptation of his works. Naturally then, due to

Deidre Shauna Lynch, “Cult of Jane Austen,” in Jane Austen in Context, ed. Janet Todd

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 111; Italics are the author’s.

Sarah Glosson, Performing Jane: A Cultural History of Jane Austen Fandom, (Baton Rouge:

Louisiana State University Press, 2020), 41.

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the large number of Janeites scattered throughout the world, the Austenian pastiche they

create is varied and vast, so much so that the resulting works and the public’s

consumption of them has become a phenomenon commonly called Austenmania. These

creations are presented in multiple modes and forms—including card, board, and video

games; action figures, dolls, and other toys; clothing, jewelry, and accessories; prints,

sculptures, and other works of art; as well as any number of other collectible objects, as

well as literary, screen and stage adaptations of the novels.

Austenmania is said to have originated in 1995 when the full-length feature film

Clueless and the television miniseries Pride and Prejudice premiered in the United

States, which are adaptations of Austen’s novels Emma and Pride and Prejudice

respectively. Both works allowed Austen to capture the attention of American audiences

in a way she had never done before. However, these films were hardly the first

adaptations of Austen to be released publicly. In the third chapter of Performing Jane,

Glosson identifies some of the initial ones, writing that, “The Beaux, a Sketch” by Eliza

Leslie, “is the earliest example of Austen-related archontic fiction yet discovered,”

“The Beaux, A Sketch” is a serialized story that Leslie, an American author who

was known for her conduct books, cookbooks, and fiction, initially published in Godey’s

Lady’s Book between January and May of 1842. It is the story of Sabina Westmore, an

eighteen-year-old who visits her cousins, the Dennings, in Philadelphia. Throughout the

Ibid., 55-56. Here, Glosson uses Abigail [Derecho] De Kosnik’s interpretation of Derrida’s

term. Glosson notes that this is a more positive term than “derivative or appropriative, which imply that a

work will necessarily be lesser or somehow stolen from the original…because it connotes the

intertextuality at the core of fanfiction.” See Abigail Derecho, “Archontic Literature: A Definition, a

History, and Several Theories of Fan Fiction,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the

Internet: New Essays, ed. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse. Jefferson, (North Carolina: McFarland &

Company, Inc., 2006) 61-78.

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story, the three Denning sisters attempt to find beaux for Sabina; however, unbeknownst

to them, she is engaged to Gustavus Mordaunt, a family friend whom she has known for a

long while, and she elopes with him in the story’s conclusion. Glosson sees “The Beaux”

as a story “built upon allusions to characters and conceits lifted from Austen’s corpus,”

but acknowledges that “Leslie revised aspects that frustrated or troubled her.” Some of

these allusions are evident in Leslie’s protagonist:

the story’s heroine, Sabina, is an amalgam of wholesome traits found amid

Austen’s characters: she is sweet and kind like Jane Bennet, timid like Fanny

Price, and possessed of superior taste and accomplishments like Jane Fairfax

(characters from Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma respectively).

Glosson also finds Mrs. Denning, “the mother of the silly sisters,” to be “a

busybody like Mrs. Jennings” and “prone to ailments like Mrs. Bennet.” Additionally,

she believes “Mr. Jackaway Jempson, a pompous, mincing, stupid fellow [is] reminiscent

of Mr. Collins.” However, Leslie’s most overt allusion to Austen is the direct reference

she makes to Pride and Prejudice near the end of the first segment of text, when Sabina

takes the “excellent” work to her room so that she can enjoy a “second reading” of it.

Along with these allusions, there are also notable similarities between Leslie’s dialogue

and Austen’s.

Drawing on Abigail Derecho’s work, Glosson cites the impetus behind adaptive

works of fiction like “The Beaux,” arguing that:

Writers create archontic literature when they are both fascinated and frustrated by

their favorite texts and narratives; subordinate groups—especially women—have

Ibid., 56-57.

Ibid., 57. Miss [Eliza] Leslie, “The Beaux, a Sketch,” Godey’s Lady’s Book 24 (January-June

1842): 23.

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015005001493&view=1up&seq=289&skin=2021&q1=Beaux.

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used archontic literature to work against dominant culture as a means to record,

express, and publicize their opinions for over four hundred years.

For Glosson, then, Janeites are not only updating and extending Austen’s narratives, but

revising to improve them as well, through the removal of any aspects they find frustrating

in the original novels. She points out such a frustration that “may have troubled Leslie

and which she sought to rectify” that relates to propriety:

Austen’s characters do not exhibit a singular unwavering set of traits, habits, or

morals, but like real people, are fraught with contradictions and complexities.

Jane Fairfax is in all ways well-mannered, accomplished, and mature—certainly

compared to Emma [Woodhouse] and her meddling—yet she secretly engages

herself with a man who, while charming, misuses people and behaves badly on

several occasions…In ‘The Beaux,’ Leslie revised this scenario by giving Sabina

a more suitable fiancé than Austen gave to Miss Fairfax.

However, in revising Austen, Leslie reinforces the dominant culture and its standards of

propriety, rather than subverting it as Glosson and Derecho argue women’s archontic

literature does.

Leslie’s hero, Monsieur Mordaunt, who is “unambiguous and easily delineated as

good,” upholds the societal expectations for properly behaved gentlemen, whereas

Austen’s Frank Churchill is the one who actually challenges them. For Churchill is

neither an irreproachable hero nor an irredeemable villain, and despite his foibles, Austen

sees fit to let him “get the girl” in the end, though that girl is just as imperfect as he.

According to Glosson, Leslie’s characters do not behave improperly because Leslie

authored conduct books, and in order to support her “didactic aims,” she, therefore

“created allegorical figures rather than realistic ones,” since she needed to remedy “the

Glosson, Performing Jane, 56.

Ibid., 59.

Ibid., 60. Italics are mine.

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narrative difficulties posed by ambiguous characters by making obvious each individual’s

flaws or assets.” Though this reasoning is understandable for someone in Leslie’s

position to espouse, her revisions do detract from the element of realism in Austen’s

characters which has kept them relevant for more than two hundred years, making

Leslie’s work arguably of a lesser quality than Austen’s—perhaps part of the reason that

Leslie is no longer widely read or remembered while Austen is celebrated— therefore,

calling into question whether Leslie’s work should be labeled archontic at all. Regardless,

Glosson is correct in that “The Beaux” does offer “both writer and reader a means to

reenter a familiar and beloved text and perform affinities and sensibilities by recognizing

the original source even as it is reinvented and made new.”

A great many other adaptations of Austen, taking the form of fiction as well as

plays, were written in England as well as America towards the end of the nineteenth

century. Though each work draws either from Austen’s life and letters or her novels, their

Janeite creators utilized a variety of forms and interpretations of the source material to

produce them, such as placing characters in wholly different settings from Austen’s or

creating new characters to augment Austen’s originals. Some writers adapted sections of

Austen’s dialogue from multiple novels into a single work, such as Rosina Filippi’s

Dialogues and Scenes from the Novels of Jane Austen, which was first published in

London in 1895. Others wrote Austen variations using characters from a single work,

such as Hortense Foglesong, an American, who adapted Pride and Prejudice in 1901.

Ibid., 60. Here I question Glosson’s definition of “archontic” and her use of it to describe

Leslie’s “The Beaux,” since Glosson states that women use archontic literature to subvert certain aspects of

society and subsequently argues that Leslie modified Austen’s characters for use in her own story because

she needed to uphold the social mores of the period rather than critique them so as not to damage her ethos

as the writer of popular conduct books.

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And then there were those who dispensed with Jane’s fictional characters, for the most

part, focusing instead on a fictionalized life of Jane herself. In recent years, a well-known

example of these is Jon Spence’s 2003 imagined biography Becoming Jane, which was

subsequently adapted into a feature-length film of the same name, starring Anne

Hathaway, in 2007; however, fictionalizations like it began appearing as long ago as the

1930s.

The earliest known book-length follow-up to Jane Austen’s work, Old Friends

and New Fancies: The Imaginary Sequel to the Novels of Jane Austen, was written by

Englishwoman Sybil G. Brinton and first published in 1913, not long after the Austens’

alterations to Jane’s unfinished works were released. In Brinton’s brief introduction to the

“after-adventures of some of Jane’s characters,” some of which are taken from each of

the original novels, she explains that she determined to begin “such an undertaking”

despite the evident “difficulties” of doing so because of her “fascination [with] the

subject” as well as the fact that she and others like her “‘owe to Jane Austen of the

happiest hours of their lives.”

Admittedly, though Leslie, Brinton, and their contemporaries did begin the trend

of creating original works using Austen as a source, it was not until many decades later

that many of these adaptations were published and widely distributed, and since then, a

great deal more have been written—surprisingly, the majority of them by North

For a comprehensive list of Austen pastiche from the earliest known works until 2000, see Rolf

Breuer, “Jane Austen, etc.: The Completions, Continuations, and Adaptations of Her Novels,” Erfurt

Electronic Studies in English, last modified January 15, 2012,

http://webdoc.gwdg.de/edoc/ia/eese/breuer/biblio.html.

Sybil G. Brinton, Old Friends and New Fancies: An Imaginary Sequel to the Novels of Jane

Austen (London: Holden & Hardingham, 1913), Project Gutenberg, 2013.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43741/43741-h/43741-h.htm.

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American Janeites, following in Eliza Leslie’s footsteps. The English may have been the

first to know the greatness of Jane Austen, but, like her identity, her genius could not be

kept secret. As Leslie demonstrates, some erudite American women with access to books

from across the pond were quick to notice that genius, whereupon:

Numerous adaptations for stage and later radio, most of which were written by

women, began appearing in America and Britain in regular intervals by about

1895. These adaptations brought Austen’s novels to audiences in a new way,

helped spread her popularity, and fostered a growing and visible fandom.

Nevertheless, Janeites would remain a relatively small segment of Anglophone society

until Austen’s work once again received critical recognition, largely through the

scholarship of Leavis and Watt, among other academics. With this publicity, the circle of

Janeites widened once more, and the burgeoning field of Austen Studies expanded to

include scholars within the United States and Canada. It remains a popular field of

publication today.

Increasing academic interest meant that Austen was commonly taught in college

and high school English literature courses throughout the U.S. beginning in the 1970s.

However, because of the distinctively Georgian flavor of her prose, she was still not

popular reading, and therefore adaptations were only published sporadically. America’s

Glosson, Performing Jane, 73.

The opening line of F.R. Leavis’s 1948 publication, The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry

James, Joseph Conrad, reads, “The great English novelists are Jane Austen, Henry James, and Joseph

Conrad.” Later in the first chapter, he explains that the works of some “minor novelists,” Austen’s among

them, are all “living classics” which are of great significance; F. R. Leavis. The Great Tradition: George

Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad. (London: Faber & Faber, 2011), chap. 1, GoogleBooks. Ian Watt, a

British literary critic and professor of English at Stanford University, took notice. In his book The Rise of

the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, he also praises Austen’s “minute presentation of

daily life” and writes “Jane Austen’s technical genius manifests itself” in that “she dispensed with the

participating narrator”, and “instead she told her stories after Fielding’s manner, as a confessed author;” Ian

Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. 2nd American ed. (1957; repr,

Berkley: University of California Press, 2001), 296-297.

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obsession with all things Austen would not begin until the release of A&E’s made-for-

television miniseries adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in 1995. Though not the first such

adaptation to be presented to American audiences, this one left an indelible mark upon

them. It retained large portions of Austen’s original dialog—the same dialog that had

been considered too dense and difficult to read for pleasure—however, there was one

significant departure. Scriptwriter Andrew Davies depicted Mr. Darcy returning to

Pemberley after an exhausting horseback ride. Reaching a pond, Darcy impulsively

jumps in to refresh himself, even though he is still almost fully dressed. Austen’s readers

had never experienced this side of Darcy before because Austen only presented them

with the Darcy that Elizabeth Bennet perceives, thus they had never before imagined him

in a soaking wet, open-collared white shirt. At long last, the stiff, standoffish Mr. Darcy

had leapt off his dusty page and become an impulsive human being, and a handsomely

desirable one at that!

Suddenly, readers and movie-goers all across America wanted to know more

about Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, and especially, that brooding and mysterious

Mr. Darcy fellow everyone was talking about! Since then, Austen’s place as a pop culture

icon has remained secure, and in the intervening years, countless film and television

adaptations of all her completed novels have been produced, and many, many more

Janeites have published sequels to Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and

the rest of her works. Like Austen’s relatives and Brinton, authors of the majority of

those early adaptations were reverent, keeping the settings and characters from Jane

Pride and Prejudice, directed by Simon Langton, featuring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, aired

on January 14-16, 1996, on A&E (A&E and BBC, 1995), 10th Anniversary Limited Collector’s Edition

DVD, disc 3 and disc 2.

117

Austen’s sacred texts largely intact and merely extending her storylines, as some continue

to do. However, once the release of the 1995 Pride and Prejudice miniseries set off a

tidal wave of interest, Austenian pastiche became marketable on an immense scale, and

nothing about Austen remained sacrosanct.

The Not-So-Secret Society of Janeites

By the time Rudyard Kipling published his short story, “The Janeites,” in

MacLean’s Magazine in May of 1924, thirty years after Saintsbury coined the term

Kipling took for his title, many women (and some other men) who were fascinated with

Austen had created their own derivative or archontic works of literature. Kipling is said

to have written his short story after his family visited Bath in the spring of 1915. In a

letter to his friend, C.R.L. Fletcher, written in London on April 10 of that year, he

describes this experience:

In my spare times at Bath I’ve been reading Jane Austen and the more I read the

more I admire and respect and do reverence…When she looks straight at a man or

a woman she is greater than those who were alive with her—by a whole head.

Greater than Charles; greater than Walter—with a more delicate hand and a

keener scalpel. I have suspected it for a long time, but like my friend the South

African millionaire who discovered the Bible…now I am sure.

Here Kipling depicts himself as a convert, a Janeite as much transformed by the sharp

scalpel of Austen’s pen as a new Christian has been by that “two-edged sword, piercing

even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow,” the very

word of God. For Kipling, as well as his characters in “The Janeites,” Austen is a deity to

be revered, and though the humor of the story is that British soldiers had been taking her

Thomas Pinney, ed., The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, Volume 4: 1911-19, (Iowa City:

University of Iowa Press, 1990), 296. The passage refers to Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, and the

unnamed South African millionaire is thought to be Sir Abe Bailey.

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so seriously as to form a secret society around her, not unlike the freemasons, one gets

the feeling that Kipling’s admiration for Austen is nothing to be laughed at. The simple

but honest Humberstall explains being a Janeite best:

Well, as pore Macklin said, it’s a very select Society, an’ you’ve got to be a

Janeite in your ’eart, or you won’t have any success. An’ yet he made me a

Janeite! I read all her six books now for pleasure ’tween times in the shop, an’ it

brings it all back—down to the smell of the glue-paint on the screens. You take it

from me, Brethren, there’s no one to touch Jane when you’re in a tight place.

Gawd bless ’er, whoever she was.

At a time when men of letters considered their highbrow appreciation of Austen distinct

from and certainly above the so-called lowbrow love that women and those with less

education could comprehend, Kipling’s story illustrates that though Humberstall, with his

Cockney dialect, lack of sophistication, and war-ravaged memory, is not as educated as

the scholarly Macklin had been, he is nevertheless just as capable of “being a Janeite in

his heart.” Humberstall may not comprehend everything about Austen and her works, but

even he is able to recognize the realness of her characters, explaining:

They was just like people you’d run across any day. One of ’em was a curate—the

Reverend Collins—always on the make an’ lookin’ to marry money. Well, when I

was a Boy Scout, ’im or ’is twin brother was our troop-leader. An’ there was an

upstandin’ ’ard-mouthed Duchess or a Baronet’s wife that didn’t give a curse for

anyone ’oo wouldn’t do what she told ’em to; the Lady—Lady Catherine (I’ll get

it in a minute) De Bugg. Before ma bought the ’air-dressin’ business in London I

used to know an ’olesale grocer’s wife near Leicester (I’m Leicestershire myself)

that might ’ave been ’er duplicate. And—oh, yes—there was a Miss Bates; just an

old maid runnin’ about like a hen with ’er ’ead cut off, an’ her tongue loose at

both ends. I’ve got an aunt like ’er. Good as gold—but, you know.

Heb. 4:12, KJV.

Rudyard Kipling, “The Janeites,” MacLean’s Magazine (Toronto), May 16, 1924, 52-53.

Ibid., 48.

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He also recognizes, on some level, Jane’s genius, since he tells his Masonic Lodge

brothers that no one can “touch Jane when you’re in a tight place,” such as the one he and

his fellow British soldiers had been in when they served in northern France during World

War I—one that was so tight, in fact, that Humberstall, as far as he knows, is the only one

of his group of Janeites to have survived. Kipling’s creation of a character like

Humberstall does more than create situational humor. It illustrates, as does the mix of

officers and soldiers, “regardless of rank,” who comprised the group, that “toffs” like

Kipling himself are not the only people worthy to join the Cult of Austen.

Instead nowadays, according to Deborah Yaffe, “new Janeites are born all the

time,” and she credits this increase in membership to the ease of access created by the

Digital Age, writing, “Back when I was discovering Jane Austen, it wasn’t so easy to find

other fans. Without Twitter accounts and online communities, Austen obsession was

more likely to remain a solitary pursuit or shared with, at most, a few relatives or close

friends.” Her description of life before the advent of Austenmania and the Internet seems

reminiscent of Kipling’s depiction of the secret Janeite society of nearly a hundred years

before. In it, unless a British soldier happened upon a small sect of fans, as Humberstall

had, he too was alone in his adoration. Thankfully, such is no longer the case. Yaffe

happily reports that today:

No junior Janeite need curl up alone with her book in a dark corner. She can start

a blog, join the online Janeites discussion group, or hang out at the Republic of

Pemberley. She won’t feel isolated in her love because nowadays Jane Austen is

everywhere.

Ibid., 21.

Deborah Yaffe, Among the Janeites: A Journey Through the World of Janeite Fandom,

(Boston: Mariner Books, 2013), intro., Kindle.

Ibid., intro.

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Coincidentally, a similar phenomenon was happening when Austen began attempting to

publish her work. According to Danielle Spratt, an “explosion of media technologies”

made it possible to mass produce books cheaply during the eighteenth century, and it

“mirrors recent innovations that have made smartphones, laptops, and social media

platforms reasonably accessible for people from many backgrounds.” It is fitting that

waves of rapid technological advancement, though they happened two centuries apart,

were responsible both for the increased level of access which allowed Jane Austen a

publishing platform as well as providing Janeites with the means to more easily connect

with one another and engage in acts of cultural creation. Both shifts allowed greater

opportunities for access and collaboration. As Spratt points out:

Although we tend to think of media technologies as intimately tied to objects with

usb ports and screens, the book—as lo-fi and low-tech as it seems—is itself a

significant and durable media technology. In the eighteenth century, the increased

ability to mass-produce books was intensified by a radical shift in the political

landscape, another parallel to our twenty-first-century context.

That a creative Janeite in possession of an idea can author and share her

interpretation of Austen so easily is the crux of this study. As Yaffe observes, new

worshipers of Austen are brought into the fold all the time through varied means of

proselytization. Though the global commodification and merchandizing of Austen does

draw in most of us initially, I argue that this is not the method by which we become more

firmly entrenched in the community of followers. Buying and displaying a Jane-themed

T-shirt, tote bag, or bumper sticker will indeed publicize a woman’s preoccupation with

Austen, but as Yaffe suggests, this act is merely a solitary statement of faith. Engaging

Bridget Draxler and Danielle Spratt, Engaging in the Age of Jane Austen: Public Humanities in

Practice (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018), 165-67.

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with other Janeites, however, is an entirely different mode of expressing one’s devotion.

Active Janeites interacting more meaningfully with Austen, or “performing Jane,” as

Glosson terms it, use innate creativity to contribute to the rich, shared culture which

began developing with Pride and Prejudice’s immense initial popularity and continues

even today. Such performances of devotion can include Regency-themed balls and other

reenactments, most often attached to a celebration of Jane’s birthday or the release of a

novel; Austen-themed tours of Bath and Chowton; Jane Austen festivals; creating

podcasts, playing any number of Austen-themed games using cards, video game or

computer software, or boardgames; and arguably the most sincerest expression of one’s

love for Jane, and indeed, the focus of this book—creating literature and films that adapt

or rework Austen in new ways. Through these reworkings, Janeite women writers are

keeping Austen’s plots and characters fresh, exposing new audiences to her genius, and

ultimately ensuring that this unique community of Austen admirers will exist and expand

for generations to come.

Austen’s Enduring Relatability as Seen in Fielding’s Adaptation of Pride and Prejudice

Though fictional, Humberstall’s observation that he has met individuals in his

own life who are similar to many of Austen’s characters is an astute one. After pausing to

consider it, many of Austen’s readers have made similar observations. Katie Halsey

observes that like Samuel Richardson’s characters are said to have done, Jane Austen’s

characters, especially the women, are meant to represent the “readers to themselves.”

That is, as in the lives of actual women, the lives of Austen’s characters “reflect the

experience of intelligent, articulate women in cultural situations unsympathetic to their

intelligence and eloquence.” As they are modeled after and meant to reflect the actions

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and emotions of real women, “Austen’s heroines [are] (however ironically) contrived to

seem as ‘natural’ as possible…their characters are presented not as extraordinary but as

recognizably ordinary.”

The remarkable relatability of Austen’s characters began to be observed by her

readers and critics as soon as the books were published, as evidenced by some of the

reactions to her novels that Austen collected. To begin her list “Opinions of Mansfield

Park,” she quotes her brother Frank, “The Characters are natural & well-supported &

many of the Dialogues excellent.” Her friend Anne Sharp’s opinion is that the

“Characters are drawn to the Life—so very, very natural & just.” Mrs. Augusta

Bramstone is said to be “pleased with… the character of Fanny, as being so very natural.”

Bramstone also “thought Lady Bertram like herself.” In the same list, Fanny Cage,

though she states that she does not like Mansfield Park, she does admit that “Characters

natural & well-supported.” Austen also includes Mr. J. Plumptre’s opinion that “the

characters are all so remarkably well kept up & so well drawn & the plot is so well

contrived.”

Towards the end of Austen’s list are two detailed reviews depicting the

relatability of the characters in Mansfield Park, the first of which is from Lady Gordon:

In most novels you are amused for the time with a set of Ideal People whom you

never think of afterwards or whom you the least expect to meet in common life,

whereas in Miss A–’s works, & especially in M. P. you actually live with them,

you fancy yourself one of the family; & the scenes are so exactly descriptive, so

perfectly natural, that there is scarcely an Incident or conversation, or a person

that you are not inclined to imagine you have at one time or other in your Life

been witness to, born a part in, & been acquainted with.

Katie Halsey, Jane Austen and Her Readers, 1775-1945, (London: Anthem Press, 2012), 90.

R.W. Chapman, The Works of Jane Austen, Volume VI, Minor Works, (London: Oxford

University Press, 1963),432-34. Italics are the author’s.

Ibid., 434-35.

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Here Lady Gordon echoes Humberstall. Like him, she can easily relate to Austen’s

characters, having met people just like them in her own life, and she effectively

juxtaposes Austen with other authors who create less realistic “Ideal People.” Near the

end of her list, Austen also quotes Mrs. Pole as saying:

most Novelists fail & betray themselves in attempting to describe familiar scenes

in high Life, some little vulgarism escapes & shews that they are not

experimentally acquainted with what they describe, but here it is quite different.

Everything is natural & the situations & incidents are told in a manner which

clearly evinces the Writer belong to the Society whose Manners she so ably

delineates.

Such opinions regarding the relatability of Austen’s characters did not begin with, nor are

they limited to Mansfield Park. In fact, many of the listed observations find Mansfield

Park, despite its relatable characters, inferior to its predecessor Pride and Prejudice and

do not hesitate to tell Austen so. This comparison is understandable given that even

during Austen’s life, Pride and Prejudice was extremely popular.

Two centuries later, Pride and Prejudice remains one of the most well-known

(and well-loved) novels in the world. Unsurprisingly, then, it has been adapted and

transformed more than any of Austen’s other novels since its initial publication in 1813,

and a great portion of these adaptation has come in the form of novels transplanting

Austen’s characters, plot, or both into a modern setting. Over time, some authors have

remained patently true to the source, making as few changes to Austen as possible, while

others have opted for entirely radical transformations cutting and adding scenes as well as

Ibid., 435.

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combining and inventing characters as they please, so that social and cultural changes are

reflected in their texts.

Each approach has produced adaptations that Janeites have come to love and

appreciate as well as alterations that admittedly fall short of readers’ expectations. Out of

all such modern revisions of Pride and Prejudice, Helen Fielding’s 1996 publication,

Bridget Jones’s Diary, is perhaps the most commercially successful literary derivative,

spawning three follow-up novels and just as many films, and yet this adaptation is by no

means the most faithful to Austen’s original text. However, the relatability of Fielding’s

titular diarist is clearly similar to the relatable characters for which Austen has been

praised; for Bridget Jones is a perfect example of the stereotypical thirtysomething

professional woman of the 1990s. Though Jones is not immediately reminiscent of

Austen’s protagonist Elizabeth Bennet, upon closer inspection, similarities become

apparent.

From the aforementioned BBC miniseries starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth, which helped

spark Austenmania—a craze that has yet to abate in the U.S.—to The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a vlog series

that aired on YouTube from 2012 to 2013, Pride and Prejudice has been recreated in nearly every medium

available. Radical adaptations of Pride and Prejudice include Pride and Prejudice: The WILD and

WANTON Edition by Annabella Bloom and Jane Austen as well as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by

Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith. Notably, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, originally published by

Quirk in 2009 and billed as “The classic Regency romance—now with ultraviolent zombie mayhem,”

became a New York Times bestseller and was adapted into a feature-length film of the same name in 2016,

though the film received mixed reviews and failed at the box office. Grahame-Smith’s novel also spawned

a New York Times bestselling prequel, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dawn of the Dreadfuls, and a

sequel, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: Dreadfully Ever After, both of which were written by Steve

Hockensmith. Quirk also published another Austenian derivative in 2009, Sense and Sensibility and Sea

Monsters, credited to Austen and Ben H. Winters; it too is a New York Times bestselling book.

Helen Fielding’s fictional character Bridget Jones is a modern adaptation of Pride and

Prejudice’s protagonist Elizabeth Bennet. Bridget Jones, now a fixture in British pop culture, originally

appeared in a column in the London newspaper The Independent in 1995, during the advent of

Austenmania. The success of the Bridget Jones’s Diary column led to the publication of a series of best-

selling novels and the subsequent film adaptations starring Renée Zellweger, Colin Firth, Hugh Grant, and

Patrick Dempsey. Both Fielding and Bridget Jones are Janeites who enjoy watching the BBC’s Pride and

Prejudice miniseries previously mentioned in this chapter, which also stars Colin Firth. The casting of Firth

as Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones’s Diary after he had famously portrayed Fitzwilliam Darcy in Pride and

Prejudice, the character upon whom Mark Darcy is based, is an in-joke for Janeites who have seen both the

miniseries and the film as well as read Fielding’s novels, which reference Firth. Though Bridget Jones did

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Elizabeth Bennet is famous for wielding her wit against the “prideful” Mr. Darcy

when he initially asks for her hand in marriage, telling him bluntly “You could not have

made me the offer of your hand in any possible way that would have tempted me to

accept it.” Then, after a scathing critique of his faults, she admits, “I had not known you a

month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be

prevailed upon to marry.” Elizabeth’s emotionally charged rejection of Darcy, though

considered unbecoming behavior for a proper English lady of the Regency, is completely

understandable for modern audiences. Her anger is natural. After all, what woman would

not feel insulted if a man admitted that he proposed to her against his better judgement? It

is this inappropriate, unladylike display of real emotions that makes Elizabeth seem

authentic to readers because they would likely have a similar reaction, were they in her

place.

Bridget Jones exhibits a similarly sharp tongue when telling her boss Daniel

Cleaver (Fielding’s version of Mr. Wickham/Mr. Collins) how she feels about his refusal

to commit to a relationship with her. However, initially, Bridget’s behavior is more

similar to Charlotte Lucas’s than Elizabeth’s, since she is originally demure and accepts

other characters’ mistreatment. Eventually, though, after she is under tremendous stress

and Cleaver has repeatedly sent her conflicting messages, an exasperated Bridget reaches

her breaking point and exclaims “That is just such crap…How dare you be so

fraudulently flirtatious, cowardly and dysfunctional? I am not interested in emotional

fuckwittage. Goodbye.” Though Bridget’s language is far more casual and cruder than

not begin Austenmania, she is certainly one of its most famous products as well as a prime example of the

way that Janeites expand their culture through creating new archontic works of literature and film.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Vol. II, (London: Thomas Egerton, 1813), 132-33.

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that spoken by any of Austen’s characters, the sentiment is the same. Both women are

disgusted by the men around them and react to their situations in much the same way that

any modern female reader might.

In addition to exhibiting realistic emotions, both Elizabeth and Bridget behave in

inappropriate or unusual ways in regards to societal expectations. For Elizabeth, it is

refusing to marry Mr. Collins out of convenience. Though modern readers would not

blame her for rejecting Mr. Collins as a pandering fool, most readers in Austen’s day

would likely have done just as Charlotte Lucas did, even though they would probably

find the marriage unfulfilling emotionally. This is because, rather than choosing to marry

for love, as Elizabeth and most modern readers would want them to do, many

Englishwomen in Austen’s day would consider Mr. Collins a “good catch” because of the

financial and societal security he could offer his wife with his position as a clergyman. In

accepting him, Charlotte exhibits practical behavior for a woman in the Georgian era.

Having no means of owning property, holding a job, or otherwise providing for herself, a

typical woman of that period would be expected and obliged to marry a man like Mr.

Collins. The only women who had the luxury of marrying for love were those who were

independently wealthy and without entailed estates or brothers to inherit for them, such as

Emma Woodhouse. For if a woman without fortune did not marry a man who could

support her, she would likely face unfortunate consequences as an adult.

A realistic example of these consequences during Austen’s time can be seen in

Mansfield Park through examining the character Frances Ward. Austen explains:

Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary, 1996. (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 29.

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Miss Frances married, in the common phrase, to disoblige, her family, and by

fixing on a lieutenant of Marines, without education, fortune, or connections, did

it very thoroughly. She could hardly have made a more untoward choice.

Frances’s imprudent match becomes a problem for her eleven years later because by this

time she has:

A large and still increasing family, an husband disabled for active service, but not

the less equal to company and good liquor, and a very small income to supply

their wants… She was preparing for her ninth lying-in, and after bewailing the

circumstance, and imploring [her sisters’] countenance as sponsors to the

expected child, she could not conceal how important she felt they might be to the

future maintenance of the eight already in being.

Thus, Frances is forced to beg her sisters—both of whom have made better matches than

she—to support her family, which eventually results in the Prices sending their eldest

daughter Fanny to live with her wealthy Aunt and Uncle Bertram.

Like Frances Ward, Elizabeth Bennet is taking considerable risk by choosing to

reject Mr. Collins’s proposal in hopes of marrying someone she loves. She will not

necessarily have too many children to support as Frances does, but since Elizabeth has no

brother to inherit her father’s Longbourn estate, which is entailed, it will pass to the

nearest male relative upon his death. At that time, she will lose her childhood home and

inherit very little money, meaning that she will be just as impoverished as Frances Ward,

if she does not marry a man with a secure source of income. The fear of a similar loss of

fortune when her own father dies motivates Charlotte Lucas to choose Mr. Collins

because she knows that in doing this, she will always have access to resources. When

Elizabeth confronts Charlotte and is disapproving of her choice to marry someone she

cannot love, Charlotte tells her:

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, Vol I, (London: Thomas Egerton, 1814), 2-3.

Ibid., 5.

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I see what you are feeling…You must be surprised, very much surprised—so

lately as Mr. Collins was wishing to marry you. But when you have had time to

think it over, I hope you will be satisfied with what I have done. I am not

romantic, you know; I never was. I ask only a comfortable home; and considering

Mr. Collins's character, connection, and situation in life, I am convinced that my

chance of happiness with him is as fair as most people can boast on entering the

marriage state.

Later, when she visits Charlotte in her new home, Elizabeth takes the time “to meditate

upon Charlotte’s degree of contentment, to understand her address in guiding, and

composure in bearing with, her husband, and to acknowledge that it was all done very

well.” Despite initially judging Charlotte harshly, Elizabeth ultimately acknowledges the

wisdom of Charlotte’s choice and realizes that though she may not have made a love

match, the pragmatic Charlotte has created a pleasant life for herself as Mrs. Collins,

which is what she has wished for all along. Like Frances Ward, her sisters, and Charlotte

Lucas; most of Austen’s contemporary women readers had limited options for marriage

due to their need to make advantageous matches. However, they likely wished they could

afford to take the same risk as Elizabeth and choose to only marry for love instead,

making both the characters of Elizabeth and Charlotte easily relatable to them.

Jumping forward in time to the England of the 1990s, Bridget Jones’s status as a

single woman with a career and no children makes her an object of pity and curiosity for

her friends, family, and acquaintances who are coupled off (similar to the way that

Charlotte Lucas is pitied by other characters at the beginning of Pride and Prejudice

because she remains unmarried with no prospects at twenty-seven). Societal pressures to

find a boyfriend drive Bridget to drink, smoke, and eat unhealthily. Conversely, to escape

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Vol. I, (London: Thomas Egerton, 1813), 292-93.

Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Vol. II, 56.

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these pressures, she attempts to stop such habits and be more aesthetically pleasing to

make finding said boyfriend an easier task. The same pressures that drove the spinster

Charlotte Lucas to settle for marrying Mr. Collins also compel Bridget to settle for a less-

than-fulfilling relationship with Daniel Cleaver. She knows that Daniel is an incorrigible

cad, but she continues to let him charm her because she does not believe that she has any

better options.

Unfortunately, despite Pride and Prejudice being two hundred ten years old and

its derivative Bridget Jones’s Diary having been published little more than a quarter-

century ago, many career-minded women, including this author, still face societal and

familial stigma if they are not also married with children. That is, women are still

pressured to conform to societal expectations, which proves that though many aspects of

western culture have changed since the early nineteenth century, the belief that women

should be wives and mothers remains pervasive, at least in some societies. And yet, this

lingering tradition is part of what allows Austen to remain popular and relatable after

such a long period of time.

Austen’s characters may face societal challenges that Fielding’s do not and vice

versa, but the emotions and motives behind both authors’ characters remain equally

relevant to women readers in the twenty-first century. The protagonists each possess an

“everywoman” ordinariness, and each woman reader is able to see Elizabeth or Bridget

within themselves, their sisters, or their friends. This is a similarity at the heart of both

characters, and while Elizabeth Bennet’s relatability has made her one of the most

popular female protagonists in English literature, Bridget Jones’s relatability has made

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Fielding’s radical adaptation of Austen both a commercial and popular success in its own

right.

Cultural Creation & Archival Expansion

As they imagine new characters and situations with and in which Austen’s

originals are intertwined, these women are sharing their love of Jane with others, but they

are also adding their texts to the cultural archive which the preteen Jane inadvertently

began while writing her three volumes of juvenilia. Into this collection, she deposited

settings, plots, characters, and perhaps most famously, her sparkling, succinct prose.

Little did she know that her acolytes would be making their own contributions to it even

two centuries after her death each time they imagine a new way of using those familiar

people, places, and turns of phrase in their own works. Derecho deftly explains this

method of cultural creation within the Janeite community all the while defining archontic

literature:

An archontic text allows, or even invites, writers to enter it, select specific items

they find useful, make new artifacts using those found objects, and deposit the

newly made work back into the source text’s archive.

An archontic text’s archive is not identical to the text but is a virtual construct

surrounding the text, including it and all texts related to it. For example, we have

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (P&P) as a story that consists of several

thousand specific words given in a specific order, and we also have a P&P

archive, which contains such usable artifacts as Elizabeth Bennett, Fitzwilliam

Darcy, the sprawling estate of Pemberly, and Austen’s particular version of

English manners and morals. Many writers, such as Linda Berdoll (author of Mr.

