Confessions of a Jane Austen-Spinoff Addict

Will the real Jane Austen fans please stand up? Stand up, that is, if you love Jane Austen but are sick and tired of Jane Austen spinoffs. Stand up if you thought Pride and Prejudice and Zombies [2], a mash-up of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice [3] with “all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action [4],” was a terrible idea. If you cringe in horror every time you see sexed-up paperback titles like Mr. Knightley’s Diary [5] on Austen-themed display tables at your local bookstore. If you are fed up with Austen-mania—the fan fiction, the movies and miniseries, the romance advice books and etiquette guides and detective novels and vampire riffs and cookbooks and choose-your-own-adventures. If you, like me, are a real Jane Austen fan, and you don’t think Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters [6] is funny—you think it’s a crime.

Dear reader, there is hope, and it comes in the form of Susannah Carson’s new book, A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen [7]. Carson, a doctoral candidate at Yale University, has culled a collection of essays by literary greats such as E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, C.S. Lewis, Kingsley Amis, Eudora Welty, and Lionel Trilling, all on the subject of why Jane Austen is not only worth reading but worth reading over and over again. The book is a refreshing triumph over the muck of Jane Austen spinoffs that blight our current culture.

Or is it? After all, every fan of Jane Austen fan thinks she is a real fan of Jane Austen – that her understanding of and empathy with Austen surpasses that of other readers, that she and she alone fully appreciates and savors Austen’s merits.

I say this because before I hated Jane Austen spinoffs, I adored them. No—I was addicted to them. But in both phases, I considered myself a Jane Austen snob.

Even before I read Pride and Prejudice I fancied myself an expert on it—because I knew by heart the 1995 BBC miniseries adaptation starring Colin Firth [8]. I watched it over and over, beginning around age 11, watching more frequently after a knee injury plopped me on the couch, and ending—well, never. My father eventually bought me the deluxe DVD box set just to stave off the late rental fees.

Despite my early encyclopedic knowledge of the miniseries, I did not actually completely read the book until I was assigned Pride and Prejudice during my senior year in high school. But even then, I had no shame in brazenly