Publishers have done their best to fuel Austen-mania, bringing out books aimed at stimulating more participation in the Regency world. Anyone wishing to throw their own version of the Netherfield ball can seek advice from books such as Dinner with Mr Darcy, A Dance with Jane Austen or Regency Women’s Dress. There has also been a series of more traditional, academic studies of Jane Austen’s texts, but twenty-first-century scholars are more willing than their predecessors to take into account the popular responses to those. The avalanche of Austen-related events, books, blogs and bric-à-brac has created a playful aura around an author at one time admired primarily for her moral vision. John Mullan’s book of conundrums – What Matters in Jane Austen? – catches the tone in its title. Like John Sutherland’s Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet?, Mullan’s collection of questions prompted by the novels combines critical expertise with a sense of fun, even adding a slightly more gossipy tone (‘Is There Any Sex in Jane Austen?’). Unsurprisingly, the work that attracts most attention from Mullan is the one in which puzzles and charades are most prominent – Emma.
Fascination with Jane Austen’s novels has led to the pursuit of puzzles of a very different kind. ‘Who killed Fanny Price?’ is the question posed by Lynn Shepherd in Murder at Mansfield Park, in which she takes a widely held readerly aversion to Austen’s heroine to extremes by transforming Mansfield Park into crime fiction. Suddenly, Jane Austen is inadvertently revealed as the mother of the whodunnit, as well as everything else – the familiar genre of the country house murder, usually traced to Agatha Christie, is here found to derive from Mansfield Park. Or should that be Pride and Prejudice? P. D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley takes its cue from Pride and Prejudice, and has now become a bestselling crime novel and subsquent television adaptation. If these murder mysteries play fast and loose with Jane Austen, they are positively strait-laced in comparison to Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or Ben Winters’s Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. Austen herself was not averse to coining new words, as seen in Emma’s idea of herself as ‘an imaginist’, so it is apt enough that she should have inspired a new genre of literary ‘mash-up’ (since the amalgamation of Pemberley and a zombie apocalypse had no obvious literary precedent, reviewers turned to the contemporary music scene to find an adequate term). Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, of course, was also destined for the big screen.
Though not to the taste of every Janeite, the mash-ups demonstrate, more than any other recent phenomenon, the extent to which Austen’s stories have now achieved the status of modern myth, so widely known that they are open to being adapted, inverted or subverted. Even the distant offspring of her novels have assumed lives of their own. Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones first appeared in a newspaper column; her story, mirroring Pride and Prejudice, borrowed first the name of Austen’s hero and then, for the cinematic version, the actor Colin Firth, who played Darcy in the BBC adaptation. Bridget Jones’s Diary was followed by Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and, more recently, a film that fast-forwards a few years to Bridget Jones’s Baby.
Since 2011, the bewildering succession of Jane Austen bicentenaries has brought home the concentration of her original output, each year giving rise to celebrations of another novel. Six great novels in the space of six years was – and still is – a remarkable achievement. The twenty-first-century obsession with anniversaries has also meant that the tributes to Jane Austen have coincided with commemorations of the First World War. Historical accident brought Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion into contact with the convulsions of the early twentieth century, and, in doing so, highlighted the conflict of Jane Austen’s own day. The Napoleonic Wars may seem far removed from Mansfield or Highbury, but the appeal of these settings’ tranquillity is greatly intensified by the thought of what so many contemporary brothers, husbands and sons were enduring and how their bereft sisters, wives and mothers were suffering. With images of the First World War so much in mind, the commemorative plaque commissioned by Jane Austen’s supporters in 1917 for the centenary of her death takes on poignant additional dimensions. The black tablet, set into the brick wall of her home in Chawton, bears a striking resemblance to the memorials that were being erected in villages all over Britain in the wake of the vast battles of northern France. Lewes’s prediction, uttered in more peaceful times, deepened into a statement of faith when it was engraved in brass and mounted on oak in 1917. It continues to provide a suitably enduring monument to Jane Austen: ‘Such art as hers can never grow old’.
NOTES
1.Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 4th edn (Oxford, 2011), p. 351.
2.The principal sources of information concerning Jane Austen’s family are the memoirs and recollections written by her relatives. See: James Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford, 2002); William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen: A Family Record, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (London, 1989); Deirdre Le Faye, Jane Austen: A Family Record (Cambridge, 2004); and idem, A Chronology of Jane Austen and her Family 1700–2000 (Cambridge, 2006). See also George Holbert Tucker’s useful A History of Jane Austen’s Family, rev. edn (Stroud, 1998).
3.The Complete Poems of James Austen, ed. David Selwyn (Chawton, 2003), p. 20.
4.Austen-Leigh, Memoir, p. 18.
5.The description is from ‘The Letter of Sophia Sentiment’, discussed in chapter two and included in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen: Juvenilia, ed. Peter Sabor (Cambridge, 2006), p. 361.
6.Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Richard Mabey (Harmondsworth, 1977), p. 265.
7.Juvenilia, p. 362.
8.Ibid., pp. 3, 13.
9.Ibid., p. 54.
10.Ibid., p. 42.
11.Ibid., p. 51.