Darcy Takes a Wife, published by Landmark in 2004) and Pamela Aidan (author

of Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman, published by Wytherngate Press in 2004) have

made withdrawals from the P&P archive, used their selections to make new texts,

and deposited their new creations back into the P&P archive. The P&P archive

thus contains not only Austen’s novel, but Berdoll’s, Aidan’s, and the hundreds of

other stories based on Austen’s novel that have appeared in print both officially

(issued by publishing houses) and unofficially (issued in zines and Web sites).

Derecho, “Archontic Literature,” 65.

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Derecho bases her concept on Jacques Derrida’s 1995 article, “Archive Fever: A

Freudien Impression.” In it, Derrida argues:

By incorporating the knowledge which is deployed in reference to it, the archive

augments itself, engrosses itself, it gains in auctoritas. But in the same stroke it

loses the absolute and meta-textual authority it might claim to have. One will

never be able to objectivize it while leaving no remainder. The archivist produces

more archive, and that is why the archive is never closed. It opens out of the

future.

That is, an archive, by nature, is never complete. Rather, it is always open and waiting for

more information to be deposited into it because of the “archontic power” or “function”

which is both creating it and simultaneously driving it to continually produce more

material and then gather that new material into itself, and though I do not wholly espouse

Derecho’s theory as it has been interpreted by Glosson, Derrida’s conception of the ever-

expanding archive as a place from which to withdraw ideas and then into which to

deposit new creations does lend itself quite neatly to describing the Janeites’ production

of Austenian pastiche.

Derecho is content with Derrida’s terminology, continuing to use archive and

archon when referring to a collection of materials and the power it holds to gather more

into itself. Yet, the term library, too, seems a fitting descriptor for these concepts,

especially as they relate to Austenian literature and film, as it is one that Austen would

have understood and of which she might well have approved. Being a “great Novel-

reader” and subscriber to circulating libraries herself, she would have been quite familiar

with the system of borrowing and returning that Derrida, Derecho, and Glosson discuss;

Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25, no. 2 (Summer 1995):

45. http://www.jstor.org/stable/465144.

Ibid., 10.

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thus, library will be employed synonymously with the aforementioned lexicon for the

duration of this chapter.

A pair of sisters, Constance and Ellen Hill, were among those deeply devoted

early Janeites who felt that “sway of ever-increasing power” of Austen’s “intangible

something,” that “undefinable charm” her words possess “constraining them to follow the

author to all the places where she dwelt and inspiring them with a determination to find

out all that could be known of her life and its surroundings,” and as a result, in 1901, they

created one of the lengthiest early works to be adopted into the Austenian library. By

treading in Austen’s “gentle footsteps” and chronicling their “pilgrimage,” the Hills not

only express their admiration for Austen, but also share their story with other like-minded

converts to the Cult of Jane. In the preface, Constance perfectly captures, through first-

hand experience, the pull that so many Janeites feel when she writes, “The more intimate

their knowledge of [Austen’s] character becomes the more must they admire and love her

rare spirit and the more thorough must be their enjoyment in her racy humor—a humor

which makes everything she touches delightful…”

In her book Austen’s Cults and Cultures, borrowing from Henry Austen’s

“Biographical Notice” of his sister, Claudia L. Johnson likens this need to experience the

most thorough enjoyment of Austen possible to:

an act of friendship, for to know Jane Austen, as we have seen, is to desire to be

her friend…Jane Austen is no ordinary friend, and the purpose is not simply to get

to get to become acquainted with her in any ordinary sense; rather, it is to ‘hold

communion sweet’ with her ‘mind and heart.’

Deirdre Le Faye, ed., Jane Austen’s Letters, 4th edition, (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2011), 27.

Constance Hill, Jane Austen: Her Homes & Her Friends, (London: John Lane, 1902), v-vi.

Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

2012),70. Here Johnson quotes Hill, Jane Austen: Her Homes & Her Friends, viii, and therein Hill quotes

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Craving a connection with Jane, then, is by no means a posthumous development. As

Austen’s favorite brother observed, even during her life, “No one could be often in her

company without feeling a strong desire of obtaining her friendship, and cherishing a

hope of having obtained it.” Just as those who were blessed enough to befriend Jane

Austen while she lived, the Janeites who have been less fortunate also wish to experience

sweet communion with her. Doubtless, for many, forging this friendship would be the

pinnacle of enjoyment about which Hill wrote and is the impetus for them to create their

own works to deposit into the Austen library. In doing so, these Janeites can express their

devotion and interact with Austen through entwining their imagined characters,

situations, and locals, with her own. As slight as the connection might be, it is the only

hope of befriending Jane left to us.

As Johnson acknowledges, unlike other celebrated authors who have left behind

more geographic evidence of themselves for posterity, there are few extant locations to

which Janeites can make a pilgrimage or that can be photographed. This is why

Constance Hill must rely heavily upon Ellen Hill’s drawings to illustrate her book rather

than photographs, and this is why they construct Austen’s heritage from an “enchanted

place located at the intersection of time and space, a place from a by-gone era, yet

accessible today and still somehow permeated by the traces of Austen’s presence.” The

Hills call it Austen-land, and Johnson, in turn, likens this depiction to Lewis Carrol’s

Henry Austen’s “Biographical Notice” which was affixed to the front of the first edition of Northanger

Abbey and Persuasion, originally published in 1818 as a four-volume set.

Henry Thomas Austen, “Biographical Notice of the Author,” in Northanger Abbey and

Persuasion, by Jane Austen (London: John Murray, 1818), xii.

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Wonderland, but its innate intangibility and boundlessness is indeed reminiscent of that

most magical and excellent of places: the library.

In reusing and adding to Austen’s library of ideas, both the academic Janeites and

those who are “recreational readers” have expanded and extended Austen-land through a

process that Nicole Peters describes as a:

cultural construction of reading tastes—an archive that has been historically

situated within what it means to read a text the “right” way. In reading [Austen’s]

texts with emotional investment, Austen fandoms have problematized the

boundaries between reader and object, author and character, affected and

affecting.

Thus, while some Janeites who borrow from Austen feel compelled to protect the sanctity

of her plots and characters, as her own family did, others “often deliberately resist

academic readings” of her source material even as they use their own interpretations to

“perform critical work within a recreational text.” According to Peters, this “malleability”

is part of Austen’s widespread appeal. The flexibility of her novels and public persona

grants a particular agency to Janeites who would want to compose their own texts,

allowing them to “create productive reading communities” and to influence the ways that

Austen and her books are viewed and depicted in popular culture with each new iteration

they produce. Because these archontic acts of devotion to Austen are performed by

professional and casual readers alike, Janeites “straddle critical and recreational readings

of her novels that fundamentally influence and change” the ways in which her “body of

work is consumed in both academic and popular contexts.”

Johnson, Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures, 70-71.

Nicole Peters, “Austen’s Malleability: Fans, Adaptations, and Value Production,” Reception:

Texts, Readers, Audiences, History 10 (2018): 75. https://doi.org/10.5325/reception.10.1.0074.

Ibid., 75.

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As such, when considering how Janeite culture is produced and shared through

the creation of new entries in the Austen library, the oft-debated distinction between a

direct and indirect adaptation, or as Peters puts it, whether a Janeite writer has read

Austen the “right” way or the “wrong” way, is largely inconsequential. After all, no new

text borrowing from elements in the Austen library—be it high- or lowbrow—will be

viewed as equivalent to her original works. Additionally, though academic Janeites, along

with those who pen traditional reworkings of the novels, do offer important critical

interpretations of Austen, these rigid forms necessarily limit their authors’ creative

agency and appeal to smaller, elite audiences. However:

popular Austen readers are doing something much more complicated than is often

recognized within the institutional setting: they use her novels to build and

reinforce a strong community and to create a hybrid way of reading and

interacting with a text…Specifically, they challenge the boundaries between

emotionally absorptive styles of reading and more conventionally academic styles

of reading, particularly within the framework of privileging intertextuality and the

sociology of texts.

Because their texts also interrogate the aspects of “literary value and taste,” Janeite

women writers who create indirect archontic texts for popular reading rather than

sophisticated, direct adaptations for learned audiences still engage with Austen in deeply

analytical ways, and the more flexible form of leisurely, pleasurable reading material

allows them a great deal of creative latitude and agency. It is often these “lowbrow,”

supposedly shallow texts that draw new Janeites into the fold quicker than highbrow

scholarship does. A more interesting and useful inquiry, then, is determining whether a

new addition to the Austenian library successfully expresses a Janeite’s fervent devotion

(as opposed to merely capitalizing upon an immensely profitable niche market) and

Ibid., 75-76.

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whether that display of devoutness is likely to entice additional acolytes to join the Cult

of Jane.

Storytelling as Cultural Preservation

Regardless of their chosen genres, with each new archontic work that Janeites add

to Austen’s library, they are sharing their love of her with new audiences as well as

creating elements of intangible Janeite culture in the form of the stories these works tell.

For Bridget Draxler, narratives are essential aspects of cultural artifacts. She explains:

Storytelling and interpretation are critical agents here in giving objects value,

whether those objects are cultural relics or old books. Storytelling helps us

contextualize, explain, engage, and connect with others; if done well in situations

like these, it also helps us become rhetorically persuasive.

Draxler makes a point here that is similar to one discussed in the introduction to this

book—a group’s heritage is made up of the stories they tell about themselves. Sometimes

these stories make use of actual historical people and events, but often the history behind

the heritage has been interpreted in creative ways over long periods of time. In other

words, “The difference between a family heirloom and a piece of cultural heritage can

sometimes merely be the difference between the stories we tell about them.” Though

Draxler is making this observation about tangible artifacts exhibited in museums, it

remains applicable to the stories that are borrowed from and deposited into Austen’s

library when Janeite women writers create new texts. Indeed, these new texts are all

based upon the stories shared in Austen’s works, and yet the women who authored these

Ibid., 76.

Draxler and Spratt, Engaging in the Age of Jane Austen, 96.

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stories have brought their own interpretations to the plots, characters, and settings that all

Janeites cherish.

For instance, few historical facts are known about Jane Austen’s life, and, since

Cassandra Austen burned the majority of Jane’s personal correspondence, most of what is

known about her comes from the stories that her surviving family members released to

the public as well as passed down to other relatives, some of whom later published their

own books. Though the depictions of Austen in Henry’s “Biographical Notice,” Richard

Arthur and William Austen-Leigh’s Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, A Family Record,

and James Edward Austen-Leigh’s A Memoir of Jane Austen are the earliest biographies

available, the woman presented in all three works is a carefully cultivated version of the

actual person whom they sought to describe. However, in making these family stories

available to her readers, they ceased to be Austen family heirlooms and instead became

part of a larger cultural heritage shared by any and all of the admirers who might read

them, regardless of whether their depictions of Jane are accurate. All the Austens based

their biographies on the real Jane or the stories they heard about her while glossing over

any aspects that might damage Jane’s respectability or that of the family name, offering

her acolytes only positive interpretations. Even curated, these “biographical myths and

semi-myths” are the definitive sources upon which all other Austen biographies are

based. The family stories, which certainly would have been important to the descendants

of Austen’s siblings, have gained an almost immeasurable cultural value as priceless

cultural artifacts to millions of Jane Austen’s fans. This is because in reading and

Ibid., 96.

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engaging with these stories, Janeites can feel as if they share a personal connection with

Austen herself as well other Janeites who participate in similar acts of adoration.

In the third chapter of Engaging the Age of Jane Austen, which she co-authored

with Danielle Spratt, Draxler discusses the importance of “felt experiences” wherein

visitors feel connections to exhibits and artifacts. For Janeites, this can happen when they

make pilgrimages to significant places in Austen’s life, such as two of her former homes,

the Jane Austen’s House Museum in Chawton and The Jane Austen Centre in Bath.

Again, Draxler is referring to visiting physical locations, and visiting Austen-land, though

intangible, does allow the Janeites who venture there through reading books, watching

films, or otherwise engaging with her to have similar experiences and make meaningful

connections as they borrow immaterial cultural artifacts from Austen’s library. Just as

physical pilgrimages to Austen’s museums do, the metaphorical journeys that all manner

of Janeite women writers—be it Eliza Leslie who produced the earliest known adaptation

of Austen or Helen Fielding, creator of the Bridget Jones’s Diary franchise—have taken

throughout the past two hundred years have allowed them to “to effuse readerly

enthusiasm out loud” and “feel a sense of intimacy with” Austen. Happily, as with the

museums, Austen-land’s “requirement for entry is simple devotion [to] or curiosity”

about the illusive woman behind those half-dozen works of literary genius, and in

exchange, those same devoted and curious fans who produce their own works of pastiche

create and share experiences that are “part memorial, part study, part escapism.”

Kathryn Sutherland, Jane Austen’s Textual Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 61-

70; Halsey, Jane Austen and Her Readers, 135.

Ibid., 101.

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As with the Hill sisters and Sybil Brenton, many Janeites consider the felt

experiences they have when producing their own Austen-inspired works “the happiest

hours of their lives.” Even as they express their ardent admiration, they are at once

communing with or befriending Jane and traveling to Austen-land as they borrow from

and subsequently add to its library, and because of the diversity of patrons who make use

of it, Austen’s library has gone from the private collection of an exclusive group of

friends, family, and academics to a “crossover phenomenon” which is open to the public

and attracts followers from all walks of life as it “straddles the divide between high and

low culture, and between the cannon and the cineplex.”

The immense and ever-growing collection of literature and film derived from

Austen’s life and works is a testament to the size and diversity of the Janeite population

that created it, and as such, it would be a difficult task to include all of these texts in a

discussion concerning the materials that women create by way of appreciating Austen.

However, I hope to examine a great many of them, particularly the most popular and

profitable works in the remainder of this book, as those will have been the most

influential modes through which Janeites expose new audiences to Austen and provide

them most directly with the same opportunity that Kipling’s secret society offered to

Humberstall, a chance to meet and interact with the unmistakable element of realism with

which Austen imbued her characters. Somewhere therein lies the intangible, “unusual

Brinton, Old Friends and New Fancies; Lynch, Janeites: Austen's Disciples and Devotees, 5.

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promise” that Trilling glimpsed, what Henry Austen, Constance Hill and so many since

have termed Jane’s genius.

Conclusion

Aside from Shakespeare, few literary figures have sustained widespread critical

acclaim to the degree of Jane Austen. Despite her having lived only forty-one years and

writing seriously for about half of them, Austen is undoubtedly one of the most

accomplished women to ever have written in the English language. That this unassuming

daughter of an Anglican rector could rise from anonymity after her death and become a

cultural icon the world over seems closer to fiction than fact. Yet legions of her most

ardent admirers attest to its truth.

Austen’s body of surviving work may be small, but Janeites have spent more than

a century reading her six novels and reimagining them in countless creative ways.

Fittingly, though men were the first to join the cult of Austen-worship and offer their

critical praise, it is the women writers, kindred of Austen herself, who first began to adapt

her works and have produced much of the pastiche currently enjoyed throughout the

world. As such, the available derivative texts based upon her books are both vast and

diverse and achieve varying levels of success.

That the Anglophone world remains captivated with Jane Austen more than 200

years after she began to publish her works is proof that Janeites—be they casual readers

or academics like Trilling, Lynch, and Nagle—continue to find something of interest and

import within her novels, a seemingly inexhaustible inspiration for creating new

Hill, Jane Austen: Her Homes & Her Friends, v; H.T. Austen, “Biographical Notice,” ix. In his

“Biographical Notice,” Jane’s brother writes of her, “in the cathedral church of Winchester, which, in the

whole catalogue of its mighty dead, does not contain the ashes of a brighter genius or a sincerer Christian.”

141

interpretations and adaptations because unlike other works that have been appreciated

within their own times and then forgotten, underneath the Georgian language and syntax,

beneath even her clever critique, Austen’s novels exhibit a singular characteristic that

appeals to audiences over and over again—her characters’ close connection to humanity.

Austen’s talent for capturing authentic emotions and using them to reach readers across

two centuries of time and space is so extraordinary that it draws admirers from every

level of education and background, and yet what makes Austen’s works truly remarkable

is that so many of those admirers are then compelled to recreate those human experiences

in unique and interesting ways. Whether they are presented in a book, movie, podcast, or

play, Jane’s characters remain relevant regardless of their adapted settings because no

matter how much society changes and advances over time, at its heart, little has changed

about the human experience.

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CHAPTER FOUR: THANKFULLY TURN TO BOOKS

“…when Thought had been freely indulged, in contrasting the past & the present, the

employment of mind, the dissipation of unpleasant ideas which only reading could

produce, made her thankfully turn to a book.”

— Jane Austen, The Watsons, a Fragment of a Novel

An insatiable need to read just one more Jane Austen novel has plagued Janeites

since the moment her final novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, were first

published as a set in 1818 because it is in this printing that her brother, Henry, regrettably

announced that her “pen [was] now mouldering in the grave.” Though shocking, the twin

revelations of her identity and demise did then and still do nothing to diminish Austen’s

most ardent admirers’ desire to slip back into the world constructed through her brilliant

and sparkling prose, to return to that place where they have spent, at least according to

the early English Janeite Sybil Brinton, “the happiest hours of their lives.” Though

Brinton does not elaborate on the reasons for her admitted “fascination of the subject” of

Jane Austen’s books or why reading them resulted in such a pleasant pastime for her in

the introductory note of her 1914 publication Old Friends and New Fancies: An

Imaginary Sequel to the Novels of Jane Austen, for almost as long as avid admirers like

Brinton have appreciated Austen’s novels, her general readers as well as men and women

of letters have debated reasons that these books remain so appealing.

Henry Thomas Austen, “Biographical Notice of the Author,” in Northanger Abbey and

Persuasion, Vol. I, by Jane Austen (London: John Murray, 1818), v; Sybil G. Brinton, Old Friends and

New Fancies: An Imaginary Sequel to the Novels of Jane Austen (London: Holden & Hardingham, 1913),

Project Gutenberg, 2013. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43741/43741-h/43741-h.htm. For more on the

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A decade after Brinton published her sequel, another, more famous, English

Janeite Virginia Woolf, herself an author and literary critic, concurred with Brinton in her

review of the first edition of R.W. Chapman’s definitive set The Novels of Jane Austen.

Therein, the literary giantess admitted to wanting more of Austen as well, writing:

It is impossible to say too much about the novels that Jane Austen did write; but

enough attention perhaps has never yet been paid to the novels that Jane Austen

did not write. Owing to the peculiar finish and perfection of her art, we tend to

forget that she died at 42, at the height of her powers, still subject to all those

changes which often make the final period of a writer’s career the most interesting

of all. Let us take Persuasion, the last completed book, and look by its light at the

novels that she might have written had she lived to be 60-years-old.

The similar experiences of Woolf, Brinton, and other early Janeites, particularly those

who chose to compose their own texts which are built upon Austen’s original works

prove that modern readers who purchase literary adaptations of Austen in a variety of

genres bearing titles such as Pride and Premeditation, What Would Jane Austen Do?, or

The Jane Austen Remedy have never been alone in craving more time with her. Yet the

question remains, why, after all this time, are Janeites still enamored of Austen?

early opinions concerning the relatability of Austen’s characters, see R.W. Chapman’s The Works of Jane

Austen, Volume VI, Minor Works, (London: Oxford University Press, 1963). See also Amy L. Montz, “The

Personal Is Pilgrimage: Literary Tourism through and with Ms Austen and Ms Gaskell,” The Gaskell

Journal, 30, (2016): 57-78, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48517893.

Virginia Woolf, “Virginia Woolf on Jane Austen: A review of the publication of R.W.

Chapman’s edition of the Novels of Jane Austen, in Five Volumes,” The New Republic, January 30, 1924,

https://newrepublic.com/article/115922/virginia-woolf-jane-austen.

For a comprehensive list of Austen pastiche from the earliest known works until 2000, see Rolf

Breuer, “Jane Austen, etc.: The Completions, Continuations, and Adaptations of Her Novels,” Erfurt

Electronic Studies in English, last modified January 15, 2012,

http://webdoc.gwdg.de/edoc/ia/eese/breuer/biblio.html. See the YA murder mystery series by Tirzah Price,

which currently includes the novels Pride and Premeditation, Sense and Second-Degree Murder, and

Manslaughter Park. See the romantic comedy novel What Would Jane Austen Do? by Linda Corbett. See

Ruth Wilson’s memoir The Jane Austen Remedy: It is a Truth Universally Acknowledged that a Book Can

Change a Life.

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Just as the desire to experience more Austen is nothing new, neither is the

question of her appeal, and while the matter will likely never be settled, much has been

written about the authenticity of her characters and their sustained relevancy over time.

Though few critical reviews of Austen’s works were written at the times of the novels’

release, and the reviews that were published tended to be brief, some of these first critics

noted a peculiarity in the way that Austen presented her characters. For instance, an 1815

review of Emma published anonymously in the Quarterly Review, but later attributed to

the acclaimed early novelist Sir Walter Scott, reads:

We, therefore, bestow no mean compliment upon the author of Emma, when we

say that, keeping close to common incidents, and to such characters as occupy the

ordinary walks of life, she has produced sketches of such spirit and originality,

that we never miss the excitation which depends upon a narrative of uncommon

events, arising from the consideration of minds, manners, and sentiments, greatly

above our own. In this class, she stands alone; for scenes of Miss Edgeworth are

laid in higher life, varied by more romantic incident, and by her remarkable power

of embodying and illustrating national character. But the author of Emma confines

herself chiefly to middling classes of society…The narrative of all her novels is

composed of such common occurrences as may have fallen under the observation

of most folks; and her dramatis personae conduct themselves upon the motive and

principles which the readers may recognize as ruling their own and that of most of

their acquaintances.

Thus, according to Scott, Austen’s original readers could to relate to her characters

because they were able to recognize in those fictional people the same “motive and

principles” that governed their own behaviors as well as the behaviors “of most of their

acquaintances.” The ability to identify with the fictional characters in Sense and

Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma contrasted with experiences

readers that had with the characters that Austen’s contemporaries, such as Maria

Sir Walter Scott, “Review of Emma,” in Quarterly Review, XIV (1815): 188-201. Reprinted in

Discussions of Jane Austen, ed. William Heath. (Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1961), 7-8.

145

Edgeworth, were creating—readers felt far removed from those creatures because those

characters seemed to live much more romantic lives and function in entirely different

social circles than most of the reading audiences in England did.

Richard Whately’s piece “Modern Novels,” which was published in the Quarterly

Review in 1821, five years after Scott’s review, bemoans Austen’s death (which Henry

Austen had announced only three years prior) in a fashion similar to Woolf. And though

Whately, like so many of Austen’s early critics, focuses primarily on Austen’s “merits”

as “a Christian writer,” he, too, comments on the realistic “circumstances of the story,”

which:

are not forced upon the reader, but he is left to collect them (though without any

difficulty) for himself: her’s [sic] is that unpretending kind of instruction which is

furnished by real life; and certainly no author has ever conformed more closely to

real life, as well as in the incidents, as in the characters and description…

The vivid distinctness of description, the minute fidelity of detail, and air of

unstudied ease in the scenes represented, carry the reader’s imagination along

with the story, and give fiction the perfect appearance of reality, she possesses in

a high degree…

For Whately, this “perfect appearance of reality” which Austen’s novels possess in “a

high degree” means that, aside from their realistic plots and settings, her novels can also

be appreciated because, though her characters make mistakes—as any real human being

would—the protagonists ultimately act in good taste, learning and growing from those

mistakes, and therefore, they serve as practical models for Austen’s readers who should,

like those characters, strive to gain self-knowledge so as to best fulfill their duties both as

responsible citizens and practicing Christians.

Richard Whately, “Modern Novels,” in Quarterly Review, XXIV (1821): 352-76. Reprinted in

Discussions of Jane Austen, ed. William Heath. (Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1961), 11-12.

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Not all critics were as positive in their assessments as Scott and Whately had

been. Austen’s contemporary and a fellow female novelist, Charlotte Brontë famously

criticized Jane’s characters for lacking passion, but even she could not deny the accuracy

with which Austen depicted them otherwise. In the same letter, written to her editor,

William S. Williams on April 12, 1850, wherein Brontë complains of the characters in

Emma being cold and indifferent, she also praises the intricate detail with which the same

novel depicts the lives of the gentry, writing:

I have likewise read one of Miss Austen’s works—Emma—read it with interest

and with just the degree of admiration which Miss Austen herself would have

thought sensible and suitable. Anything like warmth or enthusiasm—anything

energetic, poignant, heart-felt is utterly out of place in commending these works:

all such demonstration the authoress would have met with a well-bred sneer,

would have calmly scorned as outré and extravagant. She does her business of

delineating the surface of the lives of genteel English people curiously well. There

is a Chinese fidelity, a miniature delicacy in the painting. She ruffles her reader by

nothing vehement, disturbs him by nothing profound. The passions are perfectly

unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy

sisterhood. Even to the feelings she vouchsafes no more than an occasional

graceful but distant recognition—too frequent converse with them would ruffle

the smooth elegance of her progress. Her business is not half so much with the

human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands, and feet. What sees keenly,

speaks aptly, moves flexibly, it suits her to study; but what throbs fast and full,

though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of life and

the sentient target of death—this Miss Austen ignores. She no more, with her

mind’s eye, beholds the heart of her race than each man, with bodily vision, sees

the heart in his heaving breast. Jane Austen was a complete and most sensible

lady, but a very incomplete and rather insensible (not senseless) woman. If this is

heresy, I cannot help it. If I said it to some people (Lewes for instance) they

would directly accuse me of advocating exaggerated heroics, but I am not afraid

of your falling into any such vulgar error.

Brontë clearly intended her critique to censure more than celebrate. Even so, she admits

that Austen’s admirers will likely consider her analysis “heresy,” George Henry Lewes

Clement K. Shorter, Charlotte Brontë and Her Circle (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1896),

399-400. Italics are the author’s.

147

among them. Lewes had written positively about Brontë’s Jane Eyre in his anonymous

1847 article in Fraser’s Magazine “Recent Novels: French and English.” However, in the

introduction of that piece, as he describes the kinds of people who read novels and what

he calls “their peculiar taste,” he proclaims:

Fielding and Miss Austen are the greatest novelists in our language. Scott has

greater invention, more varied powers, a more poetical imagination; but although

his delineation of character is generally true, as far as it goes, it is never deep; and

his deficiencies are singularly apparent…when he ventures into the perilous

sphere of contemporary life…If Scott is preferred to all others, we have no quarrel

on that score; we have merely to record an individual opinion, that great—indeed

astonishing as Scott’s powers of attraction are, we would rather have written

Pride and Prejudice or Tom Jones than any of the Waverly novels. Scott was the

Aristo of prose romance…but if he was an Aristo, he was not a Shakespeare…he

had not, above all, those two Shakespearian qualities—tenderness and passion…

Now, Miss Austen has been called a prose Shakespeare; and among others, by

Macaulay. In spite of the sense of incongruity which besets us in the words prose

Shakespeare, we confess the greatness of Miss Austen, her marvelous dramatic

power, seems more than anything in Scott akin to the greatest quality in

Shakespeare.

According to Lewes, novel readers “most heartily enjoy and applaud” the presence of

“truth in the delineation of life and character: incidents however wonderful, adventures

however perilous, are almost as naught when compared with the deep and lasting interest

excited by any thing [sic] like a correct representation of life.” It is this correct

representation of life that he so appreciates in Austen’s novels—her ability to depict

George Henry Lewes, “Recent Novels in French and English,” Fraser’s Magazine XXXVI, no.

CCXVI (December 1847): 687.

Ibid., 687. Italics are the author’s. Here Lewes ranks the greatness of Henry Fielding and Jane

Austen over that of Sir Walter Scott. Fielding (author of Tom Jones), along with Samuel Richardson

(Austen’s favorite author), are considered the fathers of the English novel. At the time that Lewes was

writing, Scott’s literature was widely acclaimed, and he was known as the greatest of novelists, with his

achievements in prose being compared to Shakespeare’s in verse. However, Lewes disagrees, believing that

while Scott is the best at writing prose romance, Jane Austen is more comparable to Shakespeare. Lewes

credits Thomas Babbington Macaulay for making the comparison previously. See “Macaulay on Jane

Austen,” in Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage Volume 1, 1811-1870, ed. B.C. Southam (London:

Routledge, 2005), 135-36.

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scenes and characters that ring true with audiences—which places her above even the

renowned man of letters Sir Walter Scott in Lewes’s estimation, and, perhaps through a

veil of jealousy, Brontë is reacting to Lewes’s high praise of the tenderness and passion

apparent in Austen’s works, claiming instead that there are none.

As one of Austen’s most ardent admirers, Lewes’s written expression of his

devotion to her did not end with this publication. He mentions Austen again five years

later in an article entitled “The Lady Novelists” in the Westminster Review. In this

instance, though he includes Jane Eyre in a group of works he labels “perfection,” Lewes

continues to rank Austen’s work above Brontë’s. A few lines later, he writes “as an artist,

Miss Austen surpasses all male novelists that ever lived.” Then, after dispensing with his

introduction, Lewes begins his discussion of the titular lady novelists with none other

than Jane Austen, and at this point he expounds upon his earlier statement:

First and foremost let Jane Austen be named, the greatest artist that has ever

written, using the term to signify the most perfect mastery over the means to her

end. There are heights and depths in human nature Miss Austen has never scaled

nor fathomed, there are worlds of passionate existence into which she has never

set foot; but although this is obvious to every reader, it is equally obvious that she

has risked no failures by attempting to delineate that which she had not seen. Her

circle may be restricted, but it is complete. Her world is a perfect orb, and vital.

Life, as it presents itself to an English gentlewoman peacefully yet actively

engaged in her quiet village, is mirrored in her works with a purity and fidelity

that must endow them with interest for all time. To read one of her books is like

an actual experience of life: you know the people as if you had lived with them,

and you feel something of personal affection towards them.

Ibid., 678.

George Henry Lewes. “Lady Novelists,” Westminster Review (1852), in A Victorian Art of

Fiction: Essays on the Novel in British Periodicals, 1851-1869, ed. John Charles Olmsted (New York:

Garland Publishing, Inc., 1979), 43.

Ibid., 44.ii

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Though Lewes acknowledges the limited scope of Austen’s world, which other critics

have viewed as a weakness, he contends that the restricted nature of her sphere is what

allowed her to create the sorts of realistic characters to which her readers could and still

can relate. According to Lewes, Austen’s characters are imbued with this distinct

relatability, which means that:

Of all imaginative writers she is the most real. Never does she transcend her own

actual experience, nor does her pen trace a line that does not touch the experience

of others. Herein we recognise the first quality of literature. We recognise the

second and more special quality of womanliness in the tone and point of view:

they are novels written by a woman, an Englishwoman, a gentlewoman; no

signature could disguise that fact; and because she has so faithfully (although

unconsciously) kept to her own womanly point of view, her works are durable.

There is nothing of the doctrinaire in Jane Austen; nor a trace of woman’s

“mission;” but as the most truthful, charming, humorous, pure-minded, quick-

witted, and unexaggerated of writers, female literature has reason to be proud of

her.

Lewes credits the durability of Austen’s work to the believability of her characters and

the world in which they live, small as it is, and he is correct in doing so. For it is this

believability that allows Janeites of the past and present to imagine that they inhabit

Austen’s world as well.

Modern scholars have come to similar conclusions. Molly MacDuff writes that

the “seemingly immortal quality of Austen’s work comes from her characters; they are

relatable, realistic, and emotional.” According to this article, she believes that despite

being written more than two centuries ago, Austen’s “feisty, kind-hearted, and

memorable characters” continue to resonate with modern women because they, like the

“young heroines she depicts in Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion

are women learning through experience. They are developing a strong emotional

Ibid., 45. Italics are the author’s.

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intelligence,” and this strength “creates agency within the heroine’s journey.” Janet Todd

agrees with MacDuff, citing the factor that contributes most to “Jane Austen’s universal

popularity” as “her ability to create the illusion of psychologically believable and self-

reflecting characters.” In rereading Austen’s novels, Todd finds that they:

are investigations of selfhood, particularly female, the oscillating relationship of

feeling and reason, the interaction of present and memory, and the constant

negotiation between desire and society. Charlotte Brontë memorably wrote that

Austen avoided the passions, that she rejected ‘even a speaking acquaintance with

that stormy Sisterhood’ Although in a mode quite different from Brontë, Jane

Austen—sometimes ironic, rarely unrestrained—has nonetheless become…a

writer about passion…through her representation of character, she reveals a

fascination with its literary construction and narcissistic power—and at times its

absurdity.

Todd alludes to a dichotomy that all women living in patriarchal societies face. In their

seminal work, The Madwoman in the Attic, which was first published in 1979, Sandra

Gilbert and Susan Gubar also address this conflict when exploring the reason that female

readers can so easily identify with Austen’s characters. For them, the relatability comes

down to Austen’s “consciousness of the unique dilemma of all women, who must

acquiesce in their status as objects after an adolescence in which they experience

themselves as free agents.” That is, as real women do, all of Austen’s female characters

must compromise their autonomy in some way to gain social acceptance. Further, when

Austen allows her characters to behave in ways that occasionally violate nineteenth-

century social mores, “She describes both her own dilemma and, by extension, that of all

Molly MacDuff, “The Emotionally Intelligent Heroine in Jane Austen,” The Limestone Review

(2020): 186. Janet Todd, The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2006), ix.

Ibid., ix. Here, Todd quotes Brontë’s letter to W.S. Williams which I have previously

mentioned, though she references Margaret Smith’s The Letters of Charlotte Brontë.

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women who experience themselves as divided, caught in the contradiction between their

status as human beings and their vocation as females.”

Wild and willful women, such as Lydia Bennet and—to a much lesser extent—

her sister Elizabeth, are famously condemned in Pride and Prejudice by other older

female characters for eschewing proper, ladylike behavior; Lydia is shamed for running

away with Wickham before marriage and Elizabeth for rejecting Mr. Collins’s proposal

of marriage for convenience. The overly sensitive Marianne Dashwood of Sense and

Sensibility is regarded as irresponsible and careless by her older sister, Elinor. Mansfield

Park’s Frances Ward Price is looked down upon by her sisters because of her

disadvantageous marriage to a marine with no means of upward mobility, and they

extend this condescension to her daughter, Fanny. Even the titular Emma Woodhouse is

seen as spoiled and arrogant for entertaining herself with matchmaking schemes.

Additionally, the lesser-known Susan Vernon of Lady Susan is depicted as cold and

manipulative because, as a new widow, she focuses on seducing men in order to maintain

the lifestyle to which she had been accustomed rather than caring for her daughter.

However, each of these characters’ behavior, just as real women’s, cannot be

reduced to simple descriptors such as “proper” or “improper,” “good” or “bad,” or “right”

or “wrong.” After all, even Austen herself struggled with this contradiction. According to

Gilbert and Gubar:

Although all women may be, as she is, split between the conflicting desire for

assertion in the world and retreat into the security of the home—speech and

silence, independence and dependency—Austen implies that this psychic conflict

can be resolved. Because the relationship between personal identity and social

role is so problematic for women, the emerging self can only survive with a

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the

Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 161 and 155.

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sustained double vision. As Austen’s admirers have always appreciated, she does

write out accommodations, even when admitting their cost: since the polarities of

fainting and going mad are extremes that tempt but destroy women, Austen

describes how it is possible for a kind of dialectic of self-consciousness to

emerge. While this aspect of female consciousness has driven many women to

schizophrenia, Austen's heroines live and flourish because of their contradictory

projections.

That they are no shining examples of perfect womanhood means Austen’s heroines, as

well as her minor female characters, read as much more authentic than the romantic

ideals or didactic models presented by Radcliffe’s and Edgeworth’s depictions of women.

Thus, as human nature has remained essentially unchanged in the intervening centuries,

the element of realism with which Austen imbued her characters remains and resonates as

much with modern Janeites as it did with those living in Austen’s time.

The astonishing relatability of Austen’s characters, particularly for women, is one

of the earliest critical observations that has been and continues to be made about her

works. Austen scholars throughout time, such Scott, Lewes, and Todd view this as an

integral part of her widespread and long-standing appeal. Feminist critics Gilbert and

Gubar agree, and it is upon this belief that the current chapter is built; for Austen’s

distinct realism allows modern Janeites to reach across time and commune with her

through engaging either with her characters or with the places and information associated

with Austen herself. In this endless quest for additional time with Austen, some of the

devotees desiring an even more intimate connection with her achieve this intimacy by

adapting Austen’s texts into new works of fiction, and so long as these modern Janeites

are able to infuse their own stories with the same peculiar relatability that has sustained

Ibid., 162-63.

