Many years hence, when we have colonised planets and discovered alien life
forms, you can be sure that one thing will remain unchanged. Somewhere in
the galaxy a film producer will be summoning his executives and saying:
“Okay, what about an updated version of Pride and Prejudice? Stately pile on
Venus, wet spaceshirt, that kinda thing.”
For the appeal of Jane Austen and her works is so enduring 200 years after she
lived that it has become almost a cosmological constant. After numerous
television adaptations and films — from a 1940 Pride and Prejudice (P&P)
with Laurence Olivier as Darcy to the Bridget Jones movie and Bollywood’s
Bride & Prejudice — there’s no sign of fatigue. In fact, Austen-mania is
stronger than ever.
Last Friday saw the opening of Becoming Jane, a Hollywood biopic concentrating
on Austen’s flirtation with a suitably unsuitable young man called Tom
Lefroy. It is a story that itself has echoes of P&P.
In a poll this month of books “we cannot live without”, P&P
came top; Emma, possibly her finest work, came 34th. Various publishers
still produce editions of Austen’s work, packaged as everything from
scholarly tomes to pastel-coloured beach reads.
Next Sunday ITV will unveil the first of a new series of adaptations beginning
with Mansfield Park, starring Billie Piper as Fanny Price. Expect tight
breeches and heaving bodices, but also a modern chick-flick tone to entice a
new generation of viewers.
Visitors to the ITV website for the series were yesterday being urged to “come
back on 12 March to find your perfect match, send a flirtmail, join our
seduction survey and much more”. Flirtmail? Goodness, Mrs Bennet, this is
Austen for the internet age — but it is one in which she appears remark-ably
at home.
Austen inspires devotion like no other author and the internet has allowed her
fans a voice that travels far faster and further than the quill-driven
letters of the 19th century. If anything, it has intensified their adoration
of Austen and their eagerness to defenestrate anyone who offends her.
“The amount of activity on the web is absolutely crazy,” said one Austen
expert. “There is a whole cult out there and it’s not something that happens
to other authors.”
Antagonise the Janeites, as the most fervent fans are known, and their
response is merciless.
Take James McAvoy, who stars as Lefroy in Becoming Jane and has garnered
laudatory reviews for his performance. McAvoy ventured to one interviewer
that Austen’s Northanger Abbey was “one of the worst books I’ve ever read in
my life, full of badly written giggly girls”.
The horror was palpable at the website Austenblog.com, which riposted: “So
unfortunate. One never knows what to do in these situations. Buy flowers?
Bake a cake? Beat him senseless with the Cluebat of Janeite Righteousness?”
(A cluebat, in case you did not know, is slang for an implement used to hammer
“some sense into someone who is blatantly stupid”.)
What is it about Austen that retains such power in an age when her sinuous,
sub-claused prose has been overtaken by the shredded staccato of the e-mail?
RICHARD Jenkyns, a professor at Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford and a
descendant of Austen’s elder brother, believes that her appeal goes beyond
the attractions of early 19th-century rural gentility.
“I don’t buy the idea that people are terribly nostalgic for a lost world or
that they love those tight breeches. People who want Regency-type escapism
can get it elsewhere,” he said.
“I think her appeal is that she was the first modern novelist and it is her
recognition of human life and the strength of the plots [that people enjoy].
The plots are fairly timeless stories about human interaction which are
familiar to us.”
Boy meets girl, boy and girl quarrel, boy and girl fall in love again. We know
the drill, but where Austen excels, says Jenkyns, is in drawing her
characters so fully that they take on a life “beyond the page”.
Austen fans certainly think so. Some have been prompted to write their own
novels to fill in the lives of Austen’s characters.
One completed an unfinished Austen manuscript about a family called the
Watsons; Jane Odiwe, a graphic designer in north London, has written a novel
all about Lydia, a lesser character from P&P; and Arielle Eckstut, who
reckons to have the “largest collection of authentic Austenian period
costumes in northern California”, decided to supply the sex scenes that
Austen “lost”.
Eckstut called her book Pride and Promiscuity; it includes a racy account of
how Darcy and Lizzie Bennet do rather more than exchange pleasantries while
out for a crucial walk towards the end of P&P.