12.Ibid., p. 8.
13.Ibid., pp. 343, 323.
14.Ibid., p. 178.
15.Ibid., p. 220.
16.Ibid., p. 244.
17.Jane Austen’s Letters, p. 31.
18.Ibid., p. 1.
19.Ibid., p. 2.
20.Ibid., p. 4.
21.Ibid., p. 71.
22.Ibid., pp. 31, 36.
23.Ibid., p. 20.
24.Ibid., p. 5.
25.Ibid., p. 41.
26.Ibid., p. 5.
27.‘Lady Susan’, The Works of Jane Austen: Volume VI, Minor Works, ed. R. W. Chapman, rev. B. C. Southam (Oxford, 1969) p. 252.
28.Anna Lefroy, ‘Recollections of Aunt Jane’, Austen-Leigh, Memoir, p. 158.
29.Jane Austen’s Letters, p. 41.
30.Ibid., p. 71.
31.Ibid.
32.Ibid., p. 27.
33.Ibid., p. 15.
34.Anthony Mandal, ‘Making Austen Mad: Benjamin Crosby and the Non-Publication of “Susan” ’, RES, ns 57 (2006), pp. 507–25.
35.‘The Watsons’, Minor Works, p. 317.
36.Jon Spence’s book Becoming Jane Austen (London, 2003) led to Julian Jarrold’s 2007 blockbuster film, Becoming Jane.
37.Letter to James Edward Austen-Leigh, Austen-Leigh, Memoir, p. 188.
38.Henry Austen, ‘Biographical Notice of the Author’, Austen-Leigh, Memoir, p. 139.
39.Austen-Leight, Memoir, p. 70.
40.Caroline Austen, ‘My Aunt Jane Austen: A Memoir’, Austen-Leigh, Memoir, p. 169.
41.Jane Austen’s Letters, p. 28.
42.The verse by Jane Austen’s mother is published in full in W. R. and R. A. Austen-Leigh’s Family Record, p. 125.
43.Jane Austen’s Letters, p. 100.
44.Austen, Complete Poems of James Austen, p. 39.
45.Jane Austen’s Letters, p. 212.
46.Ibid., p. 30.
47.Ibid., p. 190.
48.Ibid, p. 210.
49.Ibid.
50.Austen’s assessment of Emma Woodhouse is recorded in Austen-Leigh, Memoir, p. 119.
51.Jane Austen’s Letters, pp. 207, 216–17.
52.Ibid., p. 241.
53.Ibid.,
p. 287.
54.Ibid., p. 319.
55.Ibid., p. 320.
56.Ibid, pp. 325–6.
57.‘Plan of a Novel’ is reproduced in Minor Works, pp. 428–30, and in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen: Later Manuscripts, ed. Janet Todd and Linda Bree (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 226–9.
58.Jane Austen’s Letters, p. 348.
59.‘Sanditon’, Minor Works, p. 371.
60.Jane Austen’s Letters, p. 348.
61.Ibid., p. 356.
62.Ibid.
63.Jane Austen’s Letters, pp. 355, 358.
64.Ibid.
65.Ibid., pp. 359–60.
66.The text is from Later Manuscripts, p. 255, and the editors’ discussion of the surviving manuscripts (neither in Jane Austen’s own hand) is on pp. 738–9.
67.G. H. Lewes, ‘The Novels of Jane Austen’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, lxxxvi (July 1859), pp. 99–113.
68.Jane Austen’s Letters, p. 207.
69.Ibid., p. 221.
70.Ibid., p. 222.
71.W. H. Auden, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, in W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland (London, 1937).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A biography of this kind is inevitably indebted to the numerous studies of Jane Austen’s life and works. The list below represents a selection of the most important sources. Many of these books will be of interest to those who wish to pursue their knowledge of Jane Austen beyond this brief life. When it comes to reading the novels, there are many good modern editions with reliable texts, helpful introductions and illuminating notes, such as those published in the new Penguin Classics, Oxford World’s Classics, Norton Critical Editions or Harvard annotated Austen series, as well as The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen. R. W. Chapman’s edition of the novels is still widely available and always enjoyable.