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Austen for centuries, then their fresh interpretations have the potential to draw in new

readers, thereby sustaining and perhaps expanding the Janeite population.

Befriending Jane & Patronizing Her Library

Though women of the twenty-first century have much more economic and social

autonomy than their predecessors did during the Regency period, the societal pressures

that modern women face are not dissimilar to those faced by Austen’s female characters.

In turn, the emotions her characters feel are undeniably similar to those that women

actually experience in their own present-day lives, and as such, today’s Janeites can

easily recognize the presence of a Marianne Dashwood or an Emma Woodhouse within

their circles of acquaintance (or even themselves), which means that through this

relatability, many are also able to forge a close connection to Miss Austen herself in a

variety of ways, such as when they are reading and rereading her novels and buying

Austen-themed merchandise. However, an even more intimate connection with Jane can

be achieved when Janeite women writers create their own stories based upon the six

novels she originally penned.

Claudia Johnson calls the common desire that Austen’s most devoted readers

feel—that inexhaustible longing to spend time in Austen’s world—“an act of friendship.”

To Johnson’s way of thinking, “to know Jane Austen…is to desire to be her friend.”

Potential Janeites, then, begin to know Austen the moment they become absorbed in one

of her novels or a film adaptation, and once they finish reading or watching that particular

work, they naturally want to repeat their happy experience, to begin to know Jane on a

more intimate level, and so choose another Austen book or movie through which to do

so. The more they interact with her texts or the texts based upon them, the more new

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Janeites learn about Austen and her characters, and the more they want to befriend her.

However, as Johnson explains, “Jane Austen is no ordinary friend, and the purpose [of

befriending her] is not simply to get to become acquainted with her in any ordinary sense;

rather, it is to ‘hold communion sweet’ with her ‘mind and heart.’” For literary-leaning

Janeites, then, holding this sweet communion with Austen’s mind and heart takes the

form of creating new written works based upon Austen’s original novels.

Adapting Austen for new audiences means that even as they befriend Jane, these

women writers become patrons of Austen’s Library, an archive of literary elements that

she unwittingly began around 1787 as she wrote the earliest pieces of her juvenilia and to

which she continued donating for the next thirty years in the form of every novel and

letter she wrote until her death in 1817. Fortunately, as the abundance of extant archontic

material attests, the untimely end of Austen’s life did not necessitate the end of her

Library. This is because, like all archives, Austen’s Library “is never closed. It opens out

of the future.” As such, when Jane’s siblings edited and published Persuasion and

Northanger Abbey in her stead, they contributed to the Library’s collection. In the same

way, Sybil Brinton added a volume to its shelves in 1913 with Old Friends and New

Fancies, as did Eliza Leslie when she published her serialized short story, “The Beaux”

in MacLean’s Magazine seventy years earlier.

Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

2012),70. Here Johnson quotes Constance Hill, Jane Austen: Her Homes & Her Friends, (London: John

Lane, 1902), viii, and therein Hill quotes Henry Austen’s “Biographical Notice.”

Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” Diacritics 25, no. 2 (Summer 1995):

45. http://www.jstor.org/stable/465144. See also Sarah Glosson, Performing Jane: A Cultural History of

Jane Austen Fandom, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020), and Abigail Derecho,

“Archontic Literature: A Definition, a History, and Several Theories of Fan Fiction,” in Fan Fiction and

Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, ed. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse.

Jefferson, (North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2006) 61-78.

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By withdrawing characters, settings, plots, and/or pieces of dialogue from

Austen’s bank of ideas and subsequently intertwining them with new characters and

settings to create original works of literature, these Janeite women writers, and those who

succeeded them, have simultaneously befriended Austen and expanded the public’s

shared collection of Austenian pastiche. Even as they express their admiration for Austen

in written works, Janeites are producing cultural artifacts that will attract new audiences

and, in turn, induce others to befriend Jane and patronize her Library. Johnson likens this

method of cultural production, in which Janeites engage, to procreation, explaining that

“The reproduction they are interested in pertains to the dissemination of Janeite culture

itself. Just as Austen brought forth [Henry] James, Janeites bring forth other Janeites—by

recruitment.” To support this claim, she recalls Rudyard Kipling’s famous short story,

“The Janeites,” wherein the protagonist is praised for “bringin’ forth abundant fruit, like a

good Janeite.’” Thus, as “good Janeites,” in their pursuit of a friendship with Jane, these

authors are giving birth to new characters and plots, and as such, the once exclusive Cult

of Jane will continue to grow exponentially so long as these devotees create and share

their own equally relatable adaptations with others. To illustrate, what follows are

examples of archontic texts which successfully induce their readers to befriend Austen

through new versions of her characters with whom modern readers can identify.

Radical Relatability: Reworking Pride and Prejudice

A vast number of works of literature have been added to Austen’s Library in the

last two centuries, and as a result of Austenmania, more of them are being published all

Claudia Johnson, “The Divine Miss Jane: Jane Austen, Janeites, and the Discipline of Novel

Studies,” in Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees, ed. Deidre Lynch, (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 2000), 33; Rudyard Kipling, “The Janeites,” MacLean’s Magazine (Toronto), May 16, 1924, 50.

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the time. Despite the passing of nearly thirty years since this global fascination with all

things Austen began, the demand for adaptations both direct and indirect is seemingly

inexhaustible. Regardless of genre, each of these archontic texts contains a new narrative,

a story that weaves yet another thread into the Janeite cultural tapestry, breathing new life

into Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram, Emma Woodhouse and George Knightly, Anne

Eliot and Fredrick Wentworth, and all of Austen’s other protagonists. As discussed in the

previous chapter, perhaps the most well-known and commercially successful of these

texts aiming to update Austen is Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary.

Bridget Jones’s Diary is most widely recognized as a bestselling novel which

inspired an eponymous feature-length film; however, the record of Bridget’s fictional

thoughts originally took the form of a London newspaper column. Though neither

Fielding’s articles for the column nor her novel is a direct adaptation of Pride and

Prejudice, little analysis is required to note similarities between Bridget Jones and

Elizabeth Bennet. Even less is needed when comparing Fitzwilliam, the original Mr.

Darcy, to Mark Darcy, his ‘90s namesake of Fielding’s creation. Subsequent novels and

films in the Bridget Jones franchise adapt Austen’s characters in much more radical

ways—such as in the most recent film, Bridget Jones’s Baby, which depicts an unwed

and pregnant Bridget who does not know whether Mark Darcy is the father of her child—

but even as their lives become less and less similar to those of Lizzie and Darcy, Bridget

and Mark remain relatable characters for modern audiences, meaning that Fielding’s

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archontic texts are not only popular and profitable, but they are also successful

adaptations of Pride and Prejudice.

A Traditionalist’s Tale: Trollope’s Sense and Sensibility

Though Fielding’s indirect adaptation of Pride and Prejudice is indeed the most

popular and lucrative Austenian derivative, a Janeite author need not make such drastic

alterations to the source text for her work to succeed in attracting new acolytes. From the

time Sense and Sensibility was first published in 1811, it has been adapted numerous

times, with some adaptations, such as Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, being

more indirect than others. However, Joanna Trollope’s 2013 publication, Sense &

Sensibility: A Novel, the first work in a series of modern British rewritings based on

Austen’s original texts called The Austen Project, follows Austen’s original plot with a

closeness that traditional Janeites will appreciate, and what is more, her characters retain

the peculiar relatability for which Austen has long been known.

In Trollope’s version, the four Dashwood women are still displaced from their

beloved Norland Park after the younger Henry Dashwood’s sudden death. Sensitive

Marianne is once more crushed by Willoughby’s indiscretion and disregard for others.

Sensible Elinor nearly loses Edward once again because of a hasty promise coupled with

his unfaltering sense of honor, all the while suffering through this disappointment in

silence. And appropriately, the novel closes with a happy ending for the modern

For more on Bridget Jones’s Diary, see “Chapter Three: Paper Will Hardly Hold It All” in this

book.

Fittingly, The Austen Project aims to encourage modern readers’ appreciation of Austen

through the written word. As of the writing of this chapter, in partnership with HarperCollins, The Austen

Project has published this and three other adaptations of Austen’s other works: Northanger Abbey by Val

McDermid (which is discussed in this chapter), Emma by Alexander McCall Smith, and Eligible by Curtis

Sittenfield. Admittedly, this book cannot boast of widespread fame; however, it does have a 3.7 out of 5

ranking on Amazon and a similar ranking of 3.5 out of 5 on Goodreads.

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protagonists. In addition, Trollope retains some of Austen’s famous wit as she depicts the

foibles of the rich and titled, the modern landed gentry. Most importantly, though,

Trollope’s characters are depicted in relatable life experiences, just as Austen’s are. In

both books, Elinor’s pain is just as evident, even through her mask of stoicism, as

Marianne’s feelings of betrayal by and subsequent burgeoning love for Colonel Brandon.

Of course, Trollope does alter many small aspects. For instance, her characters

speak and behave in modern ways, such as referring to each other with familiar or pet

names. Sir John Middleton is most often called Jonno; Elinor Dashwood is Ellie; and

Marianne is simply M. Technological advancements such as electricity, cars, cell phones,

laptops with Wi-Fi connectivity, and iPods are ubiquitous for Trollope’s characters, as

they are for much of modern humanity. Also, nearly all of the main characters are

employed or have occupational skills by which they can earn their livings, regardless of

their sexes or social positions, including the baronet, Sir John Middleton, who runs a

successful clothing business. Elinor has nearly completed an architectural degree at the

start of the novel, and even her mother once worked as a teacher before meeting the elder

Henry Dashwood and staying home to take care of their children.

These updates are innocuous by modern standards and do not alter the essence of

the story; however, some of the modernized aspects of Sense & Sensibility: A Novel

could be considered irreverent by Janeite purists who would rather retain a more rigid

code of behavior similar to that of the Regency. For example, Trollope’s “Mrs.

Dashwood” (whom Trollope calls Belle), loses possession of Norland Park to her

“stepson” because she was never officially married to Mr. Dashwood; the characters use

mild profanity when upset or frustrated, and John Willoughby introduces Colonel

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Brandon’s foster daughter to illegal drugs to which she becomes addicted. None of these

aspects could have appeared in Austen’s original text because they would have been

considered much too scandalous for publication in polite society. However, Austen’s

characters also behave inappropriately within the context of their own time. John

Dashwood’s wife Fanny’s behavior towards her husband’s stepmother and half-sisters is

abominably rude in Austen’s text as well as Trollope’s, as is his failure to honor the

promise he made to his father. Similarly, Willoughby’s self-centeredness disgusts readers

in either decade.

Ultimately, though Austen’s novel is distinct from Trollope’s, Trollope’s is a

particularly successful update as she not only preserves Austen’s original plot, but she

also retains the distinctive flaws that make Austen’s antagonists so memorable and

relatable to modern readers, which enables her to evoke reactions that mirror the ones

Austen evokes. Thus, when Janeites read her adaptation, they are increasing their

emotional connection to Jane. Trollope brings a classic into the modern-day, and

somehow very little of Austen is lost in the translation. Much like the original text, it is a

quick, enjoyable read that paints an accurate picture of the ways that reason and romance

color people’s perceptions of real-life experiences.

Adapting the Act for YA: Kate Watson’s Seeking Mansfield

Unlike its predecessors, Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield

Park is not a title commonly associated with the name Jane Austen nowadays, except in

the minds of Janeites; nevertheless, a successful adaptation of it can still acquaint new

Joanna Trollope, Sense and Sensibility: A Novel. (New York: Harper, 2013), 7-8 and 214. Jane

Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. Claudia L. Johnson (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002), 13-

16, 148-51, and 268.

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readers with Austen. Kate Watson’s Seeking Mansfield, a young adult novel published in

2017, is one of the most recent attempts to reintroduce Austen’s third novel to modern

audiences. In this traditional reworking, Watson moves the setting from nineteenth-

century England to twenty-first-century America. Austen’s fifteen-year-old Fanny Price

becomes seventeen-year-old Finley Price of Chicago, and though Fanny and Finley are

both poor relatives of the wealthy Bertram family, the circumstances that bring them to

Mansfield differ. While Fanny is sent to live with her relatives at Mansfield Park because

her mother has married a marine who is unable to support his large family, Finley is

taken in by family friends who live on Mansfield Square after her alcoholic, drug-

addicted mother violently abuses her and is imprisoned for it.

Watson’s use of such themes is typical of the young adult genre, and it helps

explain Finley’s attitude of indebtedness to the Bertrams for modern audiences with

whom Fanny’s plight—one of a poorer relation with no means or social connections and,

therefore, no way to better her circumstances on her own—might not resonate. However,

concepts such as blended families, domestic abuse, and substance abuse would certainly

be familiar to Watson’s readers. Finley’s mother’s cruel physical abuse of her daughter is

repugnant to Watson’s readers, just as Aunt Nora’s verbal abuse is. Though Austen does

not address themes of addiction and abuse in her original text, she does emphasize the

contrast between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. Despite the major cultural and

societal shifts that have taken place in the two centuries since Austen wrote the original

text, human emotions and reactions to societal pressures remain essentially unchanged.

Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. by Claudia L. Johnson. (New York: W.W. Norton &

Company, 1998), 6-7. Kate Watson, Seeking Mansfield. (Mendota Heights: Flux, 2017), 197-199.

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Modern and regency readers alike would find Mrs. Norris and Aunt Nora’s treatment of

the protagonists inappropriate and rude. And while Fanny’s mother, Deidre’s behavior is

typical of a woman in her reduced circumstances, and therefore not thoroughly critiqued

by Austen, Henry and Mary Crawford’s and Tom and Maria Bertram’s behaviors are

critiqued in much the same way that their counterparts’ behaviors are in Seeking

Mansfield.

Like Austen, Watson also uses acting and the theatre as the backdrop for her

adaptation. Though shy and reserved because of past experiences, Finley is passionate

about her love of the theater and performing arts as seen in her obsession with movies,

theatrical productions, and the large amount of trivial knowledge she has acquired about

them, as well as her affection for the Vows Theater (an allusion to Lovers Vows, the play

that is nearly performed in Austen) and her desire to be accepted in the Mansfield Theater

Program. Unlike some interpretations of Mansfield Park, Watson’s work does not

question the morality of plays and performing them but rather the morality of those who

perform roles in public instead of presenting themselves as they really are. Harlan and

Emma Crawford (the modern Henry and Mary Crawford), teen actors who have spent

their lives in Hollywood, perform on stage in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but they are

also seen performing—that is, behaving disingenuously—in their everyday lives. From

Finley’s point of view, readers are shown that Emma deliberately makes herself

appealing to Oliver Bertram (Watson’s version of Edmund) so that she can become his

girlfriend. Readers also discover that Harlan has tried to begin a relationship with

In book publishing, the genre of young adult (or YA) fiction is generally marketed to readers

ranging in age from twelve to eighteen. In these works, the young protagonist often must overcome

domestic violence, addiction, or poverty and eventually experiences a moment of epiphany as he or she

comes of age.

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Oliver’s sister, Juliette (a combination of Austen’s Julia and Maria Bertram), all the while

knowing that Juliette is dating someone else. Then, from Oliver’s point of view, readers

learn, by overhearing the Crawfords’ conversation, that Harlan has also been deliberate in

perusing Finley. As a result, both Crawfords seem calculating, somewhat cold, and not

quite trustworthy. No matter which century readers are from, they have met people like

both sets of Crawfords who deliberately mislead the people around them, and regardless

of when such manipulative people are living, their actions are eventually hurtful to

others. Yet Harlan and Emma are not the only characters who perform in public. Finley

and Oliver each pretend that they do not have romantic feelings for the other to preserve

their friendship, and when each of them is dating a Crawford, each one pretends to be

happy for the other, though that is not the case. This pretense, though as false as the

Crawfords’, stems from reasons that are more selfless, as Oliver and Finley are each

pretending so that the other’s feelings are not hurt, and their situation rings all too true

with those who have fallen for close friends and had to tread carefully as a result.

At the conclusions of both novels, Fanny and Finley have developed a great deal.

Fanny has grown from a girl into a woman, and as Edmund’s wife, she will no longer be

dependent upon her uncle’s goodwill. Similarly, Finley has found her voice, value, and

place within the Bertram family as any good YA heroine must. And though the

Crawfords have changed each of the protagonists’ lives, such changes ultimately bring

about Fanny and Finley’s happy endings.

Watson, Seeking Mansfield, 48-49, 98-99, and 211-12. The technique of using two first-person

limited narrators who tell their story in alternation is typical of novels in the YA genre. The use of dual

narrators as well as most of the other tenets of YA literature serve Watson well in her adaptation of

Mansfield Park, particularly because Fanny is arguably Austen’s most introspective and dynamic character.

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Watson has managed to plumb the rich depths of the original text and bring out

her own compelling interpretation which proves to be a successful update of Austen. She

explores Finley Price’s psychology just as completely as Austen explores Fanny Price’s

and though both characters question the morality of people’s actions as they search for

meaning in their vastly different worlds, Watson’s modern dilemmas effectively emulate

the ethical issues that Austen’s characters face and the emotions that they, in turn, display

in such a way that these feelings are familiar to all readers. Mansfield Park might be the

most overlooked of all of Austen’s novels, but as Watson shows, it could also be the most

relatable.

Appreciated by Austen Alone: Juxtaposing Jane’s Emma &Three of its Retellings

When describing the protagonist of the last of the books that she, herself,

published, Jane Austen admitted that Emma Woodhouse is “a heroine whom no one but

myself will much like.” Given this frank assessment, it is unsurprising that Austen’s 1815

publication is considerably less popular in modern culture than Sense and Sensibility and

Pride and Prejudice, as it has been adapted fewer times and in fewer mediums.

Nevertheless, Emma has become ingrained within contemporary public consciousness in

the form of the popular 1995 teen romantic comedy Clueless, a film starring Alicia

Silverstone which updates Austen’s work. In her novel, The Knight Before Christmas,

Marilyn Brant also modernizes Austen’s story, though she moves the setting from

Highbury in Regency England to the equally fictional Crystal Corners, a small town in

twenty-first century Minnesota, and makes her protagonists new adults. Brant’s version is

not a direct adaptation, and yet the novel is successful in making Austen’s story relatable

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for modern readers who are looking to read a quick, entertaining romance, and as such, it

potentially makes a good introduction to Austen for them.

Brant’s modernized main character is Emma Westwood, an independently

wealthy socialite in her mid-twenties who is “the face of” her parents’ charity foundation,

Westwood International. As the title implies, this adaptation has a holiday theme and

begins just after Thanksgiving as Westwood is finalizing the plans for all the charity

events she sponsors. Though she is an only child, both her parents are living, but they are

away on a European cruise for the majority of the novel, so unlike Emma Woodhouse,

Emma Westwood has few interactions with family members during the course of the

narrative. However, she is similar to Austen’s original character in that when Westwood

is not fulfilling her duties as a representative for the family foundation, she likes to pair

her friends off with one another, a pastime at which she has already been successful at

least twice. Though she keeps herself pleasantly busy shopping at local stores and

preparing for a special Christmas morning event that she holds for all of Crystal Corners’

children in the town square, when she returns to her family’s spacious mansion alone in

the evenings, she cannot shake the loneliness she feels in a house that “echoes with

emptiness.” Then, when the custom display cabinet that she designed to house the

James Edward Austen-Leigh. A Memoir of Jane Austen. 1870, edited by R.W. Chapman.

(Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 157. Together, Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility have generated

the vast majority of derivative material based upon Austen. Interestingly, though Emma has not inspired as

many adaptations across as many mediums, it has served as the basis for two web series, doubling that for

Pride and Prejudice. It should also be noted that Emma has been adapted into several successful stage

plays. Though Clueless retains much of the spirit of Austen’s original text, its script conforms to the

“teenage rom-com” film genre, which was commercially lucrative at the time. As such, Clueless’s

characters are teenagers inhabiting the latter part of the twentieth century and attending high school in

Beverly Hills, California rather than new adults living in the small, fictional English village of Highbury

during the Regency period. For an in-depth discussion of this particular film adaptation, see Chapter 5 in

this book. In book publishing, the genre of “new adult fiction” is marketed to readers between the ages of

eighteen and thirty.

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specially chosen statuettes she plans to give to each child on Christmas morning is

destroyed in a fire, she is at a loss until the same friends for whom she has played

matchmaker remind her that Austin Knightley (Brant’s update of Austen’s George

Knightley), who is a successful contractor, has recently returned home after living in

Minneapolis and might be able to help.

Emma Westwood is initially reluctant to approach Austin because she feels “as if

he’d made a judgment call against her when she was a kid and refused to reverse the

verdict.” Judging by his stand-offish behavior when she recently saw him at the grocery

store and again when she literally bumped into him on the street a short time later, she

does not think he will be interested in rebuilding the cabinet for her. She believes that

Austin does not like her because, like his counterpart George, Austen is the only one of

the characters around Emma Westwood who criticizes her.

Brant’s structure deviates from Austen’s in that Brant narrates her novel using

two third person limited points of view to show readers what both of her protagonists are

thinking. In addition to providing readers with Westwood’s perspective, this construction

also allows them to learn that Westwood’s intuition is correct. In the opening lines of the

second chapter, Brant makes Knightley’s initial disdain for Emma Westwood clear in a

conversation he holds with his sister:

“Seriously, sis, did you have to spill my entire life to that rich and snotty

gossipmonger?” Austin Knightley spit out to his chatty little sister once they were

in the privacy of his truck—with the doors closed and locked and all the windows

rolled up so they couldn’t be overheard—and safely on the road to their parents’

house.

Marilyn Brant, The Knight Before Christmas (Chicago: Twelfth Night Publishing, 2019), 24

and 30. Kindle.

Ibid., 38.

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Emma Westwood. After all these years.

Still as cute as a baby bunny in the snow, but she had a mouth on her as big as a

crocodile’s. He should know. He’d grown up hearing it every day for years on the

school bus. It was always talk, talk, talk. Or, as she’d probably say, socialize,

socialize, socialize… the perfectly put together blonde he remembered from his

childhood may not have been intentionally mean-spirited, but she was practically

cataloging every word that everyone in the store had said aloud, likely for the

purpose of being able to recite it to somebody else later.

This alteration to the narrative structure removes much of the mystery and conversational

subtexts upon which Austen’s original plot hinges. However, in Brant’s much simpler

version of the story, such devices are unneeded, as the conflict does not arise from

Emma’s misinterpretation of others’ actions and feelings. Instead, it arises from Austin

Knightley, who must change his mistaken view of Emma’s behavior before he accepts

what the rest of his family had understood years before—he had actually “liked her for a

long time.” For though Westwood does matchmake, she does not dissuade any of her

friends from dating the people in whom they are interested only to encourage them to

pursue others who might make better matches from her point of view, meaning her

actions in that regard are not seen as meddlesome by anyone other than Austin Knightley

himself.

Emma Westwood is not an entirely static character, however. Toward the end of

the novel, after unsuccessfully attempting to distance herself from Austin because of the

frighteningly new feelings she has developed for him, she video chats with her parents

and has a realization of her own:

For the first twenty-six years, Emma had led a privileged life, and she’d

discovered that the more enriched her own experiences were, the more she had to

give back to others. This was important to her.

Ibid., 12-13. Italics are the author’s.

Ibid., 128.

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The joy she felt in Austin’s company was undeniable. But more than that, it was a

particularly special gift for her because she didn’t just have fun with him, she also

learned new things and grew as a person when they were together.

Other boyfriends had been very nice to her, and she liked that, of course. But her

mind and spirit hadn’t expanded by being with them, so she quickly became

restless around them.

Not so with Austin.

Being with him had positively impacted her world. And as much as she loved her

newly expanding worldview when she was with him, she appreciated his

openness to learning and changing, too. It wasn’t a one-way street, and in Emma’s

opinion, that made them both stronger and better people.

Maybe this relationship stuff, while still full of unknowns, wasn’t as confusing as

she’d thought. Or maybe, she’d just grown up enough to appreciate the beauty of

the mystery.

In the final paragraph above, with its discussion of personal growth and acceptance of the

unknown, Emma Westwood’s inner dialogue faintly echoes that of Emma Woodhouse in

Volume III, Chapter XIII where Austen writes:

Seldom, very seldom does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom

can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken; but

where, as in this case, though the conduct is mistaken, the feelings are not, it may

not be very material—Mr. Knightley could not impute to Emma a more relenting

heart than she possessed, or a heart more disposed to accept of his.

Thus, after all her mistakes are rectified and everything she misconstrued has finally

come to light, Austen’s protagonist finds herself precisely where she never expected to

be—engaged to her old friend George Knightley. At this point, she understands at last

that though a couple’s interactions are always open to interpretation and potential

miscommunication, all that matters in the end is that each person is behaving with

Ibid., 140. Italics are the author’s.

Jane Austen, Emma, Fourth Norton Critical Edition, ed. by George Justice (New York: W.W.

Norton & Company, 2011), 5.

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sincerity and love towards the other, and this is what Knightley had been doing with her

all along.

Marilyn Brant’s The Knight Before Christmas, though decidedly less complex

than the Austen novel upon which it is based, should be considered a successful indirect

adaptation. While the modern Emma that Brant depicts is decidedly more likeable than

Austen’s, this difference only means that the twenty-first century women who read the

novel will more easily identify with her. Both the modern and original Emmas are

independently wealthy and content with their present lives, having no intentions of ever

marrying at the beginning of their stories. Both have shallow views of romance and life in

general, but through the course of their respective novels, they learn and grow from the

experiences they have with other characters, especially those involving their respective

Mr. Knightleys, and they both come to understand that authentic love and respect

between couples can be one of the most meaningful and fulfilling aspects of life.

The simplicity of its plot structure coupled with the seasonal theme of Brant’s

book mean that it will likely go unnoticed by critics, and it will probably be forgotten by

its readers once Christmas is past, and they have moved on to books with more general

themes or those which are centered around other times of year. However, it remains a

successful adaptation of Austen because while readers may forget the title and finer

details of Brant’s book, they will have been able to relate to her version of Emma, so they

will likely remember the characters of Emma Westwood and Austin Knightley with

fondness. Casual readers who did come away with a positive experience will likely also

be interested, perhaps for the first time, in reading Jane Austen, since Brant’s “About the

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Book” section acknowledges “Jane Austen’s classic novel EMMA” as her source

material.

Though unsuccessful adaptations of Austen’s works have not been mentioned

thus far, two such archontic texts based upon Emma do bear brief discussions. When

researching for this book, finding an adaptation of Emma capable of withstanding any

substantive analysis was difficult, and this was not the case with Austen’s other novels;

this is unsurprising, however, as there are fewer literary adaptations of Emma from which

to choose than there are of nearly all the other titles Austen wrote. That such a problem

exists may indicate a reason for the smaller number of reworkings. That is, as Austen

admitted, the protagonist is difficult for readers to like—a fault which can certainly be

overcome through superior plot construction and character development, as the early

commercial success of Emma illustrates. However, without the strength of Austen’s

original structure to propel the story and a depth of plot into which her readers can

immerse themselves, many modern versions fall short. Stephanie Fowers’s 2014 novel

Jane and Austen and Brigid Coady’s 2018 eBook Emma Ever After are two such

examples. Fowers’s novel was self-published, whereas Coady’s was published

professionally by Harper Collins roughly a year after the company had released

Persuading Austen, Coady’s adaptation of Persuasion.

That the titles were released through different publishing avenues is readily

apparent. Fowers’s book is filled with typographical errors so glaring that they are

mentioned in several Goodreads and Amazon reviews of the text. Though most of the

Brant, The Knight Before Christmas, ix. Kindle.

See eBooks by Brigid Coady, Emma Ever After (New York: Harper Collins, 2018) on Kindle,

and Stephanie Fowers Jane and Austin (Salt Lake City: Triad Media and Entertainment, 2014) on Nook.

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mistakes are merely mechanical, some, such as references to the wrong character at the

wrong moment, are confusing and compromise the plot’s integrity. Additionally, the

pacing of the novel moves much slower than necessary, so reaching the end, even for a

Janeite, is a slogging ordeal. Fowers has clearly befriended Jane, though, as she has

named her characters either in reference to their counterparts in Austen’s works, or—in

the case of the titular protagonists—Austen herself. Also, the allusions Fowers makes

throughout the story illustrate her familiarity not only with Austen’s novels, but also with

many of the movies into which those novels have been adapted. Thus, despite its

shortcomings, Jane and Austen could have successfully drawn in new devotees had it

reached an editor’s desk because its characters are believable and exhibit relatable

emotions, though, admittedly, they do not behave as realistically as Austen’s do. Still,

Fowers’s protagonist Jane, much like Jane Austen’s Emma, eventually learns from the

mistakes she makes when meddling in other people’s lives even as she makes

assumptions about them, so when (Fowers’s) Jane realizes that Austen, the man whom

she has loved unrequitedly since the first page of the book, actually does return her

affection, she has earned her happy ending. Such is not the case with Brigid Coady’s

professionally published work.

When compared to Austen’s, Coady’s protagonist (who is likewise called Emma

Woodhouse) is also difficult to like. Both Emmas are self-absorbed and arrogant, each

one believing that she knows what makes a good love match better than even the pairs

she intends to make into couples. They both make careless comments, and after realizing

their terrible mistakes, they apologize and attempt to put things right. And yet, Coady’s

protagonist exhibits an annoying absence of self-knowledge that Austen’s does not. The

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original Emma Woodhouse is aware that she often lacks the determination to see a

project through to completion. She readily admits to laying aside hobbies when she loses

interest in them, even if she has not yet mastered them. Often, she can see the wisdom in

Mr. Knightley’s and Mrs. Weston’s advice and admits that she has been wrong. The

twenty-first century Emma Woodhouse spends the majority of Coady’s novel denying

that her parents’ negligence toward her during childhood has done her emotional damage

from which she has yet to recover, even as an adult, as well as denying that she is in love

with Gee Knightley, who is, ironically, her perfect match. Ultimately, she does achieve

self-actualization, but only when her carefully maintained world has begun to crumble

around her because she has hurt Gee and others with thoughtless biphobic comments, and

subsequently fears that she has lost his friendship forever. Perhaps if Coady’s Emma

were a bit more self-aware, she would be more comparable to Austen’s. As it is, she does

not seem as worthy of Gee’s love as her counterpart is of Mr. Knightley’s.

Brigid Coady’s Emma Ever After is much more successful as boyband fanfiction

with an underlying social commentary on bisexual inclusivity than it is as an adaptation

of Austen. Within the genre of new adult pop romance and the realm of homages to

popular bands such as One Direction, Coady’s novel does achieve its purposes. However,

as an indirect adaptation of Austen’s Emma, it falls considerably short. The modern

Emma’s “cluelessness” is made painfully obvious to readers through overuse of the term

as well as her refusal to notice what is obvious to the reader and other characters around

her. There are also several moments when the narrative is interrupted because of Coady’s

nods and in-jokes aimed at One Direction fans. Some are artfully placed, but others are

inserted inelegantly and act as distractions to a reader without extensive knowledge of

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boy band culture. While Emma Ever After does offer a timely social commentary, unlike

Austen’s, its prose can neither be termed clever nor concise. In failing to capture

Austen’s wit and succinctness, Coady’s adaptation is much less likely than Brant’s to

attract new Janeites, since those who finished this work are probably disinclined to read

classic works of literature and more apt to enjoy pop culture and human interest pieces in

magazines.

Finding Friends & Searching for Captain Wentworth: Jane Odiwe’s Adaptation of

Persuasion

By the time Austen’s last completed novel was published in December of 1817,

she had been dead for six months. As a memorial of sorts, her siblings, Cassandra Austen

and Henry Austen arranged for Persuasion to be printed in the same volume as

Northanger Abbey, a second finished novel which Austen had never published. This

posthumous volume proved to be just as popular with Austen’s original readers as its

predecessors had been, with its entire printing selling out. Despite this, most of the

criticism written about Persuasion and its companion came decades afterward. When

they finally did take notice of Persuasion, however, academics and scholars have

generally praised it, especially appreciating Anne Eliot’s transformation—from biddable

and demure youth to confident and empowered woman—as singular among Austen’s

heroines. Unfortunately, like its predecessor Mansfield Park, Persuasion is often

overlooked by public audiences and is not readily associated with Austen. Predictably,

then, it has been made into few literary adaptations. However, Jane Odiwe’s 2012

reimagining was worth the work required to find it, as she updates Austen using a locale

that allows her to mix elements of the past intriguingly with those of the present. While

Janeites will undoubtedly account for the majority of its audience, Searching for Captain

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Wentworth is a successful archontic text capable of attracting lovers of fantasy and

historical romance as well.

Odiwe opens her time-traveling tale with her protagonist, Sophie Eliot, a young

Englishwoman reeling from a recent breakup with her boyfriend and struggling to launch

her writing career so that she no longer has to depend upon her father to support her.

Sophie receives an unexpected package from her Great Aunt Elizabeth, and the parcel is

revealed to contain a decorative box accompanied by a set of housekeys and a letter

inviting Sophie to take a holiday and stay in her aunt’s house in Bath, where Aunt

Elizabeth hopes that Sophie will become inspired to write a successful novel. The house,

which happens to sit next door to Jane Austen’s former home in Sydney Place, has

belonged to Sophie’s mother’s side of the family since the Regency period. Though it has

been subdivided and there is a tenant living on the ground floor, should she want to visit,

Sophie would have access to all of the other floors. With her father’s encouragement, she

agrees to accept her aunt’s offer and takes the train from London to Bath, and it is here

that the remainder of the story happens.

Rather than trying to relocate Austen’s original setting historically and

geographically, Odiwe uses time travel to relocate her modern heroine to the Bath of Jane

Austen’s day. She also keeps the plot of Persuasion largely intact, though adjustments

are made to accommodate the shifting timelines and their different cultures. Additionally,

there are parallels between most of her characters and those of Austen’s upon whom they

Though Mansfield Park, Persuasion, and Northanger Abbey have been adapted, this has

happened much less often and within much fewer mediums for these titles than Pride and Prejudice, Sense

and Sensibility, and Emma. Nevertheless, Persuasion has served as the source material for a handful of

television productions over the last sixty years, the most recent of which is a series called Rational

Creatures, released in 2019, but no feature films have been released. Occasionally, it has also been adapted

for the stage and radio.

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are based. The story’s element realism has been compromised; however, the realistic

behavior of Odiwe’s characters has not, and by preserving so much of the source

material, Odiwe is able to successfully adapt Persuasion for modern readers and

simultaneously allow them to glimpse enough of Jane’s genius to wish that they, like

Sophie, had been gifted the chance to meet their favorite author in person.

In Odiwe’s novel, while in modern-day Bath, Sophie finds a man’s white leather

glove that her housemate has dropped, and, when she slips it on her hand out of curiosity,

she is transported back in time. She suddenly finds herself inhabiting the body of her

ancestor (also named Sophia Elliot) who, while living in the Bath of 1802, has just met

the daughters of the family living next door, a pair of sisters named Austen. As “Miss

Elliot,” Sophie befriends Jane and Cassy at a time when Jane has yet to be published, so

the world has not yet heard of them. Sophie, however, is astonished to realize that her

new friend is “one of the world’s greatest writers, a novelist of such genius that her books

are still being read and loved two hundred years after her death.”

Sophie’s initial trip through time is as brief as it was accidental, and she quickly

uses the glove to return to the Bath of the present, where she meets her downstairs

neighbor, Josh Strafford, in the Pump House where the same spring water is sold

presently as was during the 1800s. He is as tall and handsome as the corner pub owner

Laura said he would be, and he is the curator of a temporary exhibition on Georgian art

being held at the local museum. While Sophie and he drink glasses of spring water

Jane Odiwe, Searching for Captain Wentworth (Henley on Thames: Paintbox Publishing,

2012), 31-32, Kindle.

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together, she finds that she likes Josh and feels guilty for keeping his white glove, but she

cannot make herself return it to him.

Instead, she retrieves it from her aunt’s box, where she had placed it after

returning to the present, and she tries it on once more. She is again transported to 1802.

