How did this Jane Austen craze begin? A century ago, no one could have predicted it. Even as late as the thirties and forties she was still being largely ignored. In his book of literary criticism, Enemies of Promise, Cyril Connolly mentions just about every major name in English literature—except for Jane Austen. But a certain group of critics in the late nineteenth century, known as the Janeists, began inflating her reputation to almost cosmic proportions. Not that they had to rediscover her—she was always remembered. But she had been seen as just another novelist.
A funny one, maybe, but nothing above and beyond her contemporaries. But once the Janeists came about, everything changed. Suddenly Jane Austen was seen as the greatest writer of the early (pre-Victorian) nineteenth century. Poor old Sir Walter Scott, who had previously held that title, was blasted out of the water. These days, his entire reputation clings to Ivanhoe like the last piece of a sunken ship. Then she was seen as the greatest writer of her entire century, surpassing even Dickens. These days, she is considered just about the greatest English novelist in history, and one of the best writers in any genre, second only to Shakespeare. How did this happen ?
Now, I’m not a sworn enemy of Jane Austen with a special axe to grind, but I feel the need, like Charlton Heston in Soylent Green, to stop the madness. Jane Austen isn’t all that bad, but why in the world should she be considered the greatest English novelist in history? These days, that conception of her is so widespread that we don’t even think about it. So let’s take a moment to step back and clear our heads.
Jane Austen is now remarkably popular. I am reminded of this every time I take a casual stroll through any given bookstore. Just scanning the shelves in Fiction and Literature, I find literally about twenty books devoted to retelling, reworking, or otherwise continuing Pride and Prejudice. It’s this book in particular. I never see any book with a title like, say, “Mansfield Park Redux,” or “Northanger Abbey II: the Revenge of the Gothic Novel.” But I do see such things as “The Secret Diary of Mr. Darcy,” “Darcy and Me,” “My Life with Mr. Darcy,” “Darcy and Elizabeth,” “The Secret History of Darcy,” and so on ad nauseam. The weirdness of this is obvious if you try to imagine the same thing being done to any other work of English literature.
Try to imagine a book called “The Secret Life of Pip and Estella,” for example. Meanwhile, there is a huge proliferation of Jane Austen book clubs, Jane Austen movies, Jane Austen societies, and so on. What’s more, there is an endless hunger for more of her books. She only published four full-length novels in her lifetime, after all, which wasn’t nearly enough according to her fans. So, two novels appeared posthumously: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. But that was still not enough. Two incomplete novels also appeared—The Watsons and Sandition. Still unsated, the public demanded more, and soon everything Austen ever wrote was up for grabs, including juvenilia, short parodies, and other things she probably wouldn’t have wanted to see in print.
She seems to arouse fierce loyalty and devotion. So I am writing this with the understanding that I am on dangerous ground. People get angry if you say anything against Jane Austen. They feel some sort of personal connection to her which escapes me. Meanwhile, I get angry as well, since I consider myself a true lover of English literature, and I can’t see why one of the few writers who never really impressed me has been elevated to such enormous stature. But let’s try not to get angry and simply think it through together.
The standard critical appraisal of Jane Austen goes like this: she was just about the single greatest creator of characters in history, whose satiric take on high society was daring and even radical for its time. Maybe, they suggest, she was even some sort of closet feminist. This last bit seems unlikely to me since the lives of her female characters seem to revolve entirely around the men they encounter, but that’s another issue. The important thing is that this critical appraisal misses the point, even for Austen fans. Judging from all the Pride and Prejudice spin-offs and similar merchandise, it seems to me that the appeal for Janeists isn’t her subtle criticism of high society, but her celebration of it.