Publications
Auden, W. H., and MacNeice, Louis, Letters from Iceland (London, 1937)
Austen, Caroline, Reminiscences of Caroline Austen, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Chawton, 1986)
Austen, James, The Complete Poems of James Austen, ed. David Selwyn (Chawton, 2003)
Austen, Jane, The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman (1923), 3rd edn rev. Mary Lascelles, 5 vols (Oxford, 1965–9)
—, The Works of Jane Austen: Volume VI, Minor Works, ed. R. W. Chapman, rev. B. C. Southam (Oxford, 1969)
—, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen: Juvenilia, ed. Peter Sabor (Cambridge, 2006)
—, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen: Later Manuscripts, ed. Janet Todd and Linda Bree (Cambridge, 2008)
—, Jane Austen’s Letters, ed. Deirdre Le Faye, 4th edn (Oxford, 2011)
Austen-Leigh, James Edward, A Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Oxford, 2002)
Austen-Leigh, William and Richard Arthur, Jane Austen: A Family Record, ed. Deirdre Le Faye (London, 1989)
Barchas, Janine, Matters of Fact in Jane Austen (Baltimore, 2012)
Batey, Mavis, Jane Austen and the English Landscape (London, 1996)
Byrne, Paula, Jane Austen and the Theatre (London, 2002)
—, The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things (London, 2013)
Copeland, Edward, and McMaster, Juliet (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen (Cambridge, 1997)Duckworth, Alistair, The Improvement of the Estate, new edn (Baltimore, 1994)
Fergus, Jan, Jane Austen: A Literary Life (London, 1991)
Fielding, Helen, Bridget Jones’s Diary (London, 1996)
—, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (London, 1999)
—, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (London, 2013)
Fullerton, Susannah, A Dance with Jane Austen (London, 2012)
Goodwin, Alex, and Newall, Tessa, A Guinea Pig Pride and Prejudice (London, 2015)
Grahame-Smith, Seth, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Philadelphia, 2009)
Grey, J. David, Litz, W., and Southam, B. (eds), The Jane Austen Handbook (London, 1986)
Harding, D. W., Regulated Hatred, ed. M. Lawlor (London, 1998)
Harris, Jocelyn, A Revolution Almost Beyond Expression: Jane Austen’s Persuasion (Newark, 2007)
Hill, Constance, Jane Austen: Her Homes and Friends (London, 1902)
Honan, Park, Jane Austen: Her Life (London, 1987)
Hubback, J. H. and E. C., Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers (London, 1906)
James, P. D., Death Comes to Pemberley (London, 2012)
Jane, Pamela, Pride and Prejudice and Kitties (New York, 2013)
Johnson, Claudia L., Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago, 1988)
—, and Tuite, Clara (eds), A Companion to Jane Austen (Oxford, 2009)
Lane, Maggie, Jane Austen’s England (London, 1986)
—, Jane Austen and Food (London, 1995)
Le Faye, Deirdre, Jane Austen’s ‘Outlandish Cousin’: The Life and Letters of Eliza de Feuillide (London, 2002)
—, Jane Austen: A Family Record (Cambridge, 2004)
—, A Chronology of Jane Austen and her Family 1700–2000 (Cambridge, 2006)
Leavis, F. R., The Great Tradition (London, 1948)
Lewes, G. H., ‘The Novels of Jane Austen’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, lxxxvi (July 1859), pp. 99–113.
Litz, A. Walton, Jane Austen: A Study of her Artistic Development (London, 1965)
Lynch, Deidre (ed.), Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees (Princeton, 2000)
Mandal, Anthony, ‘Making Austen Mad: Benjamin Crosby and the Non-Publication of “Susan” ’, RES, ns 57 (2006), pp. 507–25
—, Jane Austen and the Popular Novel (Basingstoke, 2007)
—, and Southam, Brian, The Reception of Jane Austen in Europe (London and New York, 2007)
Mullan, John, What Matters in Jane Austen? (London, 2012)
Murphy, Olivia, Jane Austen the Reader: The Artist as Critic (Basingstoke, 2013)
Nokes, David, Jane Austen (London, 1997)
Percoco, Cassidy, Regency Women’s Dress (London, 2015)
Sales, Roger, Jane Austen and Representations of Regency England (London, 1994)
Shepherd, Lynn, Murder at Mansfield Park (London, 2010)
Southam, Brian, Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, 2 vols (London, 1968 and 1987)
—, Jane Austen and the Navy (London, 2000)
—, Jane Austen’s Literary Manuscripts, 2nd edn (London, 2002)
Spence, Jon, Becoming Jane Austen (London, 2003)
Sutherland, Kathryn, Jane Austen’s Textual Lives: From Aeschylus to Bollywood (Oxford, 2005)
—, ‘Jane Austen’s Dealings with John Murray and His Firm’, Review of English Studies, 64:263 (2013), pp. 105–26
Sutherland, John, Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet? (Oxford, 1999)
Tanner, Tony, Jane Austen (Basingstoke, 1986)
Todd, Janet (ed.), Jane Austen in Context (Cambridge, 2005)
—, The Cambridge Introduction to Jane Austen, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2015)
Tomalin, Claire, Jane Austen: A Life (London, 1997)
Tucker, George Holbert, A History of Jane Austen’s Family, rev. edn (Stroud, 1998)
Vogler, Pen, Dinner with Mr Darcy (London and New York, 2013)
Watt, Ian, The Rise of the Novel (London, 1957)
White, Gilbert, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Richard Mabey (Harmondsworth, 1977)
Wiltshire, John, Jane Austen and the Body (Cambridge, 1992)
Winters, Ben, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (Philadelphia, 2009)
Websites
Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts: janeausten.ac.uk
Katherine Halsey, ‘Jane Austen’, Oxford Bibliographies Online: oxfordbibliographies.com
Persuasions: jasna.org/persuasions/on-line
The Lizzie Bennet Diaries: pemberleydigital.com/the-lizzie-bennet-diaries/
The Republic of Pemberley: pemberley.com
What Jane Saw: whatjanesaw.org
> Fiona Stafford, Jane Austen
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