Though Sophie quickly grows fond of the Austen sisters, Mr. Elliot, her ancestor

Sophia’s father (owner of both the house in Bath and the palatial Monkford Hall in

Somerset), disapproves of her association with “a country curate and his spinster

daughters” who “are a respectable enough family…but a clergyman is nothing in society.

He has no influence or importance, and no one wishes to know him better.” Therein lies

her conflict because, not only does she want to spend time with Jane and Cassandra, but

this time, Sophie also meets their brother Charles, to whom she immediately finds herself

attracted.

Sophie spends the remainder of the novel traveling back and forth across time by

putting on the glove, which she learns had originally belonged to Charles Austen,

whenever she wants to travel again. While she does like spending time with Josh (who

turns out to be a fellow Janeite whose favorite book is Persuasion, just like hers) in the

present, Sophie is much more interested in Charles, despite Mr. Elliot’s objections and

Charles’s own confession that:

I would like to marry one day. But I have my way and fortune yet to make. Even

if I wished to marry, I could not expect to attract a wife. Not perhaps until I am

made Captain of a frigate of my own will I consider matrimony as a serios

prospect.

Ibid., 62.

Ibid., 133.

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That Charles believes he is an ineligible bachelor because he is only a lieutenant and has

not yet earned a captaincy echoes the opinions of Sir Walter Elliot and Lady Russell

concerning Captain Frederick Wentworth in Persuasion. In chapter three, when Mr.

Shepherd mentions the name Wentworth for the first time, Sir Walter openly admits his

disdain for Frederick’s lack of social position as he recalls being briefly acquainted with

Frederick’s brother in the past:

Mr. Wentworth, the curate of Monkford. You misled me by the term gentleman. I

thought you were speaking of some man of property: Mr Wentworth was nobody,

I remember; quite unconnected; nothing to do with the Strafford family. One

wonders how the names of many of our nobility become so common.

Given his condescension, it is unsurprising that when Frederick asked him for permission

to marry Anne not long afterwards:

Sir Walter, on being applied to, without actually withholding his consent, or

saying it should never be, gave it all the negative of great astonishment, great

coldness, great silence, and a professed resolution of doing nothing for his

daughter. He thought it a very degrading alliance; and Lady Russell, though with

more tempered and pardonable pride, received it as a most unfortunate one.

Thus, though Anne had fallen “rapidly and deeply in love” with Frederick, and he with

her, because of her youth and the high esteem in which she held the opinions of her father

and her late mother’s closest friend:

She was persuaded to believe the engagement a wrong thing: indiscreet, improper,

hardly capable of success, and not deserving it. But it was not a merely selfish

caution, under which she acted, in putting an end to it. Had she not imagined

herself consulting his good, even more than her own, she could hardly have given

him up. The belief of being prudent, and self-denying, principally for his

advantage, was her chief consolation, under the misery of a parting, a final

parting.

Jane Austen, Persuasion, Second Norton Critical Edition, ed. by Patricia Meyer Spacks (New

York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012), 18. Italics are the author’s.

Ibid., 20.

Ibid., 20-21. Italics are the author’s.

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Unlike Anne, who acquiesces to societal pressures regardless of her own desires,

when Sophie becomes frustrated by the limitations of her social position in 1802, she

escapes to the present. However, when she does, Sophie finds that she has been gone

longer and longer each time. She also finds it harder to remain in the present and thereby

separated from Charles. Meanwhile, Josh seems to be attracted to Sophie, and he

eventually invites her to attend the opening of his exhibition, where the two of them have

a nice evening until a beautiful woman named Louisa arrives unexpectedly and is looking

for Josh. Thinking that Louisa must be Josh’s girlfriend, a hurt and disappointed Sophie

leaves the exhibition without saying goodbye. The next day, after Josh leaves her a note

asking that she bring in his mail, Sophie enters his apartment and finds the mate of the

white glove she found, which she uses to return to 1802 in hopes that she can reconnect

with Charles somehow. Though she is ultimately unable to usurp the fate of Miss Elliot in

1802, after returning to the present, Sophie discovers that Josh has been using his white

glove to experience Regency Bath as well, and when he does, he takes the form of

Charles Austen. Once Sophie learns that she has really fallen in love with Josh and that

Josh/Charles returns her love, they are married as swiftly as Anne and Wentworth.

The emotional turmoil that Odiwe’s Sophie feels throughout the novel when

separated from Charles mirrors the turmoil that Anne Elliot feels when she is separated

from Captain Wentworth in Persuasion. In Jane Austen’s novel, despite the passage of

seven years, neither Anne nor Captain Wentworth has ever forgotten the other. For this

reason, Anne rejects Charles Musgrove when he proposes to her, as she is aware that she

is still in love with Wentworth:

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No one had ever come within the Kellynch circle, who could bear a comparison

with Frederick Wentworth, as he stood in her memory. No second attachment, the

only thoroughly natural, happy, and sufficient cure, at her time of life, had been

possible to the nice tone of her mind, the fastidiousness of her taste, in the small

limits of the society around them.

Similarly, Wentworth had been devastated when Anne broke their engagement, and thus,

he is still angry with her after his years at sea, but even as he declares his intent to marry

someone else, “Anne Elliot was not far from his thoughts when he more seriously

described the woman he should wish to meet with. ‘A strong mind with sweetness of

manner’ made the first and the last of the description.”

Just as Anne has longed to be with Frederick, Sophie has longed to be with

Charles, though she has not missed him for seven years as Anne has missed Frederick.

Like Anne, Sophie has no idea that Charles feels the same way about that she does about

him until he tells her so in a letter that he sends to her through his sister Jane:

You alone have brought me to Lyme. For you alone, I think and plan. I offer

myself to you with a heart entirely your own. For it is love that has brought me

here and my confession is that I love you, dearest Sophie, and wish, if it is your

desire also, never to be parted from you again. These weeks we have spent

together have been the happiest I have ever known. Despite every effort on my

behalf to reman impartial, and to deny the sincerity of my feelings, the discovery

that love will find its way into the hardest of hearts is mine.

I will cease writing now, uncertain of my fate, but I hope I shall see you at my

brother’s supper party. A word, or look will be sufficient for me to know whether

I shall seek your father’s permission for your hand this evening or never.

Charles’s letter to Sophie is clearly based upon the letter that Wentworth gives to Anne in

the twenty-third chapter of Persuasion, wherein he writes:

You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late,

that such precious feelings are gone forever. I offer myself to you again with a

heart even more your own than when you broke it eight years and a half ago. Dare

Ibid., 21 and 45.

Odiwe, Searching for Captain Wentworth, 305. Italics are mine.

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not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I

have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been,

but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think

and plan. —Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes?

—I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think

you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing

something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the

tones of that voice when they would be lost to others. Too good, too excellent

creature! You do us justice indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment

and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in

F. W.

I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as

soon as possible. A word, a look, will be enough to decide whether I can enter

your father’s house this evening or never.

Odiwe’s letter draws heavily from Austen’s, even directly copying the italicized phrases,

but along with this superficial imitation, the feelings and behaviors of Odiwe’s characters

imitate those of Austen’s characters as well. Wentworth finds that he is still attracted to

Anne, though she broke his heart, and many years have passed since that time. Charles

finds himself attracted to Sophie, though he is not ready for marriage and he knows

Sophie’s father does not approve of the match. Here, both characters are conflicted, and

yet, each man confesses his love for the protagonist knowing there is a good chance of

rejection. In this way, Odiwe’s characters experience emotions that modern audiences

can easily imagine within themselves, were they to be separated from the people they

love, which illustrates a relatability in her characters that is similar to the one for which

Austen has long been appreciated. As such, it is fitting that while they are discussing their

shared love of Persuasion, Odiwe has Josh tell Sophie, “what’s so brilliant is that Jane

Austen, Persuasion, 167-68.

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Austen always recognizes human frailty. Not one of her characters is wholly bad or good.

It’s what makes them seen so real.”

Odiwe’s adaptation is also successful in that she is keenly aware of Janeites’ need

to befriend Austen and plays to it. Using Sophie’s narrative voice, she acknowledges that

“It’s funny how people talk about Jane Austen as if they know her and her family, but I

suppose there’s something about the way she draws you into her books which makes you

feel you know her quite like a friend.” By allowing her protagonist to interact with

fictional versions of Cassandra, Charles, and Jane Austen, she is providing her readers

with the opportunity to make friends with them even as Sophie does. In a similar fashion,

Odiwe openly addresses Janeites’ unending curiosity about Austen herself when Sophie

tells Josh, “I really would like to find out more about [Austen’s] life. I’d like the answers

to a few questions I have. Everyone has their own idea about Jane Austen, and I’d like to

explore that in some way.” Aside from reading Searching for Captain Wentworth or other

novelized accounts of Austen’s life such as Jon Spence’s Becoming Jane, the only way

for Janeites to commune more closely with Austen would be to make their own archontic

contributions to her Library.

Jane Odiwe’s Searching for Captain Wentworth is one of the most successful

archontic texts included in this chapter. For though she has chosen to create an indirect

adaptation of Persuasion, Odiwe has carefully preserved much of Austen’s plot along

with the spirit of her characters. At first glance, modern readers will recognize the

reference to Persuasion in the title, which will certainly attract any Janeite who happens

Odiwe, Searching for Captain Wentworth, 160.

Ibid., 75 and 90.

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upon it, but the deep connections to Austen’s original text as well as its intriguing

storyline and modern characters makes it an ideal book for them to recommend to their

uninitiated friends. The allusions that are sprinkled unobtrusively throughout the text

(such as character and place names from Persuasion) are a treat for readers who

recognize them, and yet unlike Coady’s attempts at something similar, they are not

jarring and do not inhibit the narrative flow for those who cannot. An avowed Janeite, it

is no surprise that Odiwe has produced an adaptation capable of persuading its readers to

commune not only with her characters and Austen’s, but with Jane Austen herself.

Horror-loving Heroines: Val McDermid’s Modernized Northanger Abbey

As the original companion to Persuasion, Northanger Abbey would likely be

forgotten by modern readers just as often, if not for its singularity among Austen’s other

titles. It is Austen’s only Gothic work, though it was her first finished novel, completed in

1803, prior to even Sense and Sensibility. Northanger Abbey still possesses the satirical

critique and realistic characters that have become synonymous with Austen’s literary

style. However, the element of subtlety that is so appreciated in Pride and Prejudice and

her other works is not present. The unusual nature of this novel as compared to Austen’s

other five titles perhaps explains the number of adaptations based upon it outstripping

that of Persuasion.

In her eponymous update, published in 2014, Val McDermid, a popular crime

writer for adults in the United Kingdom, presents readers with a fittingly clever and

Among them are at least four pieces of derivative literature and several film and theatrical

adaptations, including two made-for-television miniseries, one released in 1986, and one released in March

of 2007. The screenplay for the latter was written by Andrew Davies, whose 1995 script for Pride and

Prejudice was instrumental in creating Austenmania. Northanger Abbey has also been adapted for the radio

and into an audio drama as well as two YouTube web series.

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mysterious tale, that, though a bit radical, is a successful indirect adaptation of Austen’s

Northanger Abbey, especially for readers of YA literature. Like Trollope does in Sense &

Sensibility: A Novel, McDermid retains as much of Austen’s original plot and characters

as possible while bringing them from Regency Bath into the Edinburg of the twenty-first

century. Seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland becomes Cat Moreland, also seventeen;

and though both young women are consumed with becoming the embodiment of a

literary heroine, while Catherine finds the eerily supernatural stories of Ann Radcliffe to

be “amusing...worth reading” and “some fun,” Cat enjoys “bestselling novel[s] about

love, zombies” and vampires, as well as other ghoulish monstrosities, especially

Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight and Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

as any modern teenager might.

There are other updates as well. For example, instead of sending letters,

McDermid’s characters communicate via social media platforms and text messaging.

This clever change allows the modern character to continue to experience

miscommunications that are similar to those Austen’s original text, affording Cat the

same latitude to reach hasty conclusions about the inhabitants of Northanger Abbey that

Catherine is given. Such changes, along with the addition of other aspects of

technological and societal evolution are understandable in a modernized adaptation, and

they have little bearing upon the essence of the story itself. As in Trollope’s and

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. by Susan Fraiman. (New York: W.W. Norton and

Company, 2004), 31. Val McDermid, Northanger Abbey. (New York: Grove Press, 2014), 43. Notably,

both Twilight and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies are popular and commercially successful derivatives of

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. According to the Jane Austen Society of North America’s website’s list

of Pride and Prejudice screen adaptations, “Stephenie Meyer, an avowed admirer of Jane Austen, based

Twilight on events and characters in Pride and Prejudice.” See “Pride and Prejudice,” Jane Austen Society

of North America, last modified 2023, https://jasna.org/austen/screen/pride-prejudice/.

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Watson’s revisions, the brilliance of Austen’s characters shines through McDermid’s

alterations.

The YA genre works well for McDermid, as it does for Watson, though Austen

must be acknowledged for framing the original text as a coming-of-age story. Since

Catherine is one of Austen’s most juvenile heroines when her novel opens, McDermid

translates her thoughts, actions, and feelings into believable opinions, behaviors, and

emotions for modern teens, as seen particularly between Cat and her friend Bella Thorpe

(McDermid’s version of Isabella Thorpe). In one piece of dialog, Cat and Bella ironically

discuss their love of ghastly teen fiction, and their understandably shallow interpretation

of it is evident:

‘And they’re all as good as Vampires on Vatersay?’

Bella bumped shoulders with her. ‘They get even more scary, trust me. And that’s

not just me saying that. My friend back home, Madison Crowley, she’s read them

all too, and she says the same. She had to sleep with the light on for a week, she

was so totally terrified after Shapeshifters of Shuna,” she pouted.

Additionally, McDermid is wise to capitalize on the popular themes of zombies,

vampires, and their ilk, linking the haunting aspects of gothic horror that were popular

with nineteenth-century audiences to the darker, more grisly form of horror that

captivates audiences today.

McDermid also imbues Cat with the same overactive imagination that Austen’s

Catherine possesses. Upon first meeting the modern Henry Tilney, who is to be her dance

instructor, Cat has the following internal reaction:

McDermid, Northanger Abbey, 55. Here, McDermid refers to two gothic horror novels that

only exist within the universe of her book. They are meant to be the modern equivalent of Ann Radcliffe’s

Mysteries of Udolpho. Aside from Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, other YA titles by authors such as

Cassandra Clare (the Mortal Instruments series, Infernal Devices trilogy, and Dark Artifices series), Kerri

Maniscalco (the Kingdom of the Wicked series), Maggie Stiefvater (the Wolves of Mercy Falls/Shiver

series and the Raven Cycle series),and Tracy Wolff (the Crave series) are their counterparts in reality.

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As he moved towards her, pushing his luxuriant honey-blond hair back from his

brow, Cat had the chance properly to take stock of him. Henry was the right sort

of tall—a shade under six feet, broad-shouldered but slim without being skinny,

graceful rather than gawky. His eyebrows and lashes were much darker than his

hair, and had it not been for his dark hazel eyes, she might have suspected him of

tinting them for effect. His forehead was broad and his cheekbones well defined

on either side of a prominent nose that saved him from being too pretty for a man.

His skin was pale and clear, unblemished by freckles. He didn’t have the

confected good looks of a boy-band member but his face was compelling and

memorable. Heroic, even, Cat allowed herself to think.

Austen’s Catherine is similarly struck when she is introduced to “a very gentleman-like

young man” named Tilney, further described as one who was “rather tall, had a pleasing

countenance, a very intelligent and lively eye, and, if not quite handsome, was very near

it. His address was good, and Catherine felt herself in high luck.” What is more, by the

end of that night, Catherine has become quite taken with Mr. Tilney, though Austen’s

narrator feigns uncertainty:

Whether she thought of him so much, while she drank her warm wine and water,

and prepared herself for bed, as to dream of him when there, cannot be

ascertained; but I hope it was no more than in a slight slumber, or a morning doze

at most; for if it be true, as a celebrated writer has maintained, that no young lady

can be justified in falling in love before the gentleman’s love is declared, it must

be very improper that a young lady should dream of a gentleman before the

gentleman is first known to have dreamt of her.

In both stories, the main characters’ romances could have progressed more smoothly had

the female protagonists not become caught up in their own suspicions and melodramatic

imaginings about the supposedly mysterious Tinleys who make their home in the

potentially shadowy halls of Northanger Abbey. Austen’s Catherine becomes fascinated

Ibid., 25.

Austen, Northanger Abbey, 14 and 17. In the second passage, Austen makes a cheeky allusion

to her favorite author, Samuel Richardson, who had written this about young ladies’ behavior in Vol. 2, No.

97 of The Rambler, a periodical edited by Samuel Johnson. See Fraiman’s note in the Norton Critical

Edition.

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with the place after hearing nothing more about it than its name and immediately begins

attaching her own associations to it, based solely, of course, upon the descriptions of

large manor houses in the gothic novels she has read:

Her passion for ancient edifices was next in degree to her passion for Henry

Tilney—and castles and abbeys made usually the charm of those reveries which

his image did not fill. To see and explore either the ramparts and keep of the one,

or the cloisters of the other, had been for many weeks a darling wish, though to be

more than the visitor of an hour had seemed too nearly impossible for desire. And

yet, this was to happen. With all the chances against her of house, hall, place,

park, court, and cottage, Northanger turned up an abbey, and she was to be its

inhabitant. Its long, damp passages, its narrow cells and ruined chapel, were to be

within her daily reach, and she could not entirely subdue the hope of some

traditional legends, some awful memorials of an injured and ill-fated nun.

McDermid’s Cat begins to make similar assumptions the very moment that the General

(as McDermid refers to General Tilney) issues his invitation to her:

Not in her most detailed fantasies had she imagined being swept off to Henry’s

home as an honored guest…Not just some casual suggestion that she might drop

by, but a pressing request for her company. It held out such entrancing

possibilities—yet with a frisson of the dark and unknown.

Then, once her mother replies to Cat’s text, which had asked for her permission go to

Northanger Abbey with the Tilneys, Cat begins to think fondly over her trip to Edinburgh

thus far, and as she does, her imagination runs completely wild:

She was the luckiest person in the world, she thought. All the constellations had

lined up in her favour… She’d made new friends and been present at her brother’s

ascension into the world of adulthood. And she had—yes, she was going to admit

it—she had fallen in love. And now she was The General’s chosen visitor, she

would be cheek by jowl with the man of her dreams for as long as she was at

Northanger Abbey.

And that was the icing on the cake. Cat’s passion for atmospheric architecture was

only just second to her passion for Henry. Her imagination had always been filled

with images of pinnacles and buttresses, battlements and cloisters, priests’ holes

and secret passages. Long before she’d ever clapped eyes on Henry, they’d been

Ibid., 96.

McDermid, Northanger Abbey, 184.

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the stuff of her fantasies…tours of castles, abbeys and noble houses had wakened

her appetite for more thorough exploration behind the twisted scarlet rope. And

now it was within reach. She could already see herself, trepidatious in long damp

passages, thrilled in narrow cells with high window slits, terrified in the ruined

chapel itself.

Both heroines ascribe a sinister nature to Northanger Abbey sight unseen, and these

unfounded, overwrought perceptions color their experiences with the Tilneys from that

point on. Desiring a mystery surrounding the death of Henry’s mother nine years before,

both Catherine and Cat conjure an air of foul play where there had been none previously

and decide that one of the Tilneys (whom Cat believes could be vampires) must be

responsible. Both Austen’s and McDermid’s characters are overly dramatic and comical

in their thinking, but neither one’s behavior is out-of-character for a typical teenager of

their respective periods. Fittingly, then, after realizing their mistakes and making proper

amends, both heroines find happy endings with their particular Henrys.

McDermid’s plot is nearly identical to Austen’s except that she, like Trollope,

does include some behavior that, while authentic, was considered improper during

Austen’s time, and which is no longer completely unacceptable in modern-day. This is

seen in the General’s initial rejection of Cat, which Henry reveals is because his father

“discovered that it wasn’t me you were interested in, it was Ellie.” His statement shows

that The General disapproves of his daughter being part of a same-sex couple. While

having become acceptable in most aspects of twenty-first century society, homosexuality

is still taboo within some families, religious groups, or other communities and therefore,

many in McDermid’s reading audience will have known someone who shares the

General’s opinion. In Austen’s text, of course, Catherine’s sexual preferences are neither

Ibid., 186-87.

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discussed nor used as a plot device, as doing so would have rendered the book

unpublishable. Instead, Austen’s General Tilney objects to a match between Catherine

and his son because of her supposed lack of money or social status. Both of these

objections are relatable within the culture in which each story is set, but whereas

Austen’s impediment to her main characters’ happiness would have been a serious one in

the nineteenth century, modern readers are likely to see it as a drawback rather than the

insurmountable conflict it once was. Some Janeites may object to McDermid’s revision,

yet discussion and exploration of the main character’s sexuality is a common tenet of YA

fiction, and as such, it makes the plot more believable to McDermid’s target audience.

Ultimately, though no adaptation of Austen is going to satisfy all readers, Val

McDermid’s indirect adaptation of Northanger Abbey is successful because it preserves

Austen’s satirical critique of popular (Gothic) horror novels while simultaneously

appealing to today’s young adult readers through believable characters whose realism

echoes that of Austen’s. Despite what could be seen by some as a radical change,

McDermid’s update will undoubtedly entice YA readers to investigate her source

material and perhaps produce a new generation of Janeites.

The preceding analysis of archontic texts is admittedly limited in scope, aiming to

discuss primarily the most recent literary adaptations that successfully transform each of

Austen’s six completed novels in such a way as to drawn in modern readers by depicting

the kind of realistic behavior and emotions for with which Jane Austen has become

synonymous and thereby induce their readers to develop the kind of adoration for her that

none but Janeites possess. Only the noticeable difficulty in locating such an example to

Ibid., 334.

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analyze against Emma necessitated the inclusion of any unsuccessful archontic texts.

Even then, both titles had some merit. They were mentioned not only to affirm that

Austen was correct in her assessment of Emma Woodhouse as unlikeable, but also to

illustrate that attempting to imitate Austen is a challenge indeed, and basing a new

literary adaptation upon the most commercially successful novel Austen released during

her lifetime does not guarantee that the work will be successful by any definition. Due to

the myriad archontic texts that have been written over the previous two hundred years, it

would be both impossible and impractical to include all of them in a single chapter, even

when excluding the unsuccessful texts, and so this comparison is admittedly incomplete.

Nevertheless, these particular deposits into Austen’s Library, all of which have been

contributed by women writers, can be used both by their authors and their audiences to

assuage, at least temporarily, that continuous need that all Janeites feel to befriend Jane.

Conclusion

As William Galperin notes in the fourth chapter of Janeites: Austen’s Disciples

and Devotees, Jane Austen’s works are filled with an “unconventional and uncanny

realism” about which literary critics have been writing and debating since her final

completed works were published. Among them is an unsigned review of Northanger

Abbey and Persuasion from the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany published

in May of 1818, which observes that:

The singular merit of [Austen’s] writings is, that we could conceive, without the

slightest strain of imagination, any one of her fictions to be realized in any town

or village in England, (for it is only English manners that she paints,) that we

think we are reading the history of people whom we have seen thousands of

times, and that with all this perfect commonness, both of incident and character,

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perhaps not one of her characters is to be found in any other book, portrayed at

least in so lively and interesting a manner.

Galperin agrees with this review along with other similar assessments, published in The

Champion and The Quarterly Review during the same time period, all of which conclude

that Jane’s genius is born:

not of ‘simple imitation’ but of a heightened attention to the quotidian, or of an

attention sufficiently microscopic to open the probable to a greater range and

possibility, Blackwood’s follows very much on the heels of the Champion in

noting Austen’s singularity as a realist.

Though she was relatively unknown during her lifetime, in the years since her

death, Jane Austen has become a literary icon and—thanks to the phenomenon of

Austenmania—a permanent thread in the fabric of popular culture across the globe.

Known for her sparkling wit and sharp critique of English society, she is adored by

legions of devoted readers whose appreciation of her works is diverse and ranges from

the perspective of general audiences to that of men and women of letters, many of whom

have dedicated their lives to studying all things Austen.

That her name is remembered while so many who were once acclaimed and much

more famous than Austen is a bit of irony that she would doubtless appreciate. However,

that her genius continues to be recognized is understandable. After all, despite the

William Galperin, “Austen’s Earliest Readers and the Rise of the Janeites,” in Janeites:

Austen’s Disciples and Devotees, ed. Deidre Lynch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 103;

“Northanger Abbey and Persuasion,” The Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany 2, (May 1818):

453-55.

Here Galperin quotes from “Unsigned notice of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion,

Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine” in Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, ed. B.C. Southam (London:

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), 267-68. It should be noted that Southam lists his source as: Blackwood’s

Edinburgh Magazine, May 1818, n.s.ii, 453-55; this is a mistake. The text actually originally appeared in

The Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany (formerly published as The Scots Magazine) Vol. 2,

(May 1818): 453-55. However, Galpin as well as many more recent sources continue to use Southam’s

erroneous reference, including the Jane Austen Society of North America’s website.

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passage of more than two hundred years since death stilled her pen, humanity remains

essentially unchanged, and the distinct relatability with which she imbued her characters

renders them especially fit for adaptation. Thus, just as her earliest readers were

enamored of Fitzwilliam Darcy, modern-day Austen fans have found Mark Darcy equally

irresistible.

Further, the level of devotion that Austen and her characters inspire is such that

many of her most ardent admirers cannot content themselves with merely reading and

rereading her works. Rather they have developed an insatiable need to engage with

Austen in a deeper and more meaningful way, and their most fervent wish is to forge a

close connection with her. This is an arduous task because so little is known about

Austen’s personal life. Nevertheless, many Janeite women writers satisfy their craving by

adapting Austen for modern readers.

Some devotees see Austen as immutable and create new versions of her work that

remain faithful to her plots, themes, and characters. Others, while just as fervent in their

admiration, take a more radical approach when reworking Austen, retaining her spirit if

not her specific elements. While purists may object to such adulterations, even these

loose literary adaptations, which fundamentally alter Austen’s original texts are remakes

that should be viewed positively, as they are “opportunities to engage in issues that are

important” and to create spaces to explore “how gender, culture, and identity relate to the

literature we read (no matter when it was written) and how the literature exemplifies real-

world issues that are worthy of discussion.” In other words, through each new work,

countless numbers of readers can be drawn into Austen’s world for the first time;

therefore, continuing to create conversations about all things Austen is imperative. Even

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as they attempt to step into Jane’s world and befriend her, these women writers make

withdrawals from the vast Library of derivative texts that have already been created from

her novels and simultaneously donate their own archontic texts to that ever-expanding

collection. When they share these uniquely relatable characters in fresh, new stories,

Austen’s most devoted disciples are preserving and increasing the Janeite population

exponentially.

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CHAPTER FIVE: I CANNOT IMAGINE BETTER ACTING

“We were quite satisfied with Kean. I cannot imagine better acting, but the part was too

short, & excepting him & Miss Smith, & she did not quite answer my expectation, the

parts were ill filled & the Play heavy.”

— Jane Austen in a letter to her sister Cassandra, dated 5 March 1814

Much ado has been made of Jane Austen, especially in, but not limited to, the

Anglophone world. As many have noted before, she and her writing are remarkable in

multiple ways, not the least of which is that though she lived a rather unassuming English

life in the nineteenth century, more than 175 years after death, she inspired Austenmania,

the global phenomenon which thrust her name and likeness into the limelight and through

which she became an icon of popular culture near the turn of the twenty-first century.

Though Jane’s genius had been recognized long before 1995, and her novels had already

served as the source material for earlier film and television adaptations, that particular

year was a pivotal point in the timeline of her literary life after death, or what Claudia

Johnson calls “Jane Austen’s afterlives.” For it was in that year that two of the most

popular and successful film derivatives of Austen’s works were released, and the

resulting widespread obsession with all things Austen has yet to abate.

Simon Langton’s miniseries Pride and Prejudice, the first episode of which

originally aired in the United Kingdom on September 24, and Ang Lee’s feature length

Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

2012), 1.

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film Sense and Sensibility, which opened in theatres on December 13 of the same year,

are two of the most critically acclaimed archontic texts which have ever been contributed

to Austen’s library. They were accompanied by two more adaptations that year: Amy

Heckerling’s Clueless, a modernized retelling of Austen’s Emma, which premiered in the

United States in July and The United Kingdom in October, along with Jane Austen’s

Persuasion, which was directed by Roger Mitchell and released in the UK on April 16

and America on September 27 of 1995. The following year brought Douglas McGrath’s

feature-length Emma, and it also proved successful. An article in The New Statesman

examining the impact of Austenmania twenty years on reports:

Audiences devoured these new takes on old stories with relish. The BBC’s Pride

and Prejudice miniseries attracted 11m viewers per episode, while its VHS,

released midway through the series, sold 12,000 copies in just two days. (By the

end of October, this figure stood at 100,000: the BBC reportedly had to abandon

other projects to reissue it in time for Christmas.)

The Jane Austen House [museum] at Chawton in Hampshire saw visitor numbers

rise by 250 per cent in October, and saw 57,000 people pass through their doors in

1995. Sales of the original novels were up by 40 per cent at Penguin.

Jane had become so popular even outside of the United Kingdom that a December 1995

article in Newsweek suggested that a “lifetime Achievement Oscar” be awarded to her.

Indeed, by the beginning of 1996, there was no question that Jane Austen had become all

the rage in Hollywood, just as she had been during the Spring of 1813, when all of

London society became fascinated with her second novel, Pride and Prejudice; however,

unlike her first brush with popularity, the current craze has been anything but fleeting. In

the nearly thirty years since Austenmania initially captivated anglophone film and

Anna Leszkiewicz, “Austenmania: why 1995 was the year Jane Austen catapulted into pop

culture,” The New Statesman, 31 December, 2015.

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2015/12/austenmania-why-1995-was-year-jane-austen-

catapulted-pop-culture.

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television audiences, the number of archontic films and series inspired by her life and

novels has only increased. Austenmania has even advanced alongside technology,

spawning several vlog/web series adaptations on YouTube.

Margarida Esteves Pereira succinctly explains this pivotal turning point in

Austen’s afterlife, in her chapter “Austenmania, or the Female Biopic as Literary

Heritage,” writing that during the late ‘90s—which marked:

the 200th anniversary of the writing of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and

Prejudice—Jane Austen’s novels acquired a renewed interest by reason of the

innumerable and very popular film and TV adaptations that appeared at the time

and have continued to do so to our days. The commercial allure of Jane Austen is

not only visible in the number and diversity of adaptations of her novels, but is on

display on the internet, be it in scholarly sites dedicated to the writer, be it (and

particularly) in the immensity of sites and blogs made by Jane Austen fans…all

over the world.

Jack Kroll, “Jane Austen Does Lunch,” Newsweek, 17 December 1995.

https://www.newsweek.com/jane-austen-does-lunch-180432. The web production company Pemberley

Digital has created three web series for YouTube that are adaptations of Austen’s works: Pride and

Prejudice has been adapted into The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (See

https://www.youtube.com/user/LizzieBennet); Emma has been adapted into Emma Approved, which has a

second season (See https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_ePOdU-b3xcKOsj8aU2Tnztt6N9mEmur);

and the unfinished Sanditon has been adapted into Welcome to Sanditon (See

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_ePOdU-b3xeIJZtHVbO2rtSkoNp63bjR). Pemberley Digital has

also released a brief original web series called Domino: Gigi Darcy, which is a set of fictional instructional

videos hosted by the character Gigi Darcy from The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (See:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_ePOdU-b3xdh6_NmbLx6Uh0X3_48yuAJ), along with

adaptations of other classic literature. The Emma Agenda is another YouTube web series based on Emma,

which was produced by Quip Modest Productions (See https://youtu.be/HVMYjwzdsMw). Northanger

Abbey has also been adapted into two YouTube web series: Northbound, produced by Oh For Cute!

Productions (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-

eZpBU_V6_o&list=PLEqPkbevFLepiWDw219fljXtUBXYV3pVe&index=1), and The Cate Morland

Chronicles, produced by Apple Juice Productions (See

https://www.youtube.com/@thecatemorlandchronicles1912).

Margarida Esteves Pereira, “Austenmania, or the Female Biopic as Literary Heritage,” in

Adaptation, Intermediality and the British Celebrity Biopic, eds. Marta Minier and Maddalena Pennacchia

115-128 (London: Routeledge, 2016), 115.

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Pereira is correct; Austen’s commercial appeal has not diminished since its initial swell in

the 1990s. However, as Deidre Lynch, Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield, Pereira, and

many others acknowledge, the aforementioned proliferation of adaptations was not the

only catalyst for Austenmania. Any discussion of Austen’s sustained popularity would be

remiss were it not to recognize the singular impact of Mr. Darcy’s wet shirt (fig. 1).

Figure 1: “Mr. Darcy’s Wet Shirt.” As seen in Langton’s Pride and Prejudice miniseries, a wet Mr. Darcy (Colin Firth)

walks to Pemberley after diving into a nearby lake on his property. Shortly thereafter, he rounds a corner and sees

Elizbeth Bennet. (Pride and Prejudice, directed by Simon Langton, featuring Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. (BBC,

1995, DVD), Disc 2, 44:30.)

Langton’s miniseries is the first screen adaptation to present audiences with Mr.

Darcy’s perspective. Because of this, Darcy’s character comes to life in a much more

personal way than he has been depicted previously. In this adaptation, he is no longer

able to maintain the façade of detached reserve that Elizabeth so famously mistakes for

pride, and through the impulsive act of diving into his lake, he is both literally and

figuratively revealing more about himself to Elizabeth and the audience than he has ever

done before. In a matter of minutes, after centuries stuck as the a solemn, surprising love

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interest for Austen’s most famous heroine, Mr. Darcy becomes a bona fide international

sex symbol (as did Colin Firth, who played him, and was a relatively unknown actor at

the time), a status that he maintains to this day, every bit as easily as Jane maintains her

fame.

This iconic image is so well appreciated by audiences and, indeed, ubiquitous for

most of the general public that many of the texts, scholarly and popular alike, written

about Austen in the last three decades begin with this (in)famous scene from Langton’s

miniseries. It is fitting then, that Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield open their second

edition of Jane Austen in Hollywood with an Introduction that mentions it on the very

first page. Like most of Austen’s modern admirers, they credit this view of a rather

unassuming white shirt plastered to a soaking-wet Colin Firth as Austenmania’s point of

origin and trace the phenomenon’s growth throughout that first year, writing:

The boom started in the United Kingdom in September 1995 with the “wet-T-

shirt-Darcy” Pride and Prejudice miniseries written by Andrew Davies, and [it]

crossed the Atlantic in December with the opening of Emma Thompson’s high-

profile adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. The success of both these productions

lifted the art-house film Persuasion (written by Nick Dear and released in late

September but previously aired on British television in April 1995) out of

potential obscurity and brought a new—and older—audience to Amy

Heckerling’s Hollywood film from earlier in the summer (July), an updating of

Emma entitled Clueless.

Though Austen and some of her more conservative fans might well be displeased with

Langton’s relatively minor rewrites, namely the overt sexualization of one of her leading

characters (at least outwardly, though considering her irreverent wit, Austen also could

very well be secretly amused by it), Andrew Davies, the Janeite screenwriter responsible

Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield, eds., Jane Austen in Hollywood (Lexington: The University

of Kentucky Press, 2001), 1.

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for scripting this version of Mr. Darcy, is not. In a 2019 article which he wrote for the

Daily Mail, he states that he is “thrilled [that people are] still talking about it. New

versions of Pride and Prejudice come out and, while I wish them well, I always secretly

hope that people are going to say, yes, it’s all right, but it’s nothing like the 1995

version!”