Fortunately, Eckstut delivers the sex with lashings of Austenian irony, which
may just have saved her from a lethal walloping by the cluebat.
Many Americans also visit England to tour the places where Austen lived, and
those who attend meetings of the Jane Austen Society in the Hampshire
village of Chawton often do so in bonnets and frocks of late 18th and early
19th-century style.
This immersion in Austen’s world is now exemplified by a website called
Republic of Pemberley (the name of Darcy’s estate in P&P), a site
that describes itself as a “haven in a world programmed to misunderstand
obsession with things Austen”.
Pemberley is packed with information and knowledge-able discussion boards. But
it also offers such gems as a web page where Lady Catherine de Bourgh, a
fearsomely snooty character from P&P, and other Austenistas offer advice
on social dilemmas.
“It’s Lady Catherine’s advice page that gets me,” said Gillian Dow, the
Chawton postdoctoral research fellow in English at Southampton University.
“It’s completely bonk-ers. But let’s all enjoy it. The original novels exist
and will exist no matter how much fun people are having with adaptations and
interpretations.”
To Dow, the secret of Austen is that her novels are not cobwebbed with age.
“They don’t go into the history of the period; though the politics is in
there, you have to look quite hard for it,” she says.
Instead, the heart of the books is the social interplay of the characters as
they navigate the timeless and treacherous straits of money, marriage and
family relationships. TO others, however, Austen’s narrow focus is a
betrayal. “There’s no poverty in her novels, no corruption, ambition,
wickedness or war,” said Celia Brayfield, the novelist.
“Yes, her wit is enchanting and her human observations enduringly accurate,
but the world she writes about is so tiny. I find it claustrophobic.”
Deirdre LeFaye, an authority on life in Austen’s era, also believes that some
of the Austen mystique is “imaginary”.
“The Americans think Austen is so delightfully olde worlde pretty England. But
life in many respects was a great deal more uncomfortable in Regency times,”
she said.
LeFaye also points out that Austen’s relatively small oeuvre — six novels,
various fragments and the letters — have played a part in her popularity:
“You don’t have to read a lot to become quite expert, not like Dickens or
Trollope. So Austen does lend herself to literary criticism.
You can easily write articles comparing the heroines and the heroes.”
The novels’ middle-class anxieties and the feistiness of some of Austen’s
female characters still resonate with modern audiences.
What would Austen, who saw little fortune from her works before she died in
1817, have made of her present fame? “She would have written a wonderful
book about it, full of irony,” said Jenkyns.
LeFaye agreed: “When Pride and Prejudice first came out and Austen and her
mother had been reading it aloud to one of their neigh-bours in Chawton,
Jane commented in a letter that her mother could not speak the characters as
they ought to be.”
Austen knew exactly how she wanted her characters to look and sound. “She
would have made an excellent film director,” said LeFaye.
“If she were around today she’d be in there filming.”
The Jane industry
- A website provides an Austen quote for the day. Yesterday’s offering was: “I
have no wish to be distinguished; and I have every reason to hope I never
shall. Thank Heaven! I cannot be forced into genius and eloquence.” Edward
Ferrars on his mother’s hopes for his fame in Sense and Sensibility
- The Jane Austen Action Figure: this statuette, complete with book and quill
pen, is available by mail order and, claims one vendor, “may inspire you to
write a novel or six”
- Websites offering “are you a Janeite?” tests: these carry questions about
her work and the adaptations, but also test how much you know about her life
- Personality tests: these match your temperament to an Austen character Quite
apart from films and television adaptations, Jane Austen inspires many other
activities, including:
- A stream of academic works; these include studies of the phenomenon of
Austen fans themselves. Entering “Jane Austen” on Amazon produces entries
for more than 2,500 books
- Austen’s former home in Chawton, Hampshire, is run as a museum, attracting
about 30,000 visitors a year. The nearby great house once owned by her
brother has become a study centre for early English women’s writing
- Jane Austen toiletry sets, including Mr Darcy’s Gift for Gentlemen and Miss
Bennet’s Gift for a Lady, are available from the Jane Austen Centre in Bath
- The Pride and Prejudice board game made by Ash Grove Press: the pieces
consist of characters from the book and the aim is to secure a suitable
marriage