Davies’s wish has come true, at least partially, as there are many Janeites whose

first enjoyable on-screen experience with Pride and Prejudice was the 1995 version, and

to them, it is sacrosanct; however, for younger generations, it is Joe Wright’s 2005

theatrical release (similarly titled, but with a slightly different styling) Pride & Prejudice

to which every other remake is compared. Like Langton’s miniseries, Wright’s feature-

length film is a direct adaptation of Austen—perhaps even more so according to the

purists. The settings, plot, behaviors, speech patterns, clothing, and other aspects of

Regency culture depicted originally in the novel have been retained. Wright, too, gives

his audience a glimpse of the imperfectly human side of Mr. Darcy, yet he accomplishes

this more subtly than Langton. Though the 2005 Darcy (portrayed by Matthew

Macfadyen) does not dive into a lake, there is a brief moment when he flexes his hand

after having used it to hold Elizabeth Bennet’s hand and help her climb into a carriage,

wherein he displays the depth of his internal response upon touching her for the first time.

Since societal mores of the time dictate that almost no touching occur in public between

unmarried people of the opposite sex, a seemingly innocuous moment from modern

perspectives is understandably monumental for Darcy, who is falling in love with

Andrew Davies, “Where were you when...Mr. Darcy emerged from the lake, 15 October 1995,”

Daily Mail Online, August 31, 2019. Updated on Updated on Sept. 4, 2019.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-7387429/Where-Mr-Darcy-emerged-lake-15-October-

1995.html.

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Elizabeth and is thrilled when presented with the socially acceptable opportunity to touch

her (fig. 2). Though Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen are currently the most well-

known actors who have portrayed Mr. Darcy on-screen, many others have also embodied

him, including Sir Laurence Olivier (who originated the part on film in 1940), David

Rintoul (who portrayed him in the 1980 BBC miniseries, directed by Cyril Coke), and

Sam Riley (who portrayed him most recently, in the 2016 film Pride and Prejudice and

Zombies), not to mention those, such as Firth, who have played characters similar to Mr.

Darcy in indirect screen adaptations of Pride and Prejudice. With so many interpretations

of the character, each of Austen’s acolytes doubtless has her own opinion about which

Figure 2: “Mr. Darcy’s Hand Flex.” In the upper half of the frame, Elizabeth Bennet (Keira Knightley) watches Mr.

Darcy as he walks away after helping her into the waiting carriage. In the lower half of the frame, both the audience

and Elizabeth see Mr. Darcy splaying the fingers of the hand with which he has just held Elizabeth’s. (A picture

accompanying the article “The power of Mr. Darcy’s hand flex in ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ revisited 15 years later,”

written by Kim Renfro and published in Business Insider Nederland on November 25, 2020.

https://www.businessinsider.nl/the-power-of-mr-darcys-hand-flex-in-pride-and-prejudice-revisited-15-years-later/.)

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portrayal is the definitive Darcy, depending upon the generation or sect of Janeites to

which she belongs, and if she finds that none of the existing depictions will do, she need

not worry—a new Mr. Darcy is sure to emerge soon, since Janeites are conceiving and

producing new adaptations of Pride and Prejudice seemingly all the time.

In The Genius of Jane Austen: Her Love of Theatre and Why She Is a Hit in

Hollywood, Paula Byrne spends her eleventh chapter attempting to explain “Why

[Austen] is a Hit in Hollywood,” and why so many live-action versions of Pride and

Prejudice as well as Austen’s other novels continue to be produced. One reason Byrne

proposes is that “Austen tends to speak for the values of the lesser gentry, and to scorn

such idle, vain aristocrats as Lady Catherine de Bourgh (the embodiment of both pride

and prejudice) and the Dowager Viscountess Dalrymple (in Persuasion).” As Byrne

implies, both of these characters (along with their ilk in Austen’s other works) are

unpleasant, but their presence in the novels adds depth and yet another layer of realism to

the stories. For these are the kinds of villain that Austen’s original readers were likely to

have met and interacted with in their own everyday lives, unlike the overtly evil and

obviously imaginary Signor Montoni in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho. Each

of Austen’s novels contains believable antagonists rather than mysterious specters whose

faces are obscured by dark hats and cloaks, thus allowing her readers to escape all the

more easily into the narratives they are reading because they do not have to work to

Along with his role in Langton’s Pride and Prejudice, Colin Firth went on to portray Mr. Darcy

again in Bridget Jones’s Diary, the 2001 film adaptation of Helen Fielding’s eponymous indirect literary

adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Though in this role, Darcy is a barrister in modern London whose given

name is Mark rather than Fitzwilliam (see Chapters 3 and 4 of this book).

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maintain the suspension of their disbelief as Radcliffe, Shelley, and the Brontës often

force their readers to do with their more traditionally fantastic depictions of antagonists.

Previous chapters of this book have discussed Austen’s distinctly relatable and

realistic characters and shown that it is this distinct quality which entices the most

devoted of her readers to return to her world again and again, escaping into the novels in

an attempt to forge deeper connections with Austen and her works. As Claudia Johnson

puts it, these Janeites wish to “collapse the distance” between themselves and Jane

Austen, the revered literary genius. That is, despite being separated from her by the space

of more than two hundred years, they want to befriend Jane. Because of this, Johnson

sees these Janeites as “time travelers, taking themselves back into Austen’s world” in a

variety of ways, such as attending Regency balls or other themed events and even going

so far as creating the needed costumes and accoutrements to dress appropriately for them,

or forming Jane Austen book clubs and discussion forums. When they engage in these

activities, as well as when they read and reread the novels, watch and rewatch the film

adaptations, and even more so when they write or create their own Jane Austen pastiche,

practicing Janeites are able to:

foreclose the gap between Austen’s time and [their] own, between the dead and

the living, the fictional and the real, and to occupy Austen’s novels as they are—

not were—lived in an eternal present, where they commune with her familiarly.

Janeites commune with their divine Jane and her characters in a sort of

suprahistorical time warp where past and present get blurred.

Paula Byrne, The Genius of Jane Austen: Her Love of Theatre and Why She Works in Hollywood

(London: William Collins, 2017), 253. The Mysteries of Udolpho is a popular gothic novel first published

by Ann Radcliffe in 1794, which Austen mirthfully satirized in Northanger Abbey, a book she finished

writing only nine years later, in 1803. See also Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus,

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

Johnson, Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures, 10-11.

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Byrne also believes that Austen’s works have widespread appeal because of the ease with

which readers are able to escape into them, and though Johnson sees value in all of the

contributions to Austen’s Library that Janeites make while on their quests to escape

reality and befriend Jane, Byrne distinguishes between the successful and unsuccessful

archontic texts produced by the filmmakers and screenwriters who seek to adapt Austen

so that they can commune with her again and again:

The power of escapism and romantic fantasy cannot be gainsaid, but the key to

the difference between the merely escapist and romantic screen renditions of Jane

Austen and those that truly succeed as works of art in their own right is the

adaptation’s truth not to the letter of her text — and certainly not to correctness of

period detail — but to the spirit of her comedy. The spirit, that is, which she

herself learned from the comic theatre.

That spirit of Austen’s comedy which Byrne prizes is indeed an integral part of creating a

successful Austenian adaptation, and it adds yet another layer to the realism in her novels

because the comedy she is putting to paper has been drawn from her own experiences.

In The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things, Byrne’s first book on Austen

(for which The Genius of Jane Austen is meant to serve as a companion) she explains that

“Jane Austen cared a great deal about accuracy. She wanted her novels to be true to

life…Her novels were grounded in the real world. In order to create them, she drew upon

the reality that she knew: the people, the places, the events,” and dismisses the idea that

Jane’s characters were composites or general representations of life, as Henry Austen and

James Edward Austen-Leigh’s official biographies of Jane Austen would have her

readers believe. Instead, Byrne looks to a different opinion, but one that is every bit as

authoritative as those expressed in the other two works—a letter from Jane’s brother

Byrne, 253.

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Admiral Francis (Frank) Austen to Susan Quincy (written in reply to her request for

Jane’s autograph).

According to Byrne, because Frank Austen “celebrates” the fact that Jane had

indeed based aspects of Persuasion’s Captain Harville upon himself in his reply:

Admiral Austen is giving [Jane Austen’s] readers warrant to make connections

between the people his sister knew and the characters she created. By implication,

he is also licensing us to make links between her novels and the places she went

to (and those she heard about), not to mention the historical events through which

she lived.

Reading Austen’s novels through the lens of Frank’s admission—that her characters are

drawn from life rather than from generalizations—at least partially explains her much-

appreciated knack for depicting believable characters. It also underscores Austen’s sharp

wit and accounts for what Byrne terms her comedic spirit. If Austen were as concerned

with realism as Byrne believes, then describing actual geographic locations and accurate

behavior and mimicking natural speech in her written dialogue would not be enough to

satisfy her. She would also want to approximate human emotions as closely as possible,

which is why Byrne credits Austen’s love of the theatre and dramatic readings for the

ease with which her novels can be adapted. After all, what is good theatre but an

imitation of life? Or so Aristotle wrote in his Poetics.

As a nineteenth-century woman, Austen was certainly aware of the social

inequality and cruelty in the world, much of which remains even now, but unlike other

writers of the period, she did not gloss over it. Granted, each of her novels has a comedic,

happy ending, and yet she does not compromise the believability of her narratives by

Paula Byrne, The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things. (New York: Harper Perennial,

2014), 2.

Ibid., 4 and 5.

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concluding them as she does. After all, it is Mr. Collins who will eventually inherit

Longbourn House, not one of the Bennet sisters who has lived there all her life, and

Charlotte Lucas has clearly married Mr. Collins for convenience rather than love. John

Dashwood is still the greedy and callous brother who tossed his stepmother and half-

sisters out of their own home, Norland Park, regardless of the promise made to his dying

father. Henry and Mary Crawford are unrepentant of their irresponsible behavior that has

shamed the Bertram family. And Phillip Elton remains an unscrupulous man who

manipulates others to his advantage, heedless of his religious vocation.

In addition to drawing from authentic people, places, events, and behaviors,

Austen also troubled herself to ensure that the type of malice her protagonists oppose is

that which any of her readers might have faced on a normal day rather than a supernatural

evil only ever encountered in some far-flung castle. Most of Austen’s original readers

need not leave their own county to face the kind of discrimination Fanny Price did at the

hands of her aunts in Mansfield Park, they likely would not even have to leave their

village or neighborhood. Conflicts such as classism would have been readily familiar to

them all, as would the plight of being a poor relation or at least being expected to provide

for one. With relatable internal conflicts driving the action, little work was required for

the general readers in England to lose themselves in any of Austen’s novels, and perhaps

this is the reason that British soldiers, who were prescribed her novels as a treatment for

the nervous conditions they exhibited upon returning home from war, were at least

somewhat successful in coping with life after reading the books. While a famous example

of this therapeutic escapism can be seen in Humberstall, the main character of Kipling’s

short story “The Janeites,” Byrne brings up a lesser known yet similar example of

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Austen’s work brining pleasure to a despairing reader in the true account that A.A. Milne

gives in a letter to his friend Charles Turley Smith, written in 1936.

In the letter, Milne tells Smith, “The world is foul. I hate the insular egotism of

France, I loathe the German government, I detest Musso, I abominate Communism, I—

but why go on? At times I wish I were a Norwegian.” This does not sound like the same

man who had famously written the whimsical children’s book Winnie-the-Pooh ten years

earlier. Rather, this sounds like someone who is disillusioned with life and world politics.

Instead, Byrne writes that Milne:

was taking comfort in an enterprise that he had been working on for some months;

to turn his ‘favourite book’ into a stage play: ‘It was nearly a year’s job—six

months reading and thinking, six months writing.’ It was a labour of love: an

adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

When this dramatization was completed that same year, it was published as Miss

Elizabeth Bennet: A Play from “Pride and Prejudice.” Unfortunately, in his introduction

to this text, Milne indicates that good timing for Miss Elizabeth Bennet’s debut was never

found because another play based on Pride and Prejudice premiered in New York before

his could open in London, and thus:

the pleasure of writing is to be its own reward. Well, if that be so, I can truly say

that never was writer more highly rewarded than I have been by my year’s liaison

with Miss Jane Austen. Of all the damnably difficult and delightful things to try to

do this has been the most difficult and the most delightful.

In the same way that reading Jane Austen helped Kipling’s fictional Humberstall escape

the hellish scenes of war that he and his fellow Janeites endured in France during World

For more on Humberstall and Kipling’s “The Janeites,” see Chapter Three in this book.

Ann Thwaite, A.A. Milne: The Man Behind Winnie-the-Pooh (New York: Random House,

1990), 412. Byrne, The Genius of Jane Austen, 254. Here, Byrne also quotes Thwaite from page 412.

A.A. Milne, Miss Elizabeth Bennet: A Play From “Pride and Prejudice” (London: Chatto &

Windus, 1936), viii. Italics are the author’s.

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War I, those books had helped the living, breathing lifelong Janeite A.A. Milne when he

actually fought in France and really did discuss Austen with his fellow soldiers there.

Upon his return from the Great War, Miss Austen helped Milne again. Now, he was a

Man of Letters, making his career as a playwright, and as such, he could be more active

in his “liaison” with Jane than he ever had been as he read her texts, and so he spent a

“delightful” year in immersed in the Regency Era, away from the foul world of political

turbulence with another World War looming on the horizon, this time creating his own

archontic text and making his own contribution to her Library.

Though an early adapter of Austen’s work, Milne would not be the last Janeite to

rework Austen for live performance. Countless others have added their own scripts and

productions to her Library, taking their viewers with them on their particular journeys to

befriend Jane, and though her novels do lend themselves to screen (and stage)

adaptations, what Milne confessed about the process of penning a text based upon one of

Austen’s books remains true—it is a damnably difficult thing to do. Nevertheless, the

most demonstrative Janeites are undeterred.

To account for those who are attempting overcome this difficulty, Troost and

Greenfield delve deeper than the novels’ aforementioned realism. What is more, their

explanation accounts for the delightful experience of engaging with Austen’s lifelike

characters while acknowledging that both direct and indirect adaptations of the novels

can be successful. This is because:

Each screenwriter, director, and viewer sees [Austen’s] characters as reflecting his

or her ideas of womanhood, and that may be the secret of Austen and the film

adaptations: they play simultaneously to both camps and reach twice the audience.

Both feminists and traditionalists can easily claim Jane Austen as their own.

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Changes to Austen's texts made for the differing tastes and politics of the modern

audience bring out the conflict not only between two discrete eras or

philosophical stances but [also] between two modes of reception: reading versus

watching.

Austen’s characters are inherently malleable, and it is this flexibility, which more rigid

characters lack, that allows them to appeal to audiences with diverse viewpoints over

long periods of time. Much like their living counterparts, Captains Harville and

Wentworth are complex creatures whose motives and emotions cannot be reduced to

mere caricatures of naval officers. In the same fashion, the essence of Pemberley’s

pensive owner which Austen put to paper is lithe enough to inhabit both Langton’s and

Wright’s on-screen interpretations of Fitzwilliam Darcy even as he appeals to Janeites of

disparate age groups. Moreover, actor Colin Firth embodies both Langton’s traditional

Mr. Darcy and Mark Darcy, Helen Fielding’s radical reincarnation of the same character.

Thus, just as most readers throughout the last two hundred years have found Mr. Darcy

every bit as appealing as Elizabeth Bennet does, so do twentieth- and twenty-first century

filmgoers.

The same impulse which drove Milne to escape into writing a play which he

originally meant to be about Austen herself continues to compel Janeites to strengthen

their own connections to her though writing their own archontic dramatizations for both

large and small screens. Though Byrne and Troost and Greenfield account for Austen’s

on-screen popularity in slightly differing ways, there is no question that her characters

continue to resonate with creators and viewers alike. Whether they set out to dramatize

Troost and Greenfield, Jane Austen in Hollywood, 8.

As explained, Jane’s brother Frank admitted to inspiring at least part of Captain Harville’s

character in Persuasion. Similarly, it has been suggested that Persuasion’s hero, Captain Wentworth was

inspired by their younger brother Charles.

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one of Jane Austen’s novels in an innovative or traditional way or whether they choose to

present their own interpretations of her life, so long as the characters they depict are both

complex and malleable, Janeite women writers can continue to create film and television

adaptations with the kind of widespread appeal needed to attract new audiences and

extend Jane’s afterlives well into the future.

Jane Jumps from Page to Screen: Female Janeites & their Filmic Adaptations

Sense and Sensibility Packaged Perfectly: Emma Thompson’s 1995 Screenplay

Sense and Sensibility marked the beginning of Jane Austen’s literary career when

the novel was published by Thomas Egerton in 1811, and just as it was not the first of her

six novels to be completed, neither was it the first of her literary works to be adapted for

film or television. In fact, Sense and Sensibility was not reworked for viewing audiences

until June 4, 1950, when “a live hour-long” rendition of it aired in the United States as an

episode of NBC’s Philco Television Playhouse. This came nearly a decade after MGM

first transported film audiences into what Claudia Johnson calls Austen-land, “an

enchanted place located at the intersection of space and time, a place from a bygone era,

yet accessible today and still somehow permeated by…Austen’s presence” when the

feature-length Hollywood production of Pride and Prejudice opened on July 26, 1940.

Though released on the small screen, Delbert Mann’s televised production of Sense and

Sensibility starred former child actress Madge Evans (who was well-known in her day for

her work in silent films) as Elinor Dashwood and Cloris Leachman (who was just

beginning her acting career) as Marianne Dashwood. Since then, Sense and Sensibility

has been made into four Anglophone screen adaptations and one Tamil-language film. It

was adapted for television again in 1971, this time as a four-part miniseries for the BBC.

Ten years later came a seven-episode series which was also made for the BBC, and this

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was followed by the aforementioned feature-length film by Ang Lee in 1995. Most

recently, in 2008, Sense and Sensibility was made into its fourth television adaptation, a

three-part BBC miniseries which was written by Andrew Davies, who was the

screenwriter of the 1995 Pride and Prejudice miniseries.

Of the six Sense and Sensibility screen adaptations produced since 1950, the most

popular remains Lee’s film, which stars Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet as the

Dashwood sisters, and Alan Rickman and Hugh Grant as Colonel Brandon and Edward

Ferrars respectively. Each of these are well-respected British actors who are famous in

America as well. However, this traditional interpretation of Sense and Sensibility did not

achieve commercial and critical success simply because of its A-List headliners and their

superb acting skills. For Thompson not only starred as Elinor Dashwood, but as a Janeite

woman writer, she also penned the film’s Academy Award-winning screenplay.

Unsurprisingly, the members of the Academy are not the only ones who endorse

Thompson’s archontic text. In his 1996 article “Passionate Precision: Sense and

Sensibility,” Donald Lyons writes “What Thompson’s done with [Austen’s] book is a

miracle, a real liberation.” Though his estimation of Austen’s novel is not what most of

her devotees would consider particularly accurate, Lyons examines the film and

Sue Parrill, Jane Austen on Film and Television: A Critical Study of the Adaptations (Jefferson:

McFarland & Company, Inc., 2002), 21 and 48. Johnson, Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures, 70. Johnson

borrows the term “Austen-land” from the first chapter of Jane Austen: Her Homes and Her Friends by

Constance Hill, originally published in 1902. The American YA author Shannon Hale would use the same

term with an alternate spelling as the title of her 2007 novel, Austenland, which was adapted into a movie

of the same name in 2013. The second film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility was produced in India in

2000 and directed by Rajiv Menon. Entitled Kandukondain Kandukondain (translated I Have Found It), the

Tamil-language movie became a commercial success known for its songs and musical score; it also won the 2001

Filmfare Awards for Best Tamil Film and Best Tamil Director. (For more on Kandukondain

Kandukondain, see https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0242572/.)

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Thompson’s screenplay much more critically, writing that Thompson’s versions of the

characters:

all have an airy but grounded grace, an easy eccentricity, that take us back to the

golden age of the 19th century screen adaptation, the 1930s.

The great adaptations were the Cukor-Selznick films of Little Women and David

Copperfield. Such films were but two generations away from their originals, and

their older players knew the Victorian stage. Now we are as far away from the

Thirties films as they were from Dickens, and getting back to the spirit—or

bringing new life to the spirit—of classics is all but impossible. And now this.

Lyons is so struck with the screenplay that he claims “There wouldn’t have been any

movie without the sparkplug genius of writer/star/co-auteur Emma Thompson,” though

he also gives a great deal of credit to Lee as well for completing the package of a “golden

age operation.” And though he finds, rather predictably, that “Sense and Sensibility is a

lesser book than Pride and Prejudice,” since his superficial analysis of the novel suggests

that he must not have spent a great deal of time with it, Lyons declares that Sense and

Sensibility has “made—a phenomenon hardly new in movies—the better picture.”

While the Academy and film critics may appreciate a film, general audiences do

not always agree with their assessments. However, Sense and Sensibility is a film that is

well-regarded by nearly everyone, even new adults. As recorded in the tenth chapter of

Jane Austen in Hollywood, M. Casey Diana’s study of the influence of this film within

Donald Lyons, “Passionate Precision: Sense and Sensibility,” Film Comment, 32, no.1 (January-

February1996): 37.

Ibid., 39.

Ibid., 41. It is worth noting that at the time that Lyons’s article was published in early 1996, Joe

Wright’s feature-length film Pride and Prejudice had not yet been produced, and the closest comparison he

could draw in terms of direct Austenian film adaptations was with MGM’s Pride and Prejudice which had

been released in 1940. However, Lyons does mention Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, the successful indirect

adaptation of Emma which had been released in theatres during the summer which preceded his

publication.

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the context of the percentage of students who were successful in her Introduction to

Fiction class indicate that:

Conclusively, Thompson’s film version of Sense and Sensibility, and probably

other film versions of Austen’s classics, instills a desire for—and provides a

gateway to—a positive, in-depth reading experience for college students. In other

words, the film unlocks the mind, cultivates the intellect, and implants the desire

to pick up and read the novel. In fact, 90 percent of the film viewers expressed a

desire to read the book. By providing an entertaining, positive learning

experience, the film equips college students to read and understand the novel by

transmitting to them a greater historical, social, and cultural sense of the period.

Also, the film cultivates a deeper feeling for and attraction to the characters.

Given these results, along with its sustained popularity, Ang Lee’s 1995 film adaptation

of Sense and Sensibility, and more specifically Thompson’s screenplay for it, is an

unquestionably effective contribution to Austen’s Library. As the film is a traditional

adaption, much of the spirit of the original novel is preserved (though Austen’s ending

has been simplified), and thus, it falls perfectly into the category of what Byrne

designates as a successful film as well as the particular category of derivative works upon

which this book focuses—that is an archontic text created by a Janeite woman writer

which is capable of drawing new acolytes into the Austenian fold. Regardless of Ang

Lee’s directorial vision and the collective star power of the ensemble cast, without a

script depicting the kind of relatable characters that are such an integral part of Jane

Austen’s literary genius, this film likely would have quietly faded into obscurity as

quickly as most of the other screen adaptations of Sense and Sensibility have done, once

its actors and director ceased to be topics of popular conversation.

M. Casey Diana, “Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility as Gateway to Austen’s Novel,” in

Jane Austen in Hollywood, eds. Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield (Lexington: University of Kentucky,

2000), 141.

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However, as Byrne points out, “The best adaptations of Austen are those that, in

Milne’s words, reveal ‘truth to character’, without a slavish devotion to the purity of the

text…those that succeed in their own right.” This is why, though Lee and Thompson have

replaced Austen’s depiction of John Willoughby’s late-night return, which occurs near

the end of the novel, after he has heard about Marianne’s dangerous illness, with their

concluding scene which depicts him watching Marianne marry Colonel Brandon from

afar, this film is one of the catalysts responsible for the birth of Austenmania. It remains

so widely beloved that even though nearly thirty years have passed since its premier, it

placed second in the online edition of People magazine’s 2022 list of “The Best Jane

Austen Adaptations,” outranked only by the 1995 Pride and Prejudice miniseries.

Perhaps even more significantly, a mere three days before this sentence very sentence

was written, and on the opposite side of the globe, Australian newspaper The Advertiser

included a line Thompson wrote for Edward Ferrars in its list of “the greatest romantic

movie quotes of all time,” which reads “I’ve come here with no expectations, only to

profess, now that I am at liberty to do so, that my heart is, and always will be, yours.”

Byrne, The Genius of Jane Austen, 262. Here Byrne quotes Milne’s Miss Elizabeth Bennett, x.

Andrea Wurzburger, “The Best Jane Austen Adaptations to Watch While You Wait for the New

‘Persuasion’ Movie,” People, June 24, 2022, https://people.com/movies/the-best-jane-austen-adaptations-

to-watch/. Kirsten Jakubenko, “Tribute to the greatest romantic movie quotes of all time,” The Advertiser,

February 8, 2023, https://www.adelaidenow.com.au/tributes/article/celebrity-tributes/tribute-greatest-

romantic-movie-quotes-all-time/4528181/. Other filmic adaptations of Sense and Sensibility that have been

produced but not had as much cultural impact as those mentioned in this chapter, or fall outside the scope

of this book include: Sense and Sensibility (2008), From Prada to Nada (2011), Scents and Sensibility

(2011), and Sense, Sensibility and Snowmen (a made-for television Hallmark Channel movie, 2019). See

www.imbd.com and search “Sense and Sensibility” or see “Sense and Sensibility,” Jane Austen Society of

North America, 2023, https://jasna.org/austen/screen/sense-sensibility/.

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Universally Acknowledged as Truly Adaptable: Pride and Prejudice Reworked by

Women Writers, Directors, and Producers

Jane Austen’s Hollywood afterlife began in 1940 when MGM produced the first

film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, and though Austen’s second novel “has been the

most popular and the most often adapted for television and film,” its debut on the silver

screen was not exactly illustrious. With Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier cast in

starring roles and the famed English author Aldous Huxley behind the screenplay, the

producers hoped to have a created a blockbuster. The film was, indeed, a critical success,

but as it was adapted from Helen Jerome’s archontic play—which Andrew Wright, in his

copiously researched article, finds certainly inferior to Milne’s adaptation—rather based

directly upon Austen’s novel, and its director Robert Z. Leonard approached the project

as a screwball comedy (a genre which was popular at the time and for which he was

known), much of the distinct believability and depth of Austen’s original characters and

is lost in translation, and so it failed to make a lasting cultural impact.

The reason that so much of Austen’s essence is at risk of being lost when her

work is adapted into other mediums, especially film, is because, like all other motion

pictures that are derived from literature, Austenian films are not merely live-action

enactments of the novels upon which they are said to have been based. Instead, the

original texts are reworked into scripts, meaning that:

Because films depend on screenplays which in turn often depend on literary

source material, in fact, they are doubly performative. Actors and actresses are

translating into performance a written script which is itself an adaptation of a

prior literary source, with the important difference that the script is a performance

text—a text that requires interpretation first by its performers and then by its

Parrill, Jane Austen on Film and Television, 48-49. Andrew Wright, “Jane Austen Adapted,”

Nineteenth Century Fiction 30, no. 3 (December 1975): 433.

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audience for completion—whereas a literary text requires only interpretation by

its readers.

This diluting process clearly took place during production of MGM’s Pride and

Prejudice. When Austen’s original narrative was filtered through so many performances

and perspectives, the sharpness of her wit was dulled a bit, but more tragically, her

comedic spirit—the same one that Byrne believes to be vital for the creation of a

successful adaptation—was severely dampened.

In his discussion of Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibly, Lyons draws a similar

conclusion regarding the disastrous effects of filtering Pride and Prejudice through so

many interpretations and fundamentally altering Austen’s iconic tone:

The Jane Austen film of the golden age…has its accidental charms, but it is

fatally filtered through a stageplay that sweetened and defanged such characters

as Darcy (the limply arch Laurence Olivier), Mr. Bennet (the cuddly Edmund

Gwenn) and even Lady Catherine (a neutered Edna May Oliver). Worst of all, it

sports a complacent and didactic Elizabeth in Greer Garson. It was candybox

Austen without the vinegar…

The result, as Lyons indicates, is that MGM released a good but utterly forgettable film

which has been long overshadowed in cultural consciousness by the better adaptations

that followed it. Despite this lackluster legacy, Nicole Peterson believes that this first film

adaptation “helped to shape the relationship between the Austen fandom and early pop-

culture explorations of Austen’s novels.”

Five television miniseries adaptations of Pride and Prejudice were produced in

the wake of Leonard’s film: one in 1949 (for NBC), another in 1952, one in 1958, and

Thomas M. Leitch, “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory,” Criticism 45, no. 2

(Spring 2003):154.

Lyons, “Passionate Precision: Sense and Sensibility,” 39.

Nicole Peters, “Austen’s Malleability: Fans, Adaptations, and Value Production,” Reception:

Texts, Readers, Audiences, History 10 (2018): 77.

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then another in 1967, and one more in1980, all but the first having been made to air on

BBC channels, but there were no new feature-length film adaptations released in

Hollywood for the next sixty-five years, and none of the BBC’s first four miniseries

caused much more than a ripple of interest among their audiences. All that changed,

however, when the BBC and Simon Langton began work on the version they would

release in September of 1995. Unknowingly, this was perfectly timed to coincide with an

upsurge of other Austen film adaptations that were also being released, and soon all of

them swelled together into the unrelenting tidal wave that is Austenmania.

Considerable space in this book (including the introduction to this chapter) has

been devoted to Langton’s Pride and Prejudice. Heaps more has been designated for it in

other scholarly and popular works due to its enormous cultural impact and the

instrumental role it played in Jane Austen’s rise from anonymous authoress to global

icon. As previously mentioned, for many years, this cultural touchstone has consistently

topped the countless lists which attempt to rank Austen film adaptations based upon

either their commercial or popular appeal or perhaps their cinematic quality. However, as

Langton’s Pride and Prejudice was neither written nor directed by a woman, it will,

regrettably, not be further highlighted here.

Similarly, this book has already referenced the Bridget Jones’s Diary franchise

many times. However, unlike Langton’s miniseries, the indirect film adaptation of

Bridget Jones’s Diary which was released in 2001 was directed by Sharon Hale, and so it

Parrill, Jane Austen on Film and Television, 48-60.

This authoress would be remiss were I not to acknowledge that my own status as an unabashed

Janeite is inextricably tied to my timely first reading of Pride and Prejudice at the age of ten or eleven and

the near-simultaneous airing of this miniseries on American television, first on the A&E Network and

subsequently quite often on PBS during the remainder of the 1990s.

215

bears mention in this chapter, centering as it does on the Janeite women who direct,

produce and write the filmic contributions to Austen’s Library. Like the novel of the

same name upon which it was based, Bridget Jones’s Diary is an indirect adaptation of

Pride and Prejudice that is both popular and critically acclaimed. This is unsurprising as

Helen Fielding, author of the archontic novel, co-wrote the film’s screenplay along with

Andrew Davies and Richard Curtis, both of whom were already respected British

filmmakers at the time—Davies having previously written the screenplay for Langton’s

Pride and Prejudice miniseries; and Curtis having previously written the screenplays for

Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, both of which were immensely

successful feature-length films in the UK and the US.

Renée Zellweger stars as the titular Bridget Jones, Fielding’s update of Elizabeth

Bennet. Bridget is an Englishwoman who works as a publishing assistant at the

Pemberley Publishing in London. She is thirty-two and single, and she keeps a diary

wherein she expresses discontent with her current circumstances, especially in the areas

of her career and romantic life. According to the diary entries, she attempts to improve

both areas by losing weight, quitting both alcohol and cigarettes, and becoming self-

confident, but she is mostly unsuccessful in these endeavors. When the film opens, she

has had a crush on her boss, Daniel Cleaver (the equivalent to Mr. Wickham) for some

time. Despite being aware that he treats her badly and continually disappoints her,

Bridget continues to fantasize about dating Daniel because he is handsome and in an

administrative position. However, at a New Year’s buffet, her mother, who is overly

The Bridget Jones franchise, which includes three novels as well as a trio of films, began with a

column, loosely based on Pride and Prejudice, which ran two British newspapers in the 1990s. (See

Chapters Three and Four in this book.)

216

concerned about Bridget’s persistent unmarried state, introduces her to Mark Darcy, a

successful barrister and the son of family friends who had known Bridget when she was a

child. Darcy is four years older than she, and Bridget though Bridget does not remember

him from childhood, she finds him good-looking if not standoffish, until she overhears

him say “Mother, I do not need a blind date, particularly with a verbally incontinent

spinster who smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish and dresses like her mother,” a

scene which corresponds to Elizabeth and Darcy’s first meeting in Pride and Prejudice. It

is this humiliating encounter with Mark that has driven Bridget to make changes in her

life and record her progress in a diary until she finds the perfect man.

Shortly thereafter, Bridget and Daniel begin to flirt via Instant Messenger at work

and then to date. During this time, Daniel reveals that he and Mark Darcy were once

friends, but they do not like one another because Mark slept with Daniel’s fiancée, which

confirms Bridget’s initial impression of Mark. Since she is finally with Daniel, Bridget

tries to convince herself that she is happy, but she feels the stings of Daniel’s backhanded

compliments, and when he abandons her during a weekend getaway while she has

mistakenly dressed as a Playboy Bunny for a party that had been previously “Tarts and

Vicars” themed, she is mortified and alone. Worse, when her disastrous weekend is over

and she returns to London, she discovers that Daniel has been sleeping with an American

colleague from the New York office while he has been seeing Bridget. This blatant

betrayal pushes Bridget to her breaking point, and she quits her job, telling Daniel when

Bridget Jones’s Diary, directed by Sharon Maguire, featuring Renée Zellweger, Colin Firth, and

Hugh Grant (Miramax, 2001), 4:46-4:50, DVD. Each of the Bridget Jones films employs an in-joke for

Janeite viewers wherein Firth, who famously played Mr. Darcy in Langton’s miniseries, plays Mark Darcy

in these films. The publishing company Bridget works for shares the name Pemberley with that of Mr.

Darcy’s estate in Pride and Prejudice.

217

he tries to persuade her not to leave that “if staying here means working within ten yards

of you, frankly, I’d rather have a job wiping Saddam Hussein’s arse.” As Bridget makes

this statement in front of the whole floor, she gains the respect of all her colleagues and

can stride confidently away with a smile on her face.

Bridget has run into the disagreeable Mark Darcy periodically since her mother

introduced them, and in each instance, she has felt like a fool in front of him, most

especially when he turns up at the party where she is dressed as a tart. While there, he

expresses dislike for Daniel and comments that Daniel is not good enough for Bridget,

but Bridget is still hurt by the remark he made when they first met, and she dismisses

him, causing him to leave confusedly. Bridget is humiliated on an even larger scale in her

new job as a television reporter. Her boss sends her to a local fire station and insists that

she begin her segment sliding down the fire pole in a miniskirt before interviewing the

chief. She agrees to do this, but the inept cameraman gets a shot of her buttocks instead

of her face as she is sliding down the pole and her skirt is riding up. A few nights later,

she is still embarrassed by accidentally exposing herself to such a large audience, but she

attends a dinner party with some of her married friends. To her dismay, Mark is there

with the same elegant woman he brought to the previous party, and she feels idiotic once

again. However, he follows her out as she tries to leave the party and makes a surprising

admission when they are alone in the foyer:

I don’t think you’re an idiot at all. I mean, there are elements of the ridiculous

about you. Your mother’s pretty interesting, and you really are an appallingly bad

public speaker. And you tend to let whatever’s in your head come out of your

mouth without much consideration of the consequences…I realise that when I met

you at the turkey curry buffet that I was unforgivably rude, and wearing a reindeer

jumper—that my mother had given me the day before—but the thing is, um, what

Ibid., 50:14-50:20.

218

I’m trying to say very inarticulately is that, in fact, perhaps, despite appearances, I

like you very much.

Bridget does not believe he is serious, and when she tries to brush off his compliment, he

insists “No, I like you very much just as you are.” However, he is called back to the party

before she can reply. This scene is reminiscent of Mr. Darcy’s initial proposal to

Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, which she rejects because of the incorrect assumptions

she has made about him coupled with the honest but off-putting way he chose to propose

to her.

At the news station, Bridget is assigned to cover a high-profile case that will set a

legal precedent and is being decided by the High Court that day. She and her film crew

are waiting outside the chambers in hopes of getting an interview with the defendant,

Kafir Aghani, a Kurdish freedom fighter who has been fighting extradition to his home

country for the past five years on the basis that he is married to a British aid worker.

Thinking that they will be waiting on the verdict for a while longer, Bridget and her

crewmembers are taking a smoke break when they hear that the defendant has left the

premises without giving any interviews.

Just when she is sure that she will be fired for losing the scoop, she bumps into

Mark again, who is there because he is representing Aghani and his wife. Seeing that she

is in trouble, Mark arranges an exclusive interview with his client for Bridget, thereby

saving and simultaneously advancing her career. Mark’s assistance to Bridget echoes the

assistance Mr. Darcy gives to Elizabeth and her family in Chapter 47 of Pride and

Ibid., 55:20-56:16.

Ibid., 56:22-56:26.

Ibid.

219

Prejudice when Lydia elopes with Wickham, and it is clear that the two of them remain

unwed. By going to London, locating the couple, and forcing them to marry quickly and

privately, Darcy has saved the Bennets from a social scandal that could ruin both older

sisters’ chances at marriage.

Enjoying the feeling of success within her career, Bridget decides to host a dinner

party for her birthday, forgetting that she is inept at cooking. Fortunately, while she is

struggling to prepare the meal, Mark appears at her door to congratulate her and show her

the front-page article about her interview that has run in the newspaper that morning.

When he sees the mess she has made, he attempts to salvage the meal before her friends

arrive. He quickly realizes that her dishes are horrid, and so he makes omelets to

substitute for the main course, but there is no help for either her soup, which has turned

blue, or her dessert, which has turned out more like marmalade than anything else. When

her friends arrive, they are kind to her and try to eat her unappetizing food, but everyone,

including Bridget, eventually gives up, laughing about the whole ordeal. Though her

friends were surprised to find Mark there, he gets along well with them, and everyone is

having a pleasant evening until Daniel arrives uninvited, thinking Bridget would be alone

and grateful for his company, though they had parted on bad terms. When Daniel asks for

a private conversation with Bridget, wherein he tries to smooth things over with her,

Mark leaves abruptly. Bridget is upset that Mark has gone and asks Daniel why he has

come. As he tries to answer her, Mark reappears and demands that Daniel come outside

with him. Once they are on the street outside Bridget’s building, Mark punches Daniel in

the face twice before a full-fledged fight ensues while a crowd, including Bridget and her

Ibid.

220

friends, gathers to watch. The fight then moves into a nearby restaurant, then crashes

through the restaurant’s front window and continues back out onto the street, where Mark

finally ends the fight by knocking Daniel out for a few seconds.

After the fight, Bridget seems to take Daniel’s side, telling Mark “You give the

impression of being all moral and noble, and normal, and helpful in the kitchen, but

you’re just as bad as the rest of them!” Mark apologizes for being mistaken about

Bridget’s feelings for him and leaves. Having come to, Daniel tells Bridget that they

“belong together,” arguing that “If I can’t make it with you, I can’t make it with anyone.”

Having finally realized that she deserves more than what she had been settling for,

Bridget replies, “That’s not a good enough offer for me. I’m not willing to gamble my

whole life on someone who’s…well, not quite sure. It’s like you said. I’m still looking

for something more extraordinary than that.”

On Christmas Day, Bridget’s mother reminds her that they are going to Mark’s

parents’ ruby wedding party, and Bridget refuses to attend, telling her mother that she is

not interested in Mark because of his bad behavior. Her mother explains that Mark has a

hard time during the holidays because his wife left him after he caught her having sex

with his best friend from Cambridge, whom Bridget knows to be Daniel. Seeing that she

has been wrong about Mark all along, she dresses hurriedly, and all the Joneses attend the

party together. She finds Mark at the party, apologizes for believing Daniel, and admits

that she likes Mark despite his own shortcomings. In a reverse of situation where Mark

Ibid.

Ibid., 1:12:01-1:12:11 and 1:12:49-1:13:36.

221

admitted to Bridget that he liked her, he is called to the center of the room with his father

before Mark can reply.

After toasting his wife, Mark’s father then toasts Mark, saying that he is very

proud of his son, who has just been made partner in a New York firm. Mark’s father adds

that Mark’s colleague Natasha, the elegant woman Bridget has frequently seen with

Mark, will also be going to the New York Firm. Finally, he tells his guests that Mark and

Natasha will eventually be married. Everyone applauds this news, but Bridget, in her

dismay, blurts out “No!” Realizing too late that she has caused a scene, she attempts to

explain that she only meant that losing Mark would be a tragedy for England. When it is

obvious by the murmurs that no one believes her, she leaves the party mortified.

In the New Year, Mark flies to New York and Bridget begins to write in a new

diary. She has resigned herself to spinsterhood, but her friends arrive in an attempt to

cheer her up by whisking her off to Paris for the weekend. Snow is falling as they are

getting in the car and Mark appears. He walks up to her, and then he and Bridget have the

following exchange:

[Bridget:] What are you doing here?

[Mark:] I just wanted to know if you were available for bar mitzvahs and

christenings as well as ruby weddings. Excellent speech.

[Bridget:] I thought that you were in America.

[Mark:] Well, yes, I was, but I realized I’d forgotten something back home.

[Bridget:] Which was?

[Mark:] Well, I realized I’d forgotten to kiss you good-bye. D’you mind?

[Bridget:] Not really, no. [As they are leaning in to kiss each other,] so you’re

not going to America, then?

[Mark:] No. Not.

[Bridget:] Oh. You’re staying here then?

[Mark:] So it would seem.

Ibid.

Ibid. 1:22:19.

Ibid., 1:25:58-1:26:43.

222

However, before they can kiss, Bridget’s friends, who are waiting in the car and watching

the two of them, began to cheer and honk the horn in celebration. When Bridget and

Mark finally turn to acknowledge them, they ask Bridget if she is still coming to Paris

with them, and she declines. Then she and Mark go upstairs to her apartment.

Inside, Bridget leaves Mark alone in her living area so that she can go to her room

and change into more attractive clothes, telling him to read a magazine while she is gone.

He reaches for one, accidentally uncovering her diary from the previous year. As he leafs

through its pages, he sees bits of what she wrote about him when she was still mistaken

about his character. Hurt by her words, he leaves, shutting the front door behind him. Still

changing, Bridget hears him go and rushes to the window, looking out to see that he is

already on the street, walking away. She calls down to him, but he does not hear her

because of the wind and snow. As she comes back into the living area, she sees her diary

open on the table and realizes that he has read an entry from the summer, which says:

Mark Darcy is rude, he’s unpleasant, he’s DULL—

No wonder his clever wife left him.

I hate him! HATE HIM!

Clad only in a camisole, panties, running shoes, and a cardigan, she dashes out into the

falling snow and down the street, trying to catch up with him. When she reaches the

intersection, he is out of sight. She does not know which way to go and calls out for him.

Just then, Mark steps out of one of the shops, and Bridget apologizes for what she wrote.

He watches her stoically until she says, “It’s only a diary. Everyone knows diaries are

just full of crap.” He agrees and pulls a new diary from his coat pocket, telling her that it

Ibid.

Ibid., 1:28:56. Emphasis is as shown on the text.

223

is “Time to make a new start, perhaps.” Grateful for his forgiveness, Bridget embraces

Mark, and they kiss, heedless of the weather, her lack of clothing, or the people passing

by.

Though kissing in snowfall is not the double wedding of the Darcys and the

Bingleys with which Austen ends Pride and Prejudice, it is nevertheless a fitting

conclusion to the first installment of Bridget and Mark’s story. Aside from Langton’s

miniseries, Maguire’s Bridget Jones’s Diary is arguably the most well-known and

beloved, albeit indirect, film adaptation of Austen’s most enduringly popular novel.

When it was released in 2001, it won eight film awards and was nominated for another 32

awards, including the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for Zellweger,

and British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards in the following

categories: The Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film, The Film Award for Best

Screenplay-Adapted, The Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role for

Zellweger, and The Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role for Colin Firth.

Previous to its successful awards season, however, and a mere ten days after the

film’s theatrical release on April 13, 2001, Phillip Kerr reviewed Bridget Jones’s Diary

for London’s New Statesman and was less than enthusiastic. In Kerr’s perspective,

Maguire’s film pales in comparison to Four Weddings and a Funeral, “one of the most

successful British movies ever produced, having made more than” $244,000,000. He

sneers at the “gemutlich, Dibleyish script,” and the:

Ibid., 1:30:26-1:30:43.

“Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) Awards,” Internet Movie Database, 2023. Unless otherwise

noted, all film award information is taken from Internet Movie Database.

Phillip Kerr, “A Bridget too far,” The New Statesman 30, no. 4534 (London), 23 April 2001, 44.

EBSCOhost. Released in 1994, Four Weddings and a Funeral has many parallels with Bridget Jones’s

Diary, including the fact that it also starred Hugh Grant, and as previously mentioned, Richard Curtis wrote

224

cynically chosen soundtrack of cheap but potent music; and some Hallmark

Christmas-card scenes of Theme Park England, of the kind designed to please

those untravelled Americans… who are stupid enough to believe that it snows a

lot in central London (just like in Oliver), and that anyone with a posh accent

must live in a house the size of Castle Howard.

Later in the review, Kerr, perhaps inadvertently, reveals the reason for his derision when

he marvels at the possibility:

that women still accep[t] the sad delusion that Mr Darcy, as played by Colin Firth

in the telly version of Pride and Prejudice, is the last word in masculine sex

appeal. I have nothing against the character of Mr Darcy, or indeed Firth. It is

merely that I feel he has—to borrow a nicely ironic phrase of Mr Bennett’s, when

putting a stop to his daughter Mary’s weak and affected singing performance—

“delighted us long enough.”

What Kerr fails to understand is that for many Janeites, especially those who came of age

in the 1990s, Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy was indeed and, does in fact, remain the last word

in masculine sex appeal, or if not the last word, very close to it. With only five years

having passed since Firth played Austen’s Mr. Darcy, casting him as Fielding’s Mark

Darcy was not only a treat for fans of Langton’s miniseries, but also a way to continue

capitalizing on its success by strengthening Bridget Jones’s connection to Pride and

Prejudice in the minds of general audiences.

Kerr’s other major critique of Maguire’s film is the:

plot that appears lifted entirely from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. And it

must occur to every semi-literate person who sees this unreal, almost

schizophrenic film, that Working Title might have saved themselves a great deal

of money if they had simply produced a bowdlerised version of Jane Austen’s

classic novel and had done with it. Doubtless, they and Fielding would argue that

it was an act of homage. Let it be so. But I call this empty and insincere act of

homage a homage to catatonia.

the screenplay. Additionally, it was distributed in the UK by Working Title Films, which distributed

Bridget Jones’s Diary there as well.

Ibid., 44.

Ibid., 45.

225

Again, Kerr fails to understand that even if the plot of Bridget Jones’s Diary actually had

been plagiarized from Austen’s second novel, the majority of viewers who admire that

most “bright & sparkling” work would still be happy with Fielding’s homage, as many of

them appreciate direct film adaptations as well as indirect ones, since watching either

type of film allows them to strengthen their friendships with Jane. Still, Kerr is certainly

no Janeite, and as such, that he might make uninformed errors such as these is not

unexpected.

In contrast to Kerr, the film reviewers at People were much more pleased with

Bridget Jones’s Diary. In the issue from May 14, 2001, the brief review of Maguire’s

film reads, “Total fun. A London working gal (Renee Zellweger) must decide between

rival beaus (Hugh Grant and Colin Firth—some choice!) in a smart, sassy romantic

comedy.” A week later, People ran another positive review, calling the film “Sassy fun.”

Then, in December of that year, People’s editors included Bridget Jones’s Diary in its

“Best of Screen” list, commenting, “We still crack up every time we think of Hugh Grant

exclaiming, ‘Hello, Mummy,’ during a key romantic moment in this irresistible and smart

adaptation of Helen Fielding's bestselling novel about a single woman…in London.”

James Bowman penned a more substantive review of Bridget Jones’s Diary the

summer after it was released. Here, he writes that Maguire’s film:

Deirdre Le Faye, ed., Jane Austen’s Letters, fourth edition, (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2011), 212.

“Now Playing,” People 55, no. 19, 14 May 2001, 42. EBSCOhost; “Now Playing,” People 55,

no. 20, 21 May 2001, 42. EBSCOhost. “Best of Screen,” People 56, no. 27 31 December 2001, 33.

EBSCOhost.

226

makes us think that Bridget… and the many 30-something unmarried women

who have made her such a smash hit, expect too much of men instead of too little.

At any rate, they are forever having their expectations of men disappointed.

Despite believing that the movie perpetuates women’s unrealistically romantic

expectations for men, Bowman does concede that “Bridget Jones's Diary manages to

produce something of the charm of old-fashioned romance partly by using the early pride

and prejudice that keep Bridget and her true love, Mark Darcy… apart for most of the

picture.” As there are echoes of the original romance between Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy in

Bridget’s romance with Mark Darcy, this archontic contribution to Austen’s Library is an

ideal tool to attract new Janeites, especially those from the UK, where Bridget Jones’s

everywoman character was more pervasive within the national culture than she was even

in the United States.

Regardless of some critics’ feelings about romantic comedies as a whole and this

one in particular, there is no question that general audiences and Janeites alike love

Bridget Jones’s Diary. After all, its first sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason was

released less than four years afterward. Then, in 2008, the American Film Institute (AFI)

recognized Bridget Jones’s Diary by nominating it for the “AFI’s 10 Top 10” list in the

romantic comedy category. A third film, Bridget Jones’s Baby was also released in 2016.

The latest installment of the Bridget Jones trilogy reinforced Bridget’s status as a British

cultural icon, but by replacing Hugh Grant’s character, Daniel Cleaver with the popular

American actor, Patrick Dempsey, it also effectively restored Bridget’s cultural relevancy

on the other side of the Pond, as many of Dempsey’s younger fans had not been born or

James Bowman, “Feminist Fatales,” American Spectator 34, no, 5, June 2001, 90. EBSCOhost.

Ibid., 90.

227

were not old enough to experience the first film, when it was released more than two

decades ago.

Though not a major Hollywood production like Bridget Jones’s Diary, Gurinder

Chadha’s commercially successful independent British film Bride & Prejudice was the

second feature-length indirect film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice to be released.

Chadha had already found directorial success with her 2002 comedy Bend it Like

Beckham when she directed and co-wrote this fun, flashy Bollywood take on Austen,

starring Aishwarya Rai and Martin Henderson. In a screenplay written by Paul Mayeda

Berges and Chadha, Austen’s rural England of the Regency is replaced with the

decidedly more urban setting of Amritsar, India (which is the second largest city in the

state of Punjab) in the early 2000s. Elizabeth Bennet becomes Lalita Bakshi (played by

Rai), and Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy becomes the wealthy American, William Darcy (played

by Henderson).

Berges and Chadha follow Austen’s general plot, wherein Lalita’s family attends

a friend’s wedding (rather than the Meryton ball), and there Lalita meets Will Darcy and

his close friend Balraj Uppal (who is equivalent to Austen’s Mr. Charles Bingley), as

well as Uppal’s sister, Kiran (equivalent to Caroline Bingley). Just as Bingley quickly

falls for Elizabeth’s older sister Jane, Uppal is quickly besotted with Lalita’s older sister

Jaya. However, in Chadha’s film, the viewers are aware that Darcy is also instantly

American Film Institute. AFI’s 10 Top 10 Nominees. “Official Ballot,” 74. Archived on 16 July

2011.

https://web.archive.org/web/20110716071937/http://connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/10top10.pdf?docID=3

81&AddInterest=1781. Though Patrick Dempsey is widely known for playing the neurosurgeon Derek

“McDreamy” Shepherd on the ABC television series Grey’s Anatomy from 2005 to 2015, his acting career

began in the 1980s with feature-length films, such as Can’t Buy Me Love, and has lasted more than 35

years.

228

attracted to Lalita. Unfortunately, Lalita is not similarly impressed with Darcy and is, in

fact, unhappy with the idea of Jaya accepting Uppal’s invitation to go to Goa with him

and Darcy, but when her father asks her to go along with Jaya, Lalita reluctantly agrees.

In Goa, Lalita and Darcy argue about social and economic issues, and later, Lalita meets

Londoner Johnny Wickham (equivalent to Austen’s George Wickham), who tells her that

he is acquainted with Darcy, and that is how he knows that her bad impression of Darcy

was an accurate one.

After Lalita and Jaya return home, Kohli Saab (equivalent to Mr. Collins), a

friend of the Bakshi family comes to visit them from Los Angeles. He has come looking

for a traditional Indian woman to marry. Seeing that Saab is attracted to Jaya and thinking

that Uppal will likely propose to Jaya soon, Mrs. Bakshi instead encourages a match

between him and Lalita, though Lalita does not like the idea. Later, at the Navaratri garba

(a traditional Indian festival dance), Lalita dances with Wickham, ignoring the advice of

both Darcy and Uppal’s sister. She also rejects Saab’s marriage proposal, thwarting her

mother’s plan.

Later, Uppal comes to the Bakshi house to tell Lalita and her sisters goodbye as

he is leaving for London, but he promises to keep in touch with Jaya. Not long

afterwards, Lalita’s youngest sister Lakhi (equivalent to Lydia Bennet) surprises the

sisters with the news that Lalita’s best friend Chandra (equivalent to Charlotte Lucas) is

engaged to Saab. That evening, Wickham tells Lalita that he is leaving, and he also

promises to keep in touch, though time passes and neither Uppal nor Wickham writes to

Bride & Prejudice, directed by Gurinder Chadha, featuring Aishwarya Rai and Martin

Henderson (Miramax, 2005), DVD.

Ibid.

229

Jaya or Lalita. In another departure from Austen, the viewers learn that Wickham is

writing to Lakhi instead. Meanwhile, Chandra and Saab call and invite the Bakshis to

their wedding in Los Angeles. When the Bakshis accept the invitation, Jaya is excited

about making the trip because she might see Uppal when they make a stop in London.

After the Bakshis arrive in London, Uppal’s sister, Kiran, tells them that her

brother has gone to New York looking for a wife, and Jaya is heartbroken along with

Lalita and Mrs. Bakshi. While they are still at Heathrow, the Bakshis bump into Darcy

who is also his way to Chandra and Saab’s wedding, and Darcy gives Mrs. Bakshi his

first-class ticket in exchange for hers, which means that he and Lalita sit together for the

remainder of the flight to Los Angeles. Lalita’s opinion of Darcy begins to change while

they are together on the flight, and as they spend more time with together in the city,

Lalita and Darcy fall in love with one another.

At Chandra and Saab’s wedding, Lalita meets Darcy’s mother Catherine

(equivalent to Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Darcy’s aunt) and Catherine introduces Lalita

to Anne (equivalent to Anne de Bourgh, Darcy’s cousin), Darcy’s former girlfriend. She

also meets Darcy’s sister Georgie (equivalent to Georgiana Darcy) After Georgie

explains that Darcy and Uppal have had a falling out because Darcy persuaded Uppal not

to marry the Indian girl he had been interested in, since the girl’s mother was only

interested in his money, Lalita suddenly understands why Uppal never wrote to Jaya. Not

knowing that Lalita is enraged and blames him for Jaya’s heartbreak, Darcy believes

Lalita to be in love with him, and so he proposes to her and is summarily rejected.

Ibid.

230

After the Saabs’s wedding, the Bakshis fly back to India, and when they again

stop in London, Lakhi disappears, as she attempting to run away with Wickham. Darcy

finds Lalita and apologizes for meddling in Jaya and Uppal’s relationship, explaining that

since they last spoke, Darcy has told Uppal that his advice against the marriage was

mistaken, and Uppal is reuniting with Jaya. He also reveals the reason he advised Lalita

against spending time with Wickham is because Wickham had tried to trap Georgie into

marrying him by impregnating her when she was only sixteen, so that he could gain

access to her inheritance. Wickham had believed that the Darcys would force Georgie to

marry him to avoid a scandal, but when they did not, Wickham ran away before he could

be punished and never returned. With all the misunderstandings explained, Darcy and

Lalita work together and rescue Lakhi from Wickham’s clutches. Afterwards, Darcy

proposes to Lalita a second time, and she accepts, understanding that he has loved her all

along. As does Austen’s novel, Chadha’s film concludes with a double wedding in which

Lalita and Darcy marry alongside Jaya and Uppal.

Aside from the dramatic change of setting, Chadha has made few alterations to

Austen’s original plot or her characters, and the changes Chadha has made seem minor in

comparison to those made in the earlier MGM Pride and Prejudice film adaptation.

Ironically, though this adaptation boasts no Hollywood A-Listers in its headline, it seems

to have made a larger, longer-lasting splash in pop culture than its predecessor did in

1940. In a contemporary film review for the BBC in which she gives the movie four out

of five stars, Stella Papamichael writes:

Swapping corsets for saris, and polite pianoforte for the bhangra beat, director

Gurinder Chadha reinvigorates Jane Austen's Pride And Prejudice [sic] with fun

Ibid.

231

and flamboyance… Chadha cannily entwines other aspects of Austen's novel,

including a wickedly funny turn by Nadira Babbar as Lalita's overbearing

mother—keen to marry off her four daughters to nice Indians [sic] boys.

Papamichael was right to praise Bride & Prejudice. Chadha’s film was nominated for

seven professional film awards during the 2004-2005 awards season, winning India’s

Stardust Award for Breakthrough Performance-Female by Peeya Rai Chowdhary (for her

performance as Lakhi Bakshi).

Unsurprisingly, film scholars such as Cheryl A. Wilson also appreciated Bride &

Prejudice, and in her 2006 article in Literature/Film Quarterly, Wilson finds that

Chadha’s adaptation is successful because “within the context of Austen studies and

Bollywood film history, Bride and Prejudice can be viewed as a film that integrates two

well-suited partners—the Bollywood form and Austen's comedy of manners—to both

preserve and update the cultural critique of the original.” While Wilson is correct that the

cultural critique at the heart of Pride and Prejudice has been preserved in Chadha’s

somewhat radical film adaptation, Chadha’s screenplay and her directorial vision have

done more than simply preserve Austen’s cultural critique. For her interpretation has also

achieved something that even the Old Hollywood greats could not manage; she has

Stella Papamichael, “Bride & Prejudice (2004),” BBC Film, updated October 7, 2004.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2004/09/16/bride_and_prejudice_2004_review.shtml.

“Bride & Prejudice (2004) Awards,” Internet Movie Database, 2023. Aside from the category in

which it won, Bride & Prejudice was also nominated for the following awards: The British Independent

Film Award for Best Technical Achievement as well as the one for Best Achievement in Production; The

Golden Trailer Award for Best Romance; The Washington, D.C. Film Critics Association Award for Best

Breakthrough Performance by Aishwarya Rai; and India’s Stardust Awards for Reader’s Choice Star of the

Year for Aishwarya Rai and Jury’s Choice Breakthrough Performance-Male by Nitin Ganatra (for his

performance as Kohli Saab, the equivalent to Austen’s Mr. Collins).

232

retained the essence of Austen’s characters. As a result, “Bollywood meets

Hollywood…And it’s a perfect match.”

The following year, Hollywood would at last produce another direct adaptation of

Pride and Prejudice, and this time Deborah Moggach would base her screenplay directly

upon Jane Austen’s novel. An English novelist who had prior experience with adapting

works of literature into television miniseries, Moggach was able to “extract the youthful

essence of Austen’s novel, as well as providing a richly detailed setting” for Joe Wright’s

Pride & Prejudice. In opposition to the approach Aldous Huxley used when writing his

screenplay sixty-five years earlier, Moggach attempted to remain as true to her source

text as possible when writing her script, so this adaptation is filtered through considerably

fewer perspectives than the MGM film. Her strategy worked well, since the 2005 film

was nominated for four Academy Awards and six BAFTA awards in 2006, including the

BAFTA Film Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Peters juxtaposes Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice with Leonard’s and Langton’s

film adaptations of Austen’s novel, remarking:

The original Pride and Prejudice movie [from 1940] was largely valued for its

conveyance of Austen’s wit and satire, not the romantic development between

Darcy and Elizabeth, which was viewed more as a subplot or a means to social

commentary…

…Not only did [the 1995 and 2005 film adaptations] celebrate a shift in focus to a

predominantly female Austen audience by placing a heavy emphasis on the

romantic tension between the main characters (both in the content of the films and

in the marketing of them); they also fueled an explosion in Austen’s popularity

Cheryl A. Wilson, “Bride and Prejudice: A Bollywood Comedy of Manners,” Film/Literature

Quarterly 34, no. 4 (2006): 323. Bride & Prejudice, tagline.

Derek Elley, “Pride and Prejudice,” Variety, September 11, 2005.

https://variety.com/2005/film/awards/pride-prejudice-2-1200523317/.

233

among consumers by relying less heavily on the generic constraints that secured

Austen’s canonicity.

Here, Peters points out one of the many changes in the way Austen is presented to the

public over time. Though she does not mention Lawrence Levine’s 1988 book-length

work Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, its central

premise that “the perimeters of our cultural divisions have been permeable and shifting

rather than fixed and immutable,” resonates throughout her argument.

In her analysis of the 1995 and 2005 adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, Peters

also makes a keen observation which reinforces the idea that not only are Austen’s works

malleable, but the public’s perception of Austen is pliable as well. She writes:

perhaps most interesting is the fact that these two adaptations in particular were

framed by and helped to frame the twenty-first-century Janeite: a primarily

middle class, white, female fan. It is this particular audience that Austen is so well

associated with today, and it is this particular version of Janeite that has produced

a plethora of Austen-centric texts interested in challenging notions of genre,

reader, author, and ways of reading.

While it is true that the middle-class, white, female fans do comprise a significantly large

proportion of the Janeite women writers who produce literary and film adaptations of

Austen, as Chadha’s success with Bride & Prejudice illustrates, this particular sect is by

no means the only demographic of Austen’s fans who are driven to befriend their beloved

author through the creation of their own texts.

No matter their race or profession, Austen’s modern-day fans, such as those who

create successful screenplays and films (as Chadha and Moggach did) are “more self-

Peters, “Austen’s Malleability,” 78.

Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988) 8. For more on how Levine’s theory applies to Janeite

adaptations, see Chapter One of this book.

Peters, “Austen’s Malleability,” 78.

234

aware” and prouder of their cultural productions than her devotees of the past were.

According to Peters, these days:

Janeites seem to take advantage of the fact that their fandom surrounds a

respected author as a way to blur the lines not only between scholarly texts and

Austen’s, but also between Austen’s and other texts in the romance genre. Just as

the rebranding of Austen’s fiction as romance challenges her place as “highbrow,”

the use of Austen as a romance writer likewise challenges her place as

“lowbrow.” While Janeites often distinguish between themselves and other

romance readers, there still appears to be a tendency for professional readers to

collapse Janeites into the same category because of how Janeites read or engage

Austen, while still valuing Austen’s prestige on an academic level.

Rather than remaining the exclusive group of men of letters that it began as, the Cult of

Jane has gradually expanded to include not only women, but also devotees who prize

both highbrow and lowbrow interpretations of Austen, and those among them who are

actively making contributions to Austen’s Library understand that there is inherent value

in the texts that both the academic and nonacademic Janeite women who are writing

among them create.

In Stuart Hall’s influential essay “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular,’” first

published in 1981, seven years before Levine’s book, he likens the way concepts, objects

and people fluctuate in popularity to riding a “cultural escalator.” He explains that

“Popular forms become enhanced in cultural value, go up the cultural escalator—and find

themselves on the opposite side. Other things cease to have high cultural value, and are

appropriated into the popular, becoming transformed in the process.” As part of her many

Ibid., 78-79.

235

afterlives, Jane Austen

herself has experienced

this transformative ride. In

fact, according to Claire

Grogan, “both [Austen]

and her works travel”

Hall’s escalator “in

fascinating ways.” The

movements that Grogan

discusses which are most

fascinating in terms of this

study are “the curious ways

in which these film

adaptations link the viewer

to the world of Austen and

to readers of the original

novels, especially if we

acknowledge that many

now watch Austen but do

not read her.” While

Grogan is right to explore these links between the newest film contributions to Austen’s

Library and the viewers they attract, she writes that the majority of those viewers were

Janeites before they went to the theatre to see the latest adaptation. However, in making

Figure 3: “Pride & Prejudice Theatrical Poster.” This is the theatrical release

poster for Joe Wright’s 2005 film Pride & Prejudice. In the image, only Keira

Knightley’s face is clear, and her name is the only headliner. Matthew

Macfadyen’s Mr. Darcy is presented slightly out-of-focus, and his name is

written beneath the title, minimizing Darcy in favor of Elizabeth Bennet. Jane

Austen is not credited until the last line of text on the poster, which reads “A

romance way ahead of its time from Jane Austen, the beloved author of Sense

and Sensibility.” Only Mr. Darcy’s open-collared white shirt, which is

obviously dry, is even faintly reminiscent of Langton’s miniseries. (Image

taken from “Pride & Prejudice, 2005,” on Internet Movie Database,

https://www.imdb.com/media/rm1343528192/tt0414387.)

236

this statement, she does not account for the younger audience members, such as those

who are too young to have grown up when Langton’s Pride and Prejudice was at the

height of its popularity, and so they may not know about it, and they also may not have

read the original novel, which is not taught as frequently in high schools now as it was

during the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s. Rather, it is possible that viewers in their teens and early

twenties were drawn to watch Wright’s Pride & Prejudice more so by Keira Knightley’s

leading role in the film than by association with Jane Austen, or the film’s admittedly

familiar title. In fact, Wright’s movie poster hardly mentions Jane Austen at all. Though,

Pride and Prejudice is indeed Austen’s most famous work (and it is doubtful that many

viewers would be unaware of her authorship of its source text), it is almost as if the

marketing for this film attempted to promote it as a romantic period drama while evoking

as little of Austenmania as possible so as to distinguish it from Langton’s adaptation (see

fig. 3).

Fortunately, Grogan does admit that though Janeites are the target audiences for

film adaptations of Austen, “Many viewers of the film adaptations have never read

Austen’s novels and might be led to read them only after watching the film versions.” It

is these viewers, then, who are enticed by watching new adaptations to join in with others

already on their quests to befriend Jane; it is them who help expand the Janeite ranks,

though Grogan is skeptical that most film adaptations of Austen novels will convert the

Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’ [1981],” in Essential Essays, Volume 1:

Foundations of Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 355. Claire

Grogan, “From Pride and Prejudice to Lost in Austen and Back Again: Reading Television Reading

Novels,” in Women, Popular Culture, and the Eighteenth Century, ed. Tiffany Potter (Toronto: University

of Toronto Press, 2012), 292. At the time of Pride & Prejudice’s release, the British actress Keira Knightly

had just gotten her big break in Hollywood by starring in the wildly popular Pirates of the Caribbean

alongside Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom two years earlier.

237

uninitiated viewers into Janeites. This is because she finds that even indirect adaptations

of the novels, such as Guy Andrews’s four-part miniseries Lost in Austen, which she does

praise as an “unquestionably a creative rendering of” Pride and Prejudice, “rely upon the

viewer being a close adherent of all things Austen.” Yet, the public’s continued interest in

and the lucrative market for any and all Austen-themed films and merchandise, which has

powered Austenmania for the past three decades, would indicate otherwise. If the

proliferation of high-quality film adaptations that has been occurring since 1995 does not

have a part in generating Janeites, then logically, their numbers should still be as small

and segmented as they were before Firth’s Darcy dived into the lake.

It is true that there are many allusions to both Austen’s original novel Pride and

Prejudice and Langton’s eponymous miniseries in Lost in Austen, but an appreciation of

every one of those allusions, or even a majority of them, is not required for viewers to

follow the miniseries’ plot—though such knowledge does make watching it admittedly

more entertaining—or even for them to enjoy the experience. Since viewers are made

aware that the protagonist has entered the novel, they therefore understand that the

majority of events which the protagonist, Amanda Price, experiences also take place

within Pride and Prejudice. On the contrary, it is entirely possible that after an enjoyable

experience watching Lost in Austen, having chosen to see it perhaps because Hugh

Bonneville or Alex Kingston plays a prominent character in the miniseries, a viewer who

Ibid., 294.

238

has never read any of Austen’s

works, and thus has missed many

allusions (including the protagonist’s

surname, which is a reference to

Fanny Price of Mansfield Park)

would still be intrigued enough to

search out other archontic texts

created by Janeites, including direct

film adaptations and, of course,

Austen’s original novel which

inspired them.

In a similar manner to Lost in

Austen, the 2013 film Austenland is a

loose, indirect adaptation of Pride

and Prejudice and more specifically

Langton’s miniseries adaptation of it,

and this, too, is more than capable of attracting viewers from outside the Janeite

community. Unlike Lost in Austen, this film is based directly upon an archontic novel of

the same name written by Shannon Hale in 2007. However, Hale and Jerusha Hess, the

Janeite women who wrote the screenplay did not allow the number of interpretations

Hugh Bonneville is an actor widely known for his roles in both the film Notting Hill and the

television series Downton Abbey. Alex Kingston is an actress well-known on both sides of the Pond for her

roles in the U.S. television series ER and the U.K. television series Doctor Who.

Figure 4: “Austenland Theatrical Poster.” This is the theatrical

release poster for Jerusha Hess’s 2013 film. Keri Russell is shown

holding an “I heart Mr. Darcy” bag that is a typical example of

merchandise marketed to Janeites, especially those who are fans

of Pride and Prejudice. (Image taken from “Austenland, 2013,”

on Internet Movie Database,

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1985019/mediaviewer/rm14519403

52/?ref_=tt_ov_i.)

239

through which their narrative is filtered to negatively affect the film the way a similar

process diluted MGM’s Pride and Prejudice film adaptation.

In Hess’s film, the protagonist, Jayne Hayes, is a young thirty-something

American woman so obsessed with Colin Firth’s portrayal of Mr. Darcy in Langton’s

1995 miniseries that she has an entire room decorated in Mr. Darcy memorabilia (see fig.

4), and she is unable to find happiness with any of the men she meets in her everyday life

because they fall short of Mr. Darcy. In frustration, she spends her life savings on a trip to

Austenland, a Jane Austen-themed English resort that provides its guests with an

immersive experience of life in the Regency, including a guaranteed “romance” with one

of the male actors, with the understanding that the romantic relationship is fictional and

that there be no physical touching between the guest and the actor with whom she is

paired.

Once there, Jane is told to give up all vestiges of modern life, including her cell

phone, and she is assigned the identity “Ms. Jane Erstwhile.” She then befriends another

guest whose pseudonym is Ms. Elizabeth Charming. Charming is wealthy and can

therefore afford a more expensive package than Jane, and though she is gauche, she is

kinder to Jane than anyone else, especially the manager, Mrs. Wattlesbrook, who treats

Jane with scorn because she is the only guest there who has not purchased the platinum

package. Soon enough, the staff of actors appears, and Jane meets the aloof Mr. Henry

The film Austenland was written, directed, and produced by three Janeite women writers; Hale

and Hess co-wrote the screenplay while Hess and Stephenie Meyer, the author of Twilight (an

internationally bestselling YA fantasy novel that is loosely based on Pride and Prejudice) and its sequels,

produced it.

Austenland, directed by Jerusha Hess, featuring Keri Russell, JJ Field, Jennifer Coolidge, James

Callis, and Jane Seymour (Sony Pictures Classics, 2013), Blu-ray Disc. As an in-joke for Janeites, this film

stars James Callis as Colonel Andrews; Callis also appeared in Bridget Jones’s Diary, Bridget Jones: The

Edge of Reason, and Bridget Jones’s Baby playing Bridget’s friend Tom in each film.

240

Nobley, Mrs. Wattlesbrook’s nephew. Though he is handsome, and the other guests

openly flirt with him, Jane quickly dislikes him, just as Elizabeth Bennet does Mr. Darcy

in Pride and Prejudice. At the same time, Martin, the chauffeur and groom (and

equivalent to George Wickham), is charming, and Jane is attracted to him immediately.

They begin a flirtatious exchange, but when Martin leaves Jane stranded in a rainstorm, it

is Mr. Nobley who rides in and rescues her. Jane still prefers Martin over Mr. Nobley, but

when Martin becomes jealous after the appearance of another actor, Captain George East,

who also flirts with Jane, Martin rebuffs her. When Jane questions whether he is breaking

up with her, he replies, “I didn’t realize we were going steady.”

Along with the rockiness of her romance with Martin, Jane also experiences

conflict with both Mr. and Mrs. Wattlesbrook. When, the others insist that Jane play the

piano as a means of entertainment for them, she must play the only song she knows, “Hot

in Herre,” which Mrs. Wattlesbrook finds highly inappropriate. Shortly after this, a

drunken Mr. Wattlesbrook finds Jane alone and attempts to seduce her, but she holds him

off until some of the others arrive. Then, after Jane decides to stop letting Mrs.

Wattlesbrook dictate her storyline, she steals some costumes meant for guests who have

purchased the more expensive package and catches everyone’s attention with her

newfound confidence. Her happiness is short-lived, however, because Mrs. Wattlesbrook

finds the cell phone that Jane has secretly been using to call her best friend, and since this

is the second time Jane has broken the rules by bringing the modern world into

Austenland, Mrs. Wattlesbrook attempts to evict her. However, another guest, Lady

Amelia Heartwright, unexpectedly covers for Jane, and since Lady Heartwright has

Ibid., 43:14-43:45.

241

purchased the platinum package, Mrs. Wattlesbrook acquiesces to Lady Heartwright’s

request that Jane be allowed to stay. Unfortunately, though, Lady Heartwright then uses

this act as leverage to coerce Jane into helping her find time to be alone with Captain

East.

To pass the time until the ball at the end of their stay, the group decides to put on

a play (which is similar to when Fanny Price, the Crawfords, and Tom and Edmund

Bertram begin rehearsing to perform Lovers’ Vows in Mansfield Park). Because of Lady

Heartwright’s demand to be with Captain East, Jane pairs with Mr. Nobley. As they

spend time together rehearsing their parts, Jane’s opinion of Nobley changes, and they

grow close. After the performance of the play ends in catastrophe, Jane and Nobley go to

her room to be alone, and Mr. Nobley asks for a dance with her at the ball. Jane accepts,

and the two attend the ball together. However, Jane notices that each of the actors is

professing his love to the guest with whom he has been paired and therefore fulfilling

Mrs. Wattlesbrook’s guarantee that all of her guests will experience a romance while in

Austenland, and when Mr. Nobley confesses his love to Jane as they dance, she believes

that this, too, is scripted. Jane is hurt because she realizes that she has developed

authentic feelings for Mr. Nobley while he has only been pretending to have feelings for

her as he is paid to do, so Jane tells him that she would rather have a real relationship

than a fantasy, and she leaves the ball. The same night, she reconciles with Martin, and

they spend Jane’s last evening in Austenland together.

Ibid. “Hot in Herre” is a popular rap song released by the American rapper Nelly in 2002. The

song, written by Cornell Haynes, Pharrell L. Williams, and Charles Brown, is about a couple who are

dancing in a club, and because “It’s getting’ hot in here,” the singer famously tells the girl he is dancing

with to “take off all your clothes.”

Ibid.

242

As she is leaving the resort, Jane discovers that it was Mr. Nobley who asked

Lady Heartwright to keep Jane from being evicted. Also, Mrs. Wattlesbrook explains that

Jane’s fictional romance was actually scripted with Martin, rather than Mr. Nobley, as

Jane had thought. Jane is angered because she had supposed the opposite to be true, and

so she threatens to go public with the fact that Mr. Wattlesbrook assaulted her and have

Austenland closed. Martin arrives at the airport to assuage Jane’s anger before she leaves

England, and Mr. Nobley arrives almost at the same time. Both men claim that their

feelings for Jane were real, but Jane believes neither one is sincere, and after telling Mr.

Nobley that even though their romance was not real, he had been “perfect,” she flies back

home.

In the final scene, Jane is packing up her Mr. Darcy memorabilia when Mr.

Nobley appears at her door, explaining that he has come all the way from England to

return the sketchbook that she inadvertently left at the resort. When Jane asks why he did

not mail it to her instead, he confesses that his real name is Henry Nobley, and he is not

an actor. Rather, he is a history professor who wanted to experience Regency life, and

since Mrs. Wattlesbrook is really his aunt, he asked her to let him join her staff

temporarily. He professes his love for her again, and knowing that he is sincere, Jane

finally believes him. The film ends as they kiss.

As with Lost in Austen, there are many allusions to Pride and Prejudice and other

Austen works as well as to Langton’s miniseries and Firth as Darcy in Austenland, but

viewers who are unaware of these references can still enjoy the film and appreciate the all

Ibid., 1:24-1:27.

Ibid.

243

too believable disappointment that Jane feels because of the actions of the men around

her. These viewers may be curious about why Jane is so obsessed with Austen and Mr.

Darcy, but having questions such as these will likely entice them to dig deeper into Darcy

and Pride and Prejudice. Through this research, these potential new Janeites will

hopefully develop an appreciation for Jane Austen and her genius and subsequently want

to befriend Jane Austen and experience her world as much as the fictional Jane Haynes

did. As such, an ignorance of the allusions to Austen is not necessarily an insurmountable

obstacle for those who might watch the film. In fact, according to John Wiltshire, in the

closing sentence of The Cinematic Jane Austen: Essays on the Filmic Sensibility of the

Novels:

The mere presence of two or more treatments of the same novel impels the

reader towards comparison, and comparison of films impels the viewer

towards the source text. The later films derive as much from the earlier

films as they do from the novels; they are hybrid or even miscegenated

works, which derive only in part from the cinematic Jane Austen.

Therefore, any archontic text, whether book or film, that is based upon multiple

contributions to Austen’s Library can draw new viewers or readers and is certainly

capable of pointing those viewers towards the sources from which that particular text

derived. Regardless of the amount of fresh material that has been fused with Austen’s

original novels to inspire new films, so long as the women writers creating them are able

to preserve the essence of Austen’s believable characters, these stories will be shared

over and over again, cherished by generations of Janeites for decades to come, just as

Langton’s and Wright’s adaptations of Pride and Prejudice have been as well as

John Wiltshire, “Afterward: On Fidelity” in The Cinematic Jane Austen: Essays on the Filmic

Sensibility of the Novels, ed. by David Monaghan, Ariane Hudelet, and John Wiltshire (Jefferson:

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2009), 170.

244

Maguire’s and Chadha’s. However, if too much of Austen’s spirit is sifted away by

various layers of interpretation, the adaptation will be eclipsed within the shared

memories of both popular culture in general and the Janeite community specifically.

Mansfield Park & the Price of Producing a Successful Adaptation of Austen’s

Problematic Novel

Jane Austen’s third novel to be published is dramatically different than the

universally beloved Pride and Prejudice; nevertheless, “Austen was confident that”

Mansfield Park “would be well-received and unhappy when it was not.” In her

introduction to the novel, Claudia Johnson explores the reasons that Austen’s earliest

readers may have had for their liking this “difficult” and “experimental” novel so much

less than its predecessor that Austen’s publisher did not bother to publish a second edition

when all of copies of the first edition sold in May of 1813, nor did any contemporary

reviewer bother to write about it. Though Lionel Trilling and other early Austen scholars

praised the book, particularly the character Sir Thomas Bertram, most modern critics,

including Johnson, Joseph Lew, Edward Said, and Brian Southam have recognized that

Bertram is problematic for readers today because of his imperialistic practices. Another

reason twentieth and twenty-first century readers may find Mansfield Park the “most

controversial” of all Austen’s novels is that as Sue Parrill explains, its heroine, Fanny

Price is “modest, retiring, decorous, and prudish. Moreover, she is said to be physically

Other filmic adaptations of Pride and Prejudice that have been produced but have not had as

much cultural impact as those mentioned in this chapter, or those which fall outside the scope of this book

include: Pride and Prejudice: A Latter-Day Comedy (2003), Unleashing Mr. Darcy (a made-for-television

Hallmark Channel movie, 2016) and its sequel, Marrying Mr. Darcy (2018), Pride and Prejudice and

Zombies (2016), Pride, Prejudice and Mistletoe (a made-for-television Hallmark Channel movie, 2018),

and Pride and Prejudice Atlanta (a made-for-television Lifetime movie, 2019). (See www.imbd.com and

search “Pride and Prejudice” or see “Pride and Prejudice,” Jane Austen Society of North America, 2023,

https://jasna.org/austen/screen/pride-prejudice/.)

245

unattractive and weak…entirely passive,” all of which are off-putting attributes in present

society. Given these challenges, it is not surprising that Mansfield Park has only been

adapted into films three times, none of which were Hollywood productions.

In 1983, the BBC released the first screen adaptation in the form of a miniseries

directed by David Giles and written by Ken Taylor. Then, in 1999, came the first feature-

length version of Mansfield Park, which was also made for the BBC, and which was

written and directed by Patricia Rozema. The third and most recent adaptation was

released in 2007 by ITV (Independent Television, also known as Channel 3), BBC’s

competitor in British television markets, and though the miniseries stars Billie Piper as

Fanny Price, it was not well liked by critics, and both British or American audiences took

little notice of it. That neither the miniseries nor the film adaptations made much cultural

impact raises the question of “whether it is possible for there to be a faithful

dramatisation of Mansfield Park” which achieves any sort of commercial or popular

success.

Parrill, Jane Austen on Film and Television, 80. Claudia L. Johnson, “Introduction: Jane Austen

and Mansfield Park,” in Mansfield Park, edited by Claudia L. Johnson (New York: W.W. Norton and

Company, 1998), xi-xii. Lionel Trilling, “Mansfield Park,” in The Opposing Self: Nine Essays in Criticism,

Lionel Trilling (New York: Viking, 1955), 208-30; Claudia L. Johnson, “Mansfield Park: Confessions of

Guilt and Revolutions of Mind,” in Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel, Claudia Johnson

(University of Chicago Press, 1988), 96-120; Joseph Lew, “‘That Abominable Traffic’: Mansfield Park and

the Dynamic of Slavery,” in History, Gender, and Eighteenth-Century Literature, edited by Beth Fowles

Tobin (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1994), 271-300; Edward W. Said, “Jane Austen and

Empire,” in Culture and Imperialism, Edward W. Said (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1993), 93-97;

Brian Southam, “The Silence of the Bertrams: Slavery and the Chronology of Mansfield Park,” Times

Literary Supplement (London) no. 4794, 17 February 1995, 13-14.

Byrne, The Genius of Jane Austen, 267. Billie Piper is a well-known, award-winning English

actress and former pop singer who rose to fame in the mid-1990s while she was still a teen. She

successfully transitioned from singing to acting in 2003, and has become famous for playing Rose Tyler in

the BBC’s internationally popular science fiction series Doctor Who, Belle de Jour in ITV’s Secret Diary of

a Call Girl, and as Brona Croft in Penny Dreadful, a Victorian horror television series that aired on

ShowTime in the US and Sky Atlantic in the UK.

246

Rozema’s film, unlike Taylor’s Mansfield Park, is a liberal reworking of Austen’s

novel. Though she retains Austen’s setting, Rozema’s drastic revisions to the plot include

“the omission of much of the content” and the conflation of “the character of Fanny Price

with the author herself,” and they were not appreciated by most, especially the

traditionalist, Janeites whom Paula Byrne describes as being shocked “from their

complacency” by the film’s commentary “about the corrupt spoils of slavery” as well as

Rozema’s addition of “incest and lesbianism” and her depiction of Sir Thomas Bertram

“as a sadistic patriarch who takes an unhealthy interest in his female slaves.” Though

Byrne attributes the less than enthusiastic reception of Rozema’s Mansfield Park to its

challenging source text and the radicality of Rozema’s directorial vision, this is an

archontic text that has held up exceedingly well, indeed a deposit into Austen’s Library

that was very much ahead of its time. Nearly twenty-five years later, Rozema’s social

critiques which made it unpopular with viewers in at the turn of the century, make it

culturally relevant today amid the various efforts to promote a more inclusive and

accepting society.

Because the Regency England that Rozema portrays is much less idyllic than

most close adaptations of Austen novels, the uninitiated viewers who are inclined to

equate Jane Austen with sentimentality will be pleasantly surprised that she censures the

oppressiveness of racism and sexism as well as eschews heteronormativity—and though

Austen could not have addressed issues as controversial as these in her day, these

critiques are redolent of those that Austen could express. After all, in the original novels,

Austen does dare to subtly critique the Church of England and the sexist double-

Parrill, Jane Austen on Film and Television, 85; Byrne, The Genius of Jane Austen, 266.

247

standards it perpetuated at the time, wherein ruination could happen to a woman if she

were even thought to be in a compromising situation, whereas there were little to no

repercussions for the man who put her in that circumstance.

In Jane Austen, The Secret Radical, Helena Kelly dispels the popular

misconception that Austen’s original novels were little more than didactic books

promoting proper feminine conduct or vapid romances written to appeal to the

supposedly simpler-minded sex. She reminds modern readers of:

the fact that Jane was the only novelist of this period to write novels which were

set more or less in the present day, and more or less in the real world — or at any

rate a world recognisable to her readers as the one in which they actually lived.

Jane doesn’t offer us wicked villains and perfect heroines. She doesn’t give us

storms, or miraculously reappearing heirs.

Instead, Austen’s fiction is so realistic that “Critics of Jane’s own generation praised her

for her unparalleled ability to accurately reproduce what she saw around her.” Thus, by

depicting English society as she does, Rozema is actually preserving the spirit of

Austen’s novels more accurately than many other filmmakers have done, even through

their more traditional adaptations.

Though Rozema’s revisions to Austen are still weaknesses for the most

conservative Janeites, such are the lenses through which many scholars of culture,

history, and literature, alike now examine the world. Because of this shift and its

repercussions in education systems, the younger generations of prospective Janeites are

more open to and appreciative of the broad viewpoint that Rozema’s film provides, and

therefore, they are more likely to become interested in befriending Jane after watching

Helena Kelly, Jane Austen, The Secret Radical, (London: Icon Books, Ltd, 2017). 24.

Ibid., 24.

248

this version of Mansfield Park, than they might be after watching a traditional Austenian

film, which would probably reinforce the stereotypical image of Jane Austen’s novels as

stuffy, irrelevant classical works of literature. Despite being as controversial and

underappreciated as the novel upon which it was loosely based, Rozema’s Mansfield

Park, Byrne correctly classifies it as “the cleverest of all overt Austen adaptations.

Austen’s Emma: A Heroine’s Complexity Reimagined as Cluelessness or Implausibility

Emma was the final novel published in Jane Austen’s lifetime, and for many

Janeites, it is “Jane Austen at her complicated best.” Though it is neither as popular nor

as oft adapted as Pride and Prejudice, literary critics such as Trilling consider Emma the

“most fully representative of its author,” as it demonstrates her skill, and her literary

genius. He did acknowledge, nonetheless, that when compared to the former, it is “not the

more delightful, but the greater book.” Thus, despite Austen believing that Emma’s

protagonist is one “whom no one but myself will much like,” the novel has been adapted

for both film and television nearly a dozen times, outpaced in number only by Pride and

Prejudice.

Though the Jane Austen Society of North America’s website traces the earliest

film adaptation of Emma to John Glenister’s 1972 BBC miniseries, Andrew Wright

records that the BBC actually released its first miniseries based on Emma in May of

1948. Six years later, NBC’s Kraft Theatre would release its own television adaptation

for American audiences. The BBC would then release another Emma miniseries in the

Byrne, The Genius of Jane Austen, 266.

Parrill, Jane Austen on Film and Television, 107. Lionel Trilling, “Emma,” Encounter 8, no.6

(June 1957), 50. James Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen, 1870, edited by R.W. Chapman.

(Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 157. That there are so many screen adaptations of Emma is curious, as finding

suitable literary adaptations of Emma to analyze in the previous chapter of this book proved to be a difficult

undertaking.

249

spring of 1960, and America’s CBS would follow suit in the fall of that year. Next came

Glenister’s British adaptation, and there would not be another archontic film produced

based upon the novel until Emma made its Hollywood debut as Amy Heckerling’s 1995

feature film Clueless.

Acting as both writer and director of the indirect adaptation, Heckerling moves

Austen’s narrative action from the fictional village of Highbury to the Beverly Hills of

the mid-1990s. Protagonist and new adult Emma Woodhouse becomes sixteen-year-old

Cher Horowitz (played by Alicia Silverstone) who is beautiful, popular, and wealthy. She

is also caring, especially towards her widowed (and subsequently divorced) father, who is

a highly-paid litigator, and her best friend and fellow high school student Dionne (played

by Stacey Dash), but she is more concerned about appearances and shopping at the mall

than doing well in school or being active in meaningful extracurricular activities, and her

only ambitions are to entertain herself by making-over other people and to maintain the

bubble of perfection she lives within.

Early in the film, report cards are coming come out, but Cher is not worried about

her less-than-excellent grades because, as she tells her former step-brother Josh (who is

the equivalent of Mr. Knightley, and is played by Paul Rudd), in “every other semester,”

she has been able to beg, convince, or trick her teachers into raising her grades before her

father sees them. In the next scene, to her dismay, after Cher delivers a lackluster,

obviously unresearched speech in-favor of Haitian immigration, her teacher, Mr. Hall

(the equivalent of Mr. Weston), reveals that she has earned a C in his Debate class, and to

JASNA, “Emma,” jasna.org/austen/screen/emma/; Wright, “Jane Austen, Adapted,” 447-49.

Clueless, directed by Amy Heckerling, featuring Alicia Silverstone, Stacey Dash, Brittany

Murphy, and Paul Rudd (Paramount Pictures, 1995), DVD.

250

her surprise, no amount of convincing can sway him to change it. Not to be deterred,

Cher notices that Mr. Hall is single and thinks that if he had a girlfriend, he would be

“sublimely happy” and thereby easier to convince to raise her grade, so she begins to play

matchmaker.

After taking stock of the faculty at Bronson Alcott High School, Cher is

struggling to find someone to pair with Mr. Hall when she remembers, “Of course, there

was always Ms. Geist! Something told me not to discount Ms. Geist!” Ms. Geist (the

equivalent of Miss Taylor) is Cher’s frumpy but passionate Civics teacher and guidance

counselor who sits alone at lunch. To this end, Cher and Dionne secretly place a

handwritten note signed “Secret Admirer,” containing Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, and a

long-stemmed rose in Ms. Geist’s mailbox in the teacher’s lounge. Then, Cher tells Mr.

Hall that Ms. Geist told her that Mr. Hall is “the only one in this school with any

intelligence” to pave the way for a romance between them.

Meanwhile, Cher’s father receives a notice in the mail that she has accumulated

three traffic tickets while still driving with her learner’s permit, and so he grounds her

from driving her Jeep without a licensed driver in the vehicle with her. With no other

choice, Cher asks Josh—who often comes to visit her and her father when he is not

attending his college classes because he considers Mr. Horowitz his own father and he

wants to attend law school someday and needs to gain experience—to ride with her so

that she can leave the house. Cher and Josh have vastly differing philosophies of life and

argue during the drive. Josh urges her to use her energy to do something positive in the

Ibid., 9:56-10:01 and 11:15-11:17.

Ibid., 11:48-11:53, 12:14 to 12:16, and 14:23-14:30. Cher’s high school is named after Bronson

Alcott, the American transcendentalist author and father of Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women.

251

world, such as planting trees, but Cher’s idea of making positive contributions to society

is donating her designer clothing and playing matchmaker with her teachers, both of

which, as Josh points out, are self-serving rather than altruistic activities. Cher is annoyed

by Josh’s disapproval, which corresponds with Emma’s displeasure when Mt. Knightley

criticizes her.

Later, Cher and Dionne offer Mr. Hall a Thermos of Italian roast coffee, which

Cher claims that she mistakenly packed in her own lunch rather than her father’s. The

girls suggest that Mr. Hall share the coffee with Ms. Geist, and he accepts. Then Cher and

Dionne find Ms. Geist and give her a quick makeover as she walks down the hall,

removing her glasses and kooky hair clips, and tying her cardigan stylishly around her

hips to emphasize her waistline. On their way to P.E., the girls see Mr. Hall and Ms.

Geist sitting happily together on a bench that is shaded by a tree, sharing the coffee, and

they are pleased with their success, having done a good deed in pairing their teachers

together. As time passes, and the couple falls in love, Mr. Hall does become an easier

grader, the whole student body applauds Cher’s efforts, and Cher receives an A in

Debate. When her father sees her amended grades, he is proud of her persuasive

abilities.

A new student named Tai Frasier (the equivalent of Harriet Smith, played by

Brittany Murphy) enrolls at school, Cher deems Tai “adorably clueless,” and she decides

that her next good deed should be making Tai over and helping her learn to fit in. Cher

and Dionne give Tai fashion advice and help her develop self-confidence, but Cher does

Ibid.

252

not like that Tai is attracted to Travis Birkenstock (the equivalent of Robert Martin), a

“loadies” who spends more time skipping class and doing drugs than going to class. She

tries to pair Tai with the handsome and popular Elton, whom she thinks is a more

appropriate match, but she is unaware that Elton is more interested in her than he is Tai.

Cher, Dionne, and Tai all attend a party in Sun Valley, a community that is an

hour away from Beverly Hills. When they arrive, Cher attempts to push Tai and Elton

together, and she is somewhat successful. However, her father calls, demanding that she

come back home because she has been out too late. Cher leaves the party with Elton

because he will be driving in the direction of her house to get to his own. Once they are in

alone in his car, Elton attempts to make out with her. Shocked and disgusted, Cher rejects

him, and in anger, he leaves her in an empty parking lot. Almost immediately after Elton

abandons her, Cher is mugged by a stranger with a gun. Desperate, she uses a nearby

payphone and calls Josh, who quickly comes to her rescue.

Back at school, another new student arrives. The suave and sharply dressed

Christian (the much kinder equivalent to Frank Churchill) is the first high school boy that

Cher has ever found attractive, and she sets out to make him her boyfriend. Her efforts to

catch his attention seem to be working, and he accepts her invitation to a party she knows

is happening at Josh’s college. When Josh finds out she is attending a party with a boy,

he becomes jealous and follows her there. At the party, Tai is not having a good time

because no one will dance with her, so Josh does. Cher sees this and is glad that Josh is

being nice to her friend. When the party is nearing its end, Cher and Tai are ready to

Ibid., 22:10-22:17 and 24:33-25:44.

Ibid.

253

leave, but Christian is not ready to go home yet. Josh then gives the girls a ride home, and

Christian promises that he will call her the next day. Cher is pleasantly surprised when

Christian is true to his word, and she takes the opportunity to invite him to her house that

night. He accepts her invitation, and Cher makes plans to seduce him, thinking that she

has finally found the person, other than Luke Perry, with whom she wants to lose her

virginity. Though they watch Some Like it Hot and Spartacus on her bed, and Cher does

her best to entice him to have sex with her, he says that he is tired and leaves, asking

instead for a kiss on the cheek as he says goodnight.

On the way to school the next day with Dionne and her boyfriend Murray, Cher

tells them about what happened with Christian and questions what when wrong. Murray

tells the girls that Christian is homosexual, which is why he would not sleep with Cher.

Once she understands that Christian is not romantically available to her (which

corresponds to Frank being unavailable to Cher because he is secretly engaged to Miss

Fairfax), Cher adjusts her expectations and continues to be friends with Christian. The

two remain close friends and often go shopping at the mall together. On one particular

trip, they take Tai with them, and the guys that Tai is flirting with hang her off the

second-story railing as a joke. Tai is terrified that they will drop her and screams,

catching Cher’s and Christian’s attention. Christian runs over and makes the boys pull

Tai back up to safety, and once he knows Tai is all right, he takes her and Cher home to

recover from the ordeal.

Ibid. Luke Perry was a popular American actor who became a teen idol in the 1990s while

playing Dylan McKay on the television series Beverley Hills, 90210 (the original series which established

the franchise of the same name, which now includes six iterations) the from 1990-1995 and again from

1998 to 2000. He also starred in the popular films Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 8 Seconds, and The Fifth

Element in the same decade. Perry died in 2019.

Ibid.

254

It seems to Cher that overnight her perfect bubble is burst when news of Tai’s

“brush with death at the mall” gets out at school, and Tai subsequently becomes more

popular than Cher is. Then, Cher fails her driver’s test because she is distracted by

wondering how she could be less popular than Tai and, as a result, she almost runs over a

person in the biking lane, fails to change lanes properly, and finally hits a parked car

before the diving examiner makes her pull over and park. While Cher is still sad about

failing her driver’s test, Tai confesses that she is interested in dating Josh and asks Cher

to help her win Josh over. Cher refuses, telling Tai that Josh is not right for her. Tai is

insulted and calls Cher “a virgin who can’t drive” before leaving Cher by herself.

Afterwards, when reflecting upon her argument with Tai, Cher recognizes that it is she

rather than Tai who has been “totally clueless” about her priorities and her relationships

with the people in her life. She also comes to the realization that she is in love with Josh

Figure 5: “Cher’s Epiphany.” In this image, Cher Horowitz (Alicia Silverstone) has an epiphany wherein she realizes

that she has been wrong about the way that she approaches life and her relationships with others, particularly Josh,

whom she now knows that she loves. The movement of the fountain spray and lights in the background are timed

perfectly to illustrate this, the climax of the film. (Heckerling, Clueless, 1:19:05.)

255

(fig. 5). This is similar to the realization that Emma Woodhouse has after Harriet Smith

confesses her love for Mr. Knightley to Emma.

In an effort to give herself a spiritual makeover and do actual good deeds rather

than self-centered ones, Cher finally acquiesces to Ms. Geist’s request to help with

community service projects and becomes the captain of the school’s fundraiser for Pismo

Beach disaster relief. At home, Cher notices that her father and Josh are working on a

multimillion-dollar case and have an overwhelming amount of work to do, so she offers

to help them. Her father happily assigns her the small task of highlighting all the phone

calls on record as having been made on September third. Shortly afterwards, Travis

invites her to watch him skate in a local tournament. While there, she and Tai work out

their differences, and Cher’s life seems to be getting back on track.

As she helps her father with his case, Cher inadvertently organizes the documents

incorrectly, and her father’s legal assistant becomes angry because she has misplaced the

pages. However, Josh defends her and reminds the assistant that if he had done his job

correctly, Cher would never have made the mistake. After the assistant storms out, Josh

and Cher are left alone on the grand staircase, where they admit their feelings for one

another and share their first kiss. Not long afterward, Mr. Hall and Ms. Geist have their

wedding. In attendance are all the couples in Cher’s friend group: Dionne and Murray,

Tai and Travis, and Cher and Josh. Though the boys say that the girls should stop

thinking about and planning their future weddings, Josh asks Cher to catch Ms. Geist’s

Ibid., 1:09:10-1:11:06 and 1:16:59-1:17:03.

This “disaster” seems to be entirely fictional. See Victoria Sepulveda, “Why the tiny Central

Coast town of Pismo Beach has been name-dropped in movies for decades,” SFGate, 7 April 2022,

https://www.sfgate.com/streaming/article/Pismo-Beach-mentioned-in-movies-17058909.php.

256

bouquet when it is thrown so that he can win a bet. Cher successfully catches the

bouquet, though all the other single girls in attendance fight her for it, and the film ends

as Josh and Cher kiss.

100

Despite being an indirect adaptation of Emma, Clueless remains largely faithful to

Austen’s plot structure, and though not all of Heckerling’s characters directly correlate to

Austen’s, that this Janeite has been careful to maintain the spirit of the original novel

even as she modernizes it undeniable. Heckerling, like Rozema, shifts the social critique

in her film and addresses modern controversies such as homosexuality and racial tensions

within the US. Not only is there non-heteronormative representation in the form of

Christian, but also, Tai refers to the friends she had at her former school who were not

straight. Additionally, Dionne and Murray, who are African American, have a discussion

wherein he states that “street slang is an increasingly valid form of expression. Most

feminine pronouns do have mocking, but not necessarily misogynistic undertone.” These

aspects mean that the film remains culturally relevant even after the passage nearly thirty

years.

101

Unquestionably successful upon its release, Clueless was nominated for half a

dozen awards during the 1995-96 season, and it won six of them, notably the National

Society of Film Critics’ Awards for Best Screenplay. Heckerling’s film also grossed

$56,631,572 domestically and spawned a computer game as well as an eponymous

television series which ran for three seasons, airing on ABC during the first two seasons,

100

Ibid. William Galperin, “Adapting Jane Austen: The Surprising Fidelity of ‘Clueless,’” The

Wordsworth Circle 42, no. 3 (2011): 187–93.

101

Ibid., 23:24-23-39.

257

and on UPN for the final season. But how could such a radical reworking of Emma be so

universally beloved? Holly Luetkenhaus believes that:

What Clueless does so well, that arguably other Austen adaptations fail to

accomplish at the same level, is maintain the ironic satire so particular to Austen’s

narration (Emma in particular emphasizes the irony). Most films, because of the

removal of her wry narrator, fail to fully translate Austen’s mockery of the

romantic and societal conventions within which her characters are forced to

operate.

102

Like Maguire’s Bridget Jones’s Diary did for adults (especially British women),

Heckerling’s Clueless brings Austen into the 1990s in a with characters and situations

that feel authentic for its teen viewers, and Leukenhaus is correct. Just as sarcasm is a

fundamental means of communication and self-expression for Bridget as a young

professional, wryness is integral to Cher’s quintessential teenage experience— as

inextricable from it as the slang terms “As if!” and “Whatever!” she is still known for

popularizing.

Though its initial popularity has waned, the now nostalgic film has yet to be

forgotten. Clueless’ prominent and seemingly indelible place in popular culture was

confirmed a mere two weeks before this paragraph was written, during the 2023

Superbowl broadcast when an advertisement for the shopping rebate service Rakuten

recreated several well-known scenes from Heckerling’s film. The commercial featured an

adult Silverstone along with Elsa Donovan (who played Amber in the film, a mean but

popular girl student who serves as a foil to Cher) acting in character within the modern

world. As the Superbowl is typically the most widely viewed televised event in America

102

“Clueless,” IMDb, 2023, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112697/. Holly Luetkenhaus, “As If!

Clueless and the Modern AU,” in Austentatious: The Evolving World of Jane Austen Fans, (Iowa City:

University of Iowa Press, 2019), 34.

258

each year, the Rakuten commercial exposed millions of viewers to the world of Clueless

and, according to Wiltshire, to Jane Austen as well. In terms of indirect Austen film

adaptation, which have had made the largest cultural impacts, Heckerling’s classic

coming-of-age story comes in second only to Maguire’s Bridget Jones’s Diary.

103

Five screen adaptations of Emma have been released since Clueless premiered in

1995, and only two of them have been written or directed by women. The first is Aisha, a

Hindi-language adaptation set in present-day Delhi, which was released in 2010. The

screenplay for Aisha was written by Devika Bhagat, and the film was directed by

Rajshree Ojha. The second and most recent adaptation, which is stylized as Emma., was

released in 2020 with Eleanor Catton writing the screenplay and Autumn de Wide taking

on first her directorial role. De Wilde ostensibly retains Austen’s original setting for this

directly adapted feature-length film, and despite making its debut in March 2020, Emma.

grossed $26,404,660 globally. The film, starring Anya Taylor-Joy as Emma Woodhouse,

was nominated for 60 awards, two of which were Academy Awards. Emma. received 11

awards in total, most of which were awarded for Best Costume.

104

In “Jane Again,” Rachel M. Brownstein contextualizes the film, writing that de

Wilde’s Emma.:

is lavish, engaging, and cute, like every adaptation of Austen’s novel about the

matchmaking heroine who finds love herself, next door. These include Amy

Heckerling’s brash Clueless (1995), set in twentieth-century Hollywood, and the

two period dramas that were released the following year, one starring Gwyneth

Paltrow and the other with Kate Beckinsale.

105

103

Rakuten, “The Extended Cher Cut | Rakuten Commercial,” 6 Feb. 2023. Advertisement, 1:00.

https://youtu.be/o_yGq_4xCKQ. Wiltshire, “Afterward: On Fidelity,” 170.

104

Emma. was released on March 6, 2020, just before the global COVID-19 pandemic caused

most US citizens to be subject to stay-at-home orders which were issued as early as March 7, 2020, and

lasted for varying lengths of time. “Emma.,” IMDb, 2023, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9214832/.

105

Rachel M. Brownstein, “Jane Again,” in Jane Austen, Sex, and Romance: Engaging with

Desire in the Novels and Beyond, ed. Nora Nachumi and Stephanie Oppenheim (Rochester: Boydell &

259

Though it is entertaining, and de Wilde does set her narrative in England at some point in

the 1800s, there are many anachronisms, making it dissimilar to the other direct

adaptations that preceded it. As Brownstein notes:

de Wilde’s Emma. is an anti-historical romance. It is set in a time and place that

never existed, a squeaky-clean English countryside where the saturated colors are

startling, all the characters caricature themselves, and ebullient invisible

orchestras burst into eclectic music to comment, presumably ironically, on the

action. Replete with ironies, nearly all of them indeterminate, it is ‘true’ to neither

the past nor Jane Austen’s novel. Mindful of earlier Austen adaptations, for the

most part condescendingly, it riffs, really, on the big book Austen dedicated to the

Prince Regent in 1815.

106

Thus, while de Wilde has utilized her training as a professional photographer to create an

astonishingly striking film that presents “Emma’s identity through a canny utilisation of

the Burkean and Romantic beautiful, and an implicit cultural understanding of how

Austen’s work is consumed by fans beyond the film screen,” her interpretive vision for

Emma. thins the realism that is such a distinct aspect of Austen’s writing style to the

point that the success of the adaptation is compromised, at least for the erudite or

traditionalist viewers who would take notice of these inconsistencies. Though it could be,

as it was with MGM’s 1940 Pride and Prejudice, that “De Wilde’s film plays with and

against the notorious gentility and politeness of Austen’s blameless novel” a bit too much

Brewer, 2022), 154-55. Other filmic adaptations of Emma that have been produced but have not had as

much cultural impact as those mentioned in this chapter, or those which fall outside the scope of this book

include: Emma (1996, directed by Diarmuid Lawrence), Emma (1996, Douglas McGrath), and Emma

(2009). See www.imbd.com and search “Emma” or see “Emma,” Jane Austen Society of North America,

2023, https://jasna.org/austen/screen/emma/.

106

Ibid., 115.

260

and, therefore, will only draw the perspective Janeites who are captivated by its sublime

cinematography.

107

Screen Adaptations of Northanger Abbey, Persuasion, & Austen’s Other Posthumous

Publications

Austen’s final finished novels to be published were Northanger Abbey and

Persuasion, which were printed as a four-volume set in December of 1817, Jane having

died five months beforehand. However, once her fragmentary works Sanditon and Lady

Susan, and The Watsons were also published, they have been completed by creative

Janeites wishing, just as Woolf did, that there were more than six novels through which

they could explore Austen-land and strengthen their friendship with Jane. These

unfinished works have also been adapted into a handful of feature-length films and

television miniseries. Most recently Persuasion and Sanditon were released as a 2022

film and 2019 miniseries (which is ongoing), respectively.

Persuasion, the last novel Austen would complete, has been adapted for the

screen only five times. Sue Parrill lists the earliest one as a BBC miniseries that aired in

four parts from December 30, 1960 to January 20, 1961. The screenplay was written by

Michael Voysey and Barbara Burnham, who drew directly from Austen’s novel. No

copies of this series are believed to survive. Ten years later, the BBC released a second

Persuasion miniseries. Julian Mitchell wrote the screenplay, and Howard Baker directed

the five-part series which aired in the spring of 1971. No further adaptations of

Persuasion were produced until 1995, when the BBC released a made-for-television

movie starring Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds as Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth. It

107

Hila Shachar, “Cultural Manifestations of Romanticism on the Contemporary Screen,” in The

Edinburgh Companion to Romanticism and the Arts, ed. Maureen McCue and Sophie Thomas (Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press, 2023), 495. Brownstein, “Jane Again,” 157.

261

was adapted from Austen’s novel by Nick Dear and directed by Roger Mitchell. Likely

because its release coincided with the beginnings of Austenmania, after it aired on BBC-2

in April of 1995, the film was released theatrically and distributed in the US by Sony

Pictures Classics. It was also aired in America on PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre television

program. The fourth adaptation of Persuasion was also a made-for-television movie, but

it aired on ITV, rather than the BBC, in 2007. Though some reviews praised the film,

which was written by Simon Burke and directed by Adrian Shergold, Gill Ballinger

writes that it:

108

overemphasises Anne [Elliot’s] marginality: it makes her excessively servile, as

well as physically frail. Also, in the novel, Anne can be eloquent and rhetorically

powerful; the adaptation loses the opportunity to draw this out. Finally, the ending

of the adaptation aligns her with aristocratic, patrician values which are quite at

odds with her political affiliations in the novel.

109

However, within the same edited book, Katherine Johnson points out that a clip from

Shergold’s Persuasion has been included in the documentary which is shown at the Jane

Austen Centre in Bath, and though the actors in the clip are not actually the characters

they are playing, “authenticity is still attributed to them as signifiers of Austen’s

characters.” Johnson explains that, as such, these representations are “arguably of equal

(if different) ‘authenticity’ to the characters conjured in the imaginations of Austen’s

readers—evocations which, it is widely acknowledged, can feel almost real in their

vividness.”

110

108

Parrill, Jane Austen on Film and Television, 150.

109

Gill Ballinger, “Adapting Austen ‘for the new generation’: ITV’s 2007 Trilogy Mansfield Park,

Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion,” in After Austen: Reinventions, Rewritings, Revisitings, edited by Lisa

Hopkins (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 158.

110

Katherine Johnson, “Literary Heritage Writ Large at the Jane Austen Festival, Bath” in in After

Austen: Reinventions, Rewritings, Revisitings, edited by Lisa Hopkins (London: Palgrave Macmillan,

2018), 281.

262

Therefore, while Ballinger finds more at fault with than in favor of the film,

Johnson argues that Shergold’s Persuasion and other films shown at the Centre “offer

accessible and attainable sources of ‘original’ pieces for Austen admirers” who otherwise

may not be able to forge personal connections with or otherwise befriend Jane because of

the lack of extant historical artifacts with verifiable connections to Austen. Johnson’s

point—that heritage museums help their guests encounter a past that has been brought

back to life in a personally accessible way—echoes the purpose of the Hill sisters’ 1902

publication Jane Austen: Her Homes & Her Friends. Constance and Ellen’s narrative

journey brought their readers into Austen-land, as Constance described and Ellen

sketched their actual experiences walking where Austen once walked in hopes that

Janeites who had not seen the likes of Steventon, Chowton, or Bath, might still be able to

imagine spending time in those places with Austen, just as the Hill sisters had actually

done in the process of writing their book. A similar impulse drives all Janeite women

writers to spend more time with their beloved Austen, but unlike the early admirers,

modern devotees can share their adventures in Austen-land with others through film.

The most recent filmic adaptation of Persuasion premiered on the Internet

streaming service Netflix little more than six months ago. It was directed by Carrie

Cracknell and Ron Bass and Alice Victoria Winslow penned its screenplay. Released on

July 15, 2022, Cracknell’s Persuasion is a traditional adaptation of Austen’s original

novel, but a review written by Collin Garbarino for World, which begins “Out of all of

Jane Austen’s books, Persuasion is the one that still needed an excellent screen

adaptation. Now Austen fans will continue to wait, because Netflix’s new movie version

263

of the classic novel doesn’t do it justice,” encapsulates the feelings of several film

critics.

111

Most reviewers take issue with the film’s depiction of protagonist Anne Elliot,

who frequently breaks the fourth wall to interact with the audience. In these asides, Anne

(played by Dakota Johnson) does more than dispel the illusion that the performers are

unaware of their audience. She also uses modern turns of phrase and expresses modern

feminist opinions that are jarring to the Janeite traditionalists. However, when coupled

with the racially diverse cast, Johnson’s interpretation of Anne Elliot is a heroine tailor-

made to appeal to younger generations of Janeites. Though it is doubtful that Cracknell’s

Persuasion will come close to being as venerated as Clueless, its radical approach to

Austen which has so annoyed the critics is precisely the element that may be able to draw

in potential Janeites so long as Bass and Winslow’s narrative resonates with them and

they find Anne and Captain Wentworth relatable.

That is not to say that there is no place in Austen’s Library for breaking the fourth

wall. Such a technique would likely be quite effective in a modern filmic adaptation of

Persuasion’s companion text Northanger Abbey, which has only been adapted for the

screen twice. The first was a BBC miniseries released in 1987, which was adapted by

Maggie Wadley and directed by Giles Foster. The second was for ITV, and it came

twenty years afterward. Written by Andrew Davies, directed by Jon Jones, and receiving

111

Collin Garbarino, “Modern Persuasion: Netflix’s adaptation of the classic story will find few

fans among Austenites,” World, 30 July 2022, 29. See Peter Debruge, “‘Persuasion’ Review: Dakota

Johnson Makes an Odd Fit for a ‘Fleabag’-Style Jane Austen Adaptation,” Variety, 15 July 2022,

https://variety.com/2022/film/reviews/persuasion-review-dakota-johnson-netflix-1235313062/; Stewart

Heritage, “Turning Persuasion into Jane Austen’s Fleabag was a truly terrible idea,” The Guardian, 15 July,

2022, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/jul/15/persuasion-jane-austen-fleabag-review; Deborah

Ross, “Everyone involved should be put in prison: Netflix’s Persuasion Reviewed,” The Spectator, 16 July

2022, https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/everyone-involved-should-be-in-prison-netflixs-persuasion-

reviewed/and many others.

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positive reviews, there is little wonder that the 2007 adaptation is remembered much

more often than the first, which had no lasting cultural impact.

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Within Austen’s repertoire of completed novels, Northanger Abbey stands apart

as the singular parody, though Austen did employ satire as a literary device in all her

works. Unlike the other five novels, however, Northanger Abbey critiques an entire genre

of fiction rather than particular aspects of English society by satirizing popular Gothic

works such as The Mysteries of Udolpho and Castle Rackrent, both of which are read in

Northanger Abbey by the teenaged Catherine Morland—Austen’s only protagonist who,

as the readers are told, “was in training for a heroine; she read all such works as heroines

must read to supply their memories with those quotations which are so serviceable and so

soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventful lives.” Thus, from the start of the first

chapter, Austen’s readers are aware that the narrator is mocking Catherine overtly

throughout the narrative. As such, one would think that incorporating a sarcastic heroine

espousing modern philosophies and who interacts directly with the audience with would

be more seamlessly and effectively accomplished in Northanger Abbey than in

Persuasion (but as British film critic Deborah Ross postulates, it is possible that neither

Cracknell nor her screenwriters have read much of Austen, and thus were unaware of the

better option). Nevertheless, as there are only two film adaptations of it, Northanger

Abbey is yet another of Austen’s novels that is in want of an excellent dramatization.

113

112

Notably, the 2007 adaptation of Northanger Abbey stars JJ Field as Henry Tilney, and Field

subsequently played Henry Nobley in the 2013 film Austenland, mentioned previously in this chapter.

113

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, edited by Susan Fraiman, (New York: W.W. Norton &

Company, 2004) 7.

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Aside from adaptations of her published works, two other archontic films have

been released recently based upon Austen’s juvenilia and fragmentary texts. First came

Whit Stillman’s 2016 full-length feature Love and Friendship, which is based not upon

the Austen’s story Love and Freindship [sic], as one might surmise. It is actually based

upon Lady Susan, a novella thought to have been completed in about 1794, but which

Austen never published. Stillman serves as both director and screenwriter of the critically

acclaimed film which was nominated for 57 awards. Among the seven that Love and

Friendship won, Stillman garnered four awards in the category of Best Adapted

Screenplay.

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Most recently, in 2019, ITV, in partnership with America’s PBS Masterpiece,

released Andrew Davies’s Sanditon, a television series based upon the unfinished

manuscript that Austen was working on in early 1817. She finished twelve chapters of the

work she called The Brothers before she ceased work on it on March 18 of that year

because of her deteriorating health. As his source text is fragmentary, Davies based the

series’ premier episode upon Austen’s manuscript and has written the script for the other

thirteen episodes himself. Presently, two eight-episode seasons have been released, and a

third will begin airing on March 19, 2023. Unsurprisingly, Davies’s Sanditon is highly

rated and has already won an Internet Movie Database award for the most popular

television shows.

115

114

“Love and Friendship,” IMDb, 2023, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3068194/.

115

Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen: A Life (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 265-67. “Sanditon,”

IMDb, 2023. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8685324/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1.

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Conclusion

Though Jane Austen’s natural life was a regrettably brief forty-one years, and her

professional career ended abruptly in the in the summer of 1817, having only lasted about

six years, her many afterlives have spanned more than two hundred. That the name and

works of the unassuming daughter of an Anglican rector could ever achieve such

longevity is incongruous, considering the rather small size of her extant body of work.

However, Austen was no ordinary woman scribbling stories at a writing desk in her spare

time. As all of fashionable British society would learn in the summer of 1813, the “Lady”

author of Pride and Prejudice and its predecessor Sense and Sensibility was a literary

genius.

Austen never signed her name to any of the four works she lived to see published.

Nevertheless, most of England’s reading public became aware of it after the unqualified

success of her second novel. By this time, her works had captivated all manner of English

readers, from members of the literary elite such as Sir Walter Scott, to the members of the

Royal Family, namely George, The Prince Regent, and everyone in between. In response,

her close friends and family were only too delighted to reveal their connections to such a

popular authoress. Since that time, aside from a brief two-decade span during which her

works were out of print, the public’s fascination with Austen has not only continued, but

also expanded exponentially over the last two centuries as her innumerable admirers

shared Austen’s remarkably realistic stories and characters with their friends.

However, her most devoted disciples could not content themselves with reading,

rereading, and discussing Austen’s six published novels. For as Virginia Woolf famously

lamented, “It is impossible to say too much about the novels that Jane Austen did write;

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but enough attention perhaps has never yet been paid to the novels that Jane Austen did

not write.” That is, because of the joy that Woolf and other Janeites experienced when

immersing themselves in the world of Austen’s creation, they wished to have access to all

the other novels Austen would have written, had she lived to do so. As reading these

unwritten works was an impossibility, these faithful readers had to find alternate avenues

though which to return to Austen-land, and little more than thirty years passed between

the time that Henry Austen formally announced his sister’s name and death in December

of 1817 and Janeites began to reimagine, retell, and otherwise rework Jane’s original

novels in new and creative ways.

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The earliest known archontic texts based upon Austen’s work, aside from the

edits that her siblings Henry and Cassandra Austen made to Northanger Abbey and

Persuasion before publishing them, was written by Jane’s niece, Catherine Anne Austen

Hubback, and published in 1850. Hubback’s novel The Other Sister is completion of

Austen’s unfinished work The Watsons, which she set aside after the death of her father

in 1805. For the next 135 years, Janeites continued to adapt Austen and make various

contributions to her Library, first in the form novels and plays, and later radio

performances. However, the trajectory of Austen’s afterlives took an irrevocable turn

when MGM produced Robert Z. Leonard’s feature length film Pride and Prejudice in

1940. For, Austen’s genius could reach audiences like never before as scenes inspired by

her novels played out before them on the silver screen.

117

116

Virginia Woolf, “Virginia Woolf on Jane Austen: A review of the publication of R.W.

Chapman’s edition of the Novels of Jane Austen, in Five Volumes,” The New Republic, January 30, 1924,

https://newrepublic.com/article/115922/virginia-woolf-jane-austen.

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Hubback was the daughter of Jane’s older brother Sir Francis “Frank” Austen. For a

comprehensive list of Austen pastiche from the earliest known works until 2000, see Rolf Breuer, “Jane

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Though Leonard’s film was well received upon debut, it failed to make the

cultural impact that studio executives hoped for when they cast the dashing Sir Laurence

Olivier as Mr. Darcy and the elegant Greer Garson as Elizabeth Bennet. It would take

another fifty-five years for a spate of successful Austenian adaptations—made for both

film and television—to be released within a few months’ time in 1995, and this exposure,

coupled with the emergence of widespread communication via the Internet, meant that

Jane Austen was suddenly a topic of discussion across the Anglophone world. She was a

bona fide celebrity, and Austenmania was born.

Despite the passage of nearly thirty years, Austen’s celebrity has only increased.

She is a cultural icon with her own brand and niche market as well as two heritage

museums and several literary festivals to her name. However, this level of popularity

would not exist without the dedication of her most ardent admirers, the Janeites who will

stop at nothing to spend just a little more time befriending Jane. By creating original film

and television adaptations, be they direct or indirect interpretations of Austen’s works or

her life that retain the complicated and supple nature of Austen’s original characters,

Janeites will propel Austenmania and extend her fame well into the foreseeable future.

Austen, etc.: The Completions, Continuations, and Adaptations of Her Novels,” Erfurt Electronic Studies in

English, last modified January15, 2012, http://webdoc.gwdg.de/edoc/ia/eese/breuer/biblio.html.

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AFTERWARD: DARE TO BE AN AUTHORESS

“I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible Vanity, the most unlearned, &

uninformed Female who ever dared to be an Authoress.”

—Jane Austen in a letter to Rev. James Stanler Clarke, dated 11 December 1815

I began this journey into Austen-land exactly one year ago today, and there is

something poetic, I think, about ending it here and now. It was not, by any means, my

first exploration of Austen’s Library, as I have been patronizing it since age ten or eleven.

I began with Pride and Prejudice, as so many other soon-to-be-Janeites do, and I fell in

love with Austen’s distinct depictions of the Regency. I loved the elegance and civility,

and the few bits of her famously sharp satire that I was clever enough to understand at

that age. Pride and Prejudice might have been a classic, but it certainly was not the dry,

boring book that some of my acquaintances made it out to be. Rather rapidly it became

my favorite book, and it remains so, unless I happen to be reading Persuasion, and even

then, it is only usurped temporarily.

Though I had not yet had the pleasure of reading Mrs. Dalloway or To The

Lighthouse, much less A Room of One’s Own, and perhaps I had yet to even hear the

name Virginia Woolf, as I was years from taking my first British Literature course. Thus,

I did not know that the dismay I felt when reaching the end of my sixth Austen novel was

a pang that all Janeites experience and that they, like Woolf and I, wish desperately for

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one more book of Austen’s to be uncovered, for one more chance to venture into an

unexplored region of Austen’s world, and grieve the books Austen did not live to write.

Even as I was mourning the death of that great authoress which had happened

more than 175 years before, a confluence of events would give birth to Austenmania, and

while that ongoing cultural phenomenon has undoubtedly and irrevocably altered popular

culture the world over, it altered me as well. After seeing Simon Langton’s Pride and

Prejudice on PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre in 1996, a new region of Austen-land did open

for me. Having Austen’s familiar characters brought to life on the television screen in

front of me gave them added dimensions and nuances, and suddenly, though there were

no other novels I had not read, I realized that other ways to experience Austen anew and

reimmerse myself in her works remained. From that point on, I read or watched any

Austenian adaptation I happened to find.

When I became a British Literature major in college, I studied Austen’s works

formally for the first time, and I began to wonder exactly what it was about them that

attracted attention from so many, scholars and laymen alike. It is that question, then, that

I have been pondering for most of my adult life, and out of which I began the earliest

incarnation of this study. Over the years, as I researched within Austen Studies, I have

come to agree with the many Janeite critics preceding me—it is Jane Austen’s uniquely

relatable characters who continue to draw readers into her narratives and engage with

them on what feels like a personal level. Readers form attachments to Elizabeth Bennet

and the Dashwood sisters, and even to the unassuming Fanny Price. They are just as

exasperated with Emma Woodhouse as George Knightley is, but like him, they love her

anyway. They cringe when Catherine Moorland lets her imagination get the best of her

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when suspecting General Tilney of murder, and they weep with Anne Eliot at the words

in Captain Wentworth’s letter. Readers can empathize with Austen’s characters so well

because of her painstakingly accurate, human depictions, many of whom they have met

in the course of their own lives. Elinor and Marianne Dashwood feel like friends who are

down on their luck after their father’s death, and we wish their brother had treated them

better. Kitty and Lydia Bennet seem like the stupid younger sisters of our friends who

refuse to listen to reason. Frank Churchill, Henry Crawford, and George Wickham are

familiar to nearly all of us who have unknowingly had a romantic relationship with a cad.

Having an answer to my initial question, I then began investigating another,

which was the purpose of this study; that is, what compels some of Austen’s most

demonstrative devotees to continue to create new adaptations of her work in various

mediums? Claudia Johnson likens this Janeite need for spending time with Austen to

desiring to make friends with her to extend the amount of time we spend in Austen’s

presence and in the presence of her characters. Austen’s pen has famously stilled, but the

instruments of her acolytes have not. Thus, as Sarah Glosson and Abigail Derecho have

argued, Janeites create their own contributions to Austen’s Library, depositing these

archontic texts into the archive that is shared globally among her followers. By extension,

I contend that while on their quests to befriend Jane, women writers rework her novels

for new mediums, and the frequent production of these fresh interpretations of Austen

continually expose new audiences to her genius, ultimately ensuring that the Janeite

community will exist and expand for generations to come.

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Précis

In Chapter One, I focus on Austen’s literary career. Beginning with the Austen

family, as they were the earliest of all Janeites, I examine the ways Jane’s father and

siblings help to promote her professionally in a brief biographical sketch of Jane’s life. I

then delve into Austen’s second life, which began with the posthumous publications of

Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in December of 1817. Additionally, I trace her path

toward gradual popularity in America and her subsequently rapid elevation to

international celebrity as a result of Austenmania, an obsession with all things Austen,

which shows no sign of abating.

In Chapter Two, I map Jane Austen’s literary heritage from the earliest known

Englishwoman writer to have completed a work, Hugeburc, a Benedictine nun who lived

and wrote in the late eighth century. Following the line of known women writers through

time, I discuss the ways that Marie de France, Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe,

Hildegard of Bingen, Juliana of Cornillon, Hugeberc and all other women writers living

in the Middle Ages experienced overwriting, a form of censorship which either limited

the topics on which they wrote or erased their voices and identities altogether, nothing

that until Christine de Pizan and Laura Cereta, no women were known to have any

agency in the publishing of their works. Next, I trace the branch of acknowledged

Englishwomen of letters, starting with Aphra Behn, who defied societal conventions by

publishing under her own name a hundred years before Austen would release Sense and

Sensibility anonymously. Behn was followed by Austen’s contemporaries Mary Astell,

Frances Burney, Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth, and Austen herself. Moving

across the Pond, I touch upon some of Austen’s American counterparts, the earliest of

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whom is Martha Ballard. She is followed by Mary Rowland; Judith Sargent Stevens

Murray, known as America’s first major feminist author; and Susanna Rowson. Without

these protofeminist women writers living on both sides of the Atlantic, there would

neither be a Jane Austen, literary genius; nor would there be a legion of followers

adapting her works two centuries afterward.

Chapter Three concerns the Janeites, the vibrant community of Austen’s myriad

admirers who are enamored of the realistic characters she has created and thus driven to

spend as much time as possible absorbed in her narratives, communing with Jane. From

the earliest literary adaptation, a serialized story by Eliza Leslie, I examine the ways

Janeite writers engage in cultural production by adding their own archontic works to the

collection that Austen began as she wrote her juvenilia. At its inception, the earliest

Austen enthusiasts to refer to themselves as Janeites were British men of letters.

However, over time, the group has expanded to include both men and women with

various levels of education and areas of expertise, many of whom have chosen to adapt

Austen’s novels using any number of mediums.

The earliest known book-length text to be added to Austen’s archive was

Englishwoman Sybil G. Brinton’s Old Friends and New Fancies: The Imaginary Sequel

to the Novels of Jane Austen, which she published in 1913. Though some literary and

filmic adaptations were published between 1913 and 1940, Austen failed to capture the

public’s attention on a permanent basis. However, when the British scholars F.R. Leavis

and Ian Watt published mid-century works praising Austen, the public finally took notice,

and by the 1970s, Austen was being taught, not only in her native England, but also in

high school and college classrooms across America. Then, in 1995, when the world had

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just become globally connected through the advent of the Internet, a spate of successful

Austenian adaptations were released for film and television viewing, among them are

Simon Langton’s miniseries Pride and Prejudice, Ang Lee’s feature-length Sense and

Sensibility, and Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, an indirect adaptation of Emma, as well as

Sharon Maguire’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, an indirect adaptation of Pride and Prejudice,

which was released the next year. Through these immensely popular texts, which could

be discussed by the enthusiastic fans living anywhere in the world with Internet

connectivity through message boards and listservs, Jane was en vogue, and she has not

fallen out of fashion since. Additionally, innumerable Janeite women writers were then

inspired to write, produce, and direct their own reworkings, completions, and sequels to

Austen’s six novels. Building on Derrida’s theory of archival expansion as interpreted by

Abigail Derecho and Sarah Glosson, I argue that the collective body of derivative works

that Janeites produce, which I have termed Austen’s Library, continues to grow and will

do so indefinitely so long as women writers continue to make contributions to it. In turn,

the Janeite community will continue to thrive as new members become initiated through

experiencing the latest archontic text.

In Chapter Four, I illustrate the ways that Austenian literary adaptations,

regardless of whether they are direct or indirect reworkings, can successfully attract new

readers and point them to the source texts by juxtaposing each of Austen’s original

novels with an archontic text upon which it was based. I have included the direct, yet

modernized adaptions Sense and Sensibility: A Novel by Joanna Trollope and Kate

Watson’s Seeking Mansfield, as well as the indirect and rather radical adaptations Bridget

Jones’s Diary, Helen Feilding’s wildly popular retelling of Pride and Prejudice; The

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Knight Before Christmas, Helen Brant’s seasonal romance based on Emma, Val

McDermid’s eponymously titled update, Northanger Abbey; and Jane Odiwe’s Searching

for Captain Wentworth, a version of Persuasion involving time travel. Though each

author has adapted Austen in her own way, all these texts preserve Austen’s relatable

characters, and as such, they are able to successfully attract readers who may never have

considered themselves Janeites.

The fifth chapter is similar to the fourth in that I examine the filmic adaptations

of Austen’s works which have been written or directed by women. As Emma Thompson

penned Ang Lee’s wonderful direct adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, I discuss it, along

with Maguire’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, as well as Heckerling’s Clueless, all released in

1995. However, I have included more recent adaptations as well. Among them are

Gurinder Chadha’s Bollywood-style reworking Bride & Prejudice (2004), Joe Wright’s

traditional adaptation Pride & Prejudice (2005) which was written by Deborah Moggach,

Patricia Rozema’s radical rendition of Mansfield Park (2007), Adrian Shergold’s made-

for-television movie Persuasion (2007), Jerusha Hess’s Austenland (2013), Autumn de

Wilde’s Emma. (2020), and Carrie Cracknell’s Persuasion (2022). Though each title may

not be considered totally successful by film critics, all of these archontic films have

succeeded in catching the public’s attention in one way or another, and as such, these

female filmmakers have helped propel Austen’s popularity and thereby preserve and

increase the Janeite community.

Implications

This research examining the ways that Janeite women writers create and expand

their cultural communities through adapting Jane Austen’s works clearly pertains to

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Austen Studies, but it also relates to the field of Heritage Studies. Defining heritage as the

collection of stories—the essence of cultural meaning and value—that lies beneath the

impersonal sets of facts and dates recalled together as history has allowed me to analyze

the life history of Jane Austen within the context of the cultural impact that her six

novels, published during the early nineteenth century have had upon Anglophone culture

over the last two hundred years. During this span, her narratives have been ascribed

significant meaning and value within the Janeite communities that her admirers have

formed as well as a sustained recognition within a vast majority of the general public.

That my research touches on historical aspects as well as social and cultural ones speaks

to the project’s interdisciplinarity.

As I investigated the history of Austen’s critical and cultural reception within

English society, I was able to contextualize the depictions of her that have been passed

down to us with the historical depictions of the Englishwomen writers who preceded her

as well as her contemporaries. Publishing within the early 1800s, as she did, meant that

Austen was far more likely to find both a publisher and a reading audience than her

literary foremothers. As such, she had the opportunity to become the talk of the British

upper crust during the spring and summer of 1813 when all of them were openly reading

and discussing Pride and Prejudice, despite the work being attributed to an anonymous

woman of unknown social status. And though there is no question that the particular Jane

Austen who is revealed to her readers through the Austen family records and biographies

has been heavily edited by her relatives to preserve their respectability, the narrative

voice that is preserved within her published novels appears to be as unfiltered and

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sardonic as the one narrating the works she left unpublished and the surviving

correspondence she exchanged with her friends and family.

The “real” Jane Austen’s story having been overwritten is a tremendous loss for

Janeites concerning themselves with the historical narrative of her life. However, the

elusive quality that keeps much of her life shadowed allows Janeites to attach their own

interpretations to the aspects of her which remain visible to us. In this way, Austen has a

distinct malleability which other authors do not, and through the lens of heritage rather

than history, this elasticity renders her again uniquely situated to fulfill various roles

within the perspectives of different sects of Janeites.

For example, traditionalist or conservative Janeites can interpret Langton and

Lee’s adaptations as the definitive film versions of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and

Prejudice respectively. All the while more progressive Janeites may consider Bridget

Jones’s Diary and Kandukondain Kandukondain the most accurate representations of

Austen on screen. After all, Austen’s novels offer telling critiques of nineteenth century

society, as both Maguire’s and Menon’s films do of societies in the late twentieth and

early twenty-first centuries. The absence of a definitive Jane Austen to contradict either

of these interpretations leaves the space to validate both points of view. Thus, the mythos

surrounding Austen and her novels can shift to accommodate the needs of any Janeites

wishing to befriend her and assign their own meaning or interpretation to her works. This

is similar to the flexibility of her characters which renders them relatable to generation

after generation of Janeite audiences. These fictional creatures are just as complex and

ambiguous as actual humans are, which allows us to find them within the real people who

populate our real lives.

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What is more, the enigma concerning Austen’s authentic history and identity, as

well as the question of what she might have written had she lived longer, continues to

intrigue Janeites, leaving them desperate to commune with their conception of her in any

way they can. Such motivation, coupled with Austen’s sustained popularity and the

almost guaranteed marketability of Austenian pastiche means that creative Janeites will

continue to write, direct, and produce their own archontic interpretations of her texts—

and, in turn, fuel Austenmania and the expansion of Janeite communities—well into the

foreseeable future, so long as the malleable, relatable essence of her characters remains

intact. By its very nature, then, Austen’s Library is self-sustaining, just as Derrida

theorized concerning all archives to be, opening out forever and never quite complete.

Jane Austen’s genius is not any more likely to be forgotten than the gleam of her

status as a pop culture icon is to become dull. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize

that not all literary and filmic adaptations of her works preserve the essence of their

source texts. Archontic texts containing characters who are unmalleable and unrelatable

to audiences of the particular genres into which they fit will not be successful in

attracting prospective Janeites, meaning that if the proliferation of Austenian adaptations

were to wane and only a few such unsuccessful texts were produced, Austen could

potentially begin to sink slowly into relative obscurity with the likes of her

contemporaries Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Ann Radcliffe, all of whom were

once popular women writers well-known amongst the general public during their

lifetimes. Therefore, it matters not whether an adaptation of Austen is direct or indirect,

traditional or radical. Rather it matters whether a text remains true to the spirit of its

source text or whether too much of Austen’s essence is lost in adaptation.

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Limitations

Though I have worked diligently over the past year to contribute valuable

research in the areas of Austen Studies and Heritage Studies, this study is inherently

limited. First, there is no way that I could identify and analyze every archontic

contribution to Austen’s Library, as they exist in every medium available. Thus, I have

only examined literary and filmic adaptations and have excluded contributions in other

mediums such as stage plays and radio broadcasts. Second, some of the earliest literary

adaptations are out of print and the few remaining copies are held privately, thereby

making them difficult to access. Likewise, several of the earliest films have been lost.

Additionally, the large quantity of extant literary adaptations would be unmanageable, so

I have narrowed the scope of my research to Anglophone literary and filmic adaptation

which were created, directed, written and/or produced by women, especially those which

have made enough cultural impact to be noticed by the general public. As such, there are

a good many text created, directed, produced, or written solely by men which I have

mentioned but not analyzed in-depth here.

Out of necessity, as well as respect for texts presented in languages and social

contexts with which I am woefully unfamiliar, I have also refrained from offering

commentary or substantive analysis of any archontic contributions which exist outside of

the predominate cultures in the United States and the United Kingdom whose literature

and films I have studied for many years. Thus, most of the texts I have interpreted here

are admittedly Eurocentric and heteronormative in nature. That is not to say that I am

unaware of adaptations such as Kandukondain Kandukondain and Fire Island; it is

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merely that I feel ill-equipped to evaluate them, and at present, they fall outside the scope

of my research.

Adapting Austen for Social Media & Beyond

As I bring this study to a close and look towards the future, I must admit that there

are several popular mediums, or rather digital platforms, besides books, film, and

television through which Janeite women are choosing to present new adaptations of

Austen. Some are choosing to record their narratives in the form of vlogs or web series

which can be streamed on YouTube. Examples of these are Hank Green and Bernie Su’s

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (2013), Su’s Emma Approved (2014), Kimberley James’s

From Mansfield with Love (2014), and Jules Pigott’s The Emma Agenda (2017), among

others. The length of the episodes in a web series, especially those that are presented in a

vlog format (i.e. the form of a personal video diary entry) is considerably shorter than the

length of episodes in a traditional television series. Most web episodes are between two

and ten minutes in length, and their brevity appeals to younger generations of Janeites

who are accustomed to consuming media in short bursts via smart phones more often

than watching a film or television.

In addition to web series, many Janeites create Austen-themed content for use on

various social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Most often,

this content is presented in the form of memes, which Zoe Weinstein discusses in her

2019 book chapter, “Fan Canons, Memes, and Mr. Darcy’s Wet Shirt.” Weinstein

Kandukondain Kandukondain is Ravi Menon’s Tamil-language Indian adaptation of Sense and

Sensibility that was released in 2000 (see Chapter 5 in this book). Fire Island is Andrew Ahn’s feature-

length film about a group of homosexual friends who take a yearly vacation on the titular island in New

York. It was inspired by Pride and Prejudice and has received positive reviews.

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believes that the widely shared Austen-themed posts (see fig. 6) that social media-savvy

Janeites create, are important cultural indicators, writing that:

Students or fans or even literary scholars can study these memes as a lens into

how modern society views Austen, but they can also recontextualize Austen as a

lens on today’s society. We haven’t changed all that much—we recognize the

emotions and situations from over two hundred years ago and we can relate to

them!

The popularity of these images—which are often screenshots taken from Austenian film

adaptations with pithy phrases emblazoned on them—shared across multiple Internet

platforms, then, is proof of just how realistic and relatable Austen’s characters really are.

Even though something of Austen’s cleverness is lost on most casual readers and social

media users of present day, they still find these images amusing.

Misty Krueger agrees with Weinstein that the digital world is the newest phase in

Austen’s afterlife because there Austen-themed content “is created and lovingly

maintained by the people who read her novels, enjoy adaptations of them, write about

her, and manage organizations devoted to her heritage.” According to Krueger, the

Internet is a useful space for more than simply viewing Austenian web series and posts,

since “Janeites turn to Web 2.0 [another name for social media platforms] for not only

entertainment but also community building, sharing ideas and research, outreach, and

fundraising.” It is a place where Janeites can go to discover “who is talking about Austen

casually and academically, what they think about her, and how digital media are

reshaping the ways people interact with the author and other Austen fans.” In other

words, the accelerated process of content creation and consumption which takes place on

Zoe Weinstein, “Fan Canon, Memes, and Mr. Darcy’s Wet Shirt” in Austentatious: The Evolving

World of Jane Austen Fans, by Holly Luetkenhaus and Zoe Weinstein (Iowa City: University of Iowa

Press, 2019), 34.

282

the Internet means that often, Janeites are interacting with digital content in real-time, and

thus, as Deborah Yaffe points out, these digital connections strengthen the Janeite

communities throughout the world. Therefore, through engaging with others on “social

media we all act as custodians of Austen’s legacy as long as we are willing to post, like,

love, share, tweet, and retweet.”

Misty Krueger, “Handles, Hashtags, and Austen Social Media.” Texas Studies in Literature and

Language 61, no. 4 (2019): 379.

Figure 6: “Darcy’s Proposal Meme.” This meme, showing a car making a sharp turn off a freeway, refers to

Mr. Darcy’s ill-advised first marriage proposal to Elizabeth Bennet, which she rejects (Post on The Jane

Austen Centre, Bath’s Facebook page, October 27, 2022,

https://www.facebook.com/JaneAustenCentreBath/photos/a.162232580491841/5592938874087824/?type=3

&theater).

283

In the four years since Krueger and Weinstein published their works, the digital

world has evolved yet again. Presently, along with Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter,

TikTok is an immensely popular social media app. On this platform, users can post short

videos which are then shared with their followers. A recent article in The Guardian by

David M. Barnett notes that a significant amount of interest in Austen “is being driven by

a proliferation of internet memes and TikToks.” For this article, Barnett interviewed

Alice Hodges, an employee working at the Jane Austen Centre in Bath, which is a

museum dedicated to telling its visitors the story of Austen’s experiences in Bath.

According to Barnett’s article, Hodges reported an increase in the number of Janeites,

some of whom are as young as eight, visiting the Jane Austen Centre. Barnett attributes

that increase to social media posts, such as memes and TikTok videos, which “have

spawned so many videos, images and hashtags online” and are so prevalent that a recent

study from Cambridge has “suggested” that, aside from Shakespeare, Austen is the author

who serves as the subject of the most memes.

The study that Barnett mentions which was recently conducted by a member of

Cambridge’s faculty is entitled “‘OMG JANE AUSTEN’: Austen Memes in the Post-

#MeToo Era,” and in it, Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, Maria Vara, and Georgios

Chatziavgerinos concur with Krueger and Weinstein, writing that:

in the past few decades the number of screen adaptations, sequels, prequels, or

rewritings of [Austen’s] novels has increased impressively. The plasticity of

Austen’s texts—her enduring power, that is, to fascinate both academics as well

as popular readers, adapt to the trends and needs of each age, and take on a variety

David M. Barnett, “OMG! It’s Jane Austen…the TikTok generation embraces new heroine,” The

Guardian 29 January 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jan/29/jane-austen-tiktok-

generation-heroine-fans. Jane Austen Centre and Jane Austen Online Gift Shop, updated 2023,

https://janeausten.co.uk/. The Jane Austen Centre is located at 40 Gay Street, in a Georgian building on the

same street where Austen once lived. The Jane Austen Centre’s Facebook page posted the meme in Figure

284

of forms—is evident in numerous and diverse adaptations and appropriations of

her work, from Hollywood blockbusters to YouTube vlog series, board or video

games. Moreover, the young generation of digital natives has discovered a fresh

incentive in Austen, as her characters and their modern screen adaptations have

taken centre stage in the new media… Jane Austen memes indeed came to claim a

noteworthy section in this new cult, as they are being unremittingly disseminated,

‘liked’, ‘re-blogged’, and/or ‘shared’ in platforms such as Facebook, Instagram,

Tumblr, and Twitter.

Kitsi-Mitakou et al. argue that the miniature size of memes affords them a distinct

advantage as a medium through which to adapt Austen and liken them to the cameos that

Jane Austen once fashioned in minute detail, as these tiny adaptations contain small

“doses of irony,” the “quintessential tongue-in-cheek element in her writing” all the while

“commenting on contemporary life and even expressing ideological trends.”

Like the still images captured in the memes which are posted, shared, and

reshared across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, TikTok videos deliver similarly

compact and ironic adaptations which are many of today’s youngest Janeites’ first

encounters with Jane Austen. However, according to Barnett’s article, the compression

required to adapt Austen for TikTok and other platforms has not compromised the

essence of her original work, and as such, even preteen Janeites can recognize that “Jane

Austen’s writing is so energetic and fun…witty, funny, and clever” and subsequently

wish to befriend her.

Ultimately, it matters not the medium through which Janeite women writers

choose to rework Austen, whether it be a novel, stage play, film, web series, meme, or

Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou, Maria Vara, and Georgios Chatziavgerinos, “‘OMG JANE AUSTEN’:

Austen Memes in the Post-#MeToo Era,” Humanities 11, no. 5 (2 Sept. 2022): 112.

https://doi.org/10.3390/h11050112.

Ibid., 113.

Barnett.

285

TikTok video. What does matter is that women writers are continually compelled to adapt

her works in new and creative ways. So long as ardent admirers dare to become

authoresses who make archontic contributions to Austen’s Library, and those texts

remain as relatable as the sacred stories upon which they are based, Jane Austen’s literary

afterlife will continue and Janeite culture will endure and prosper.

286

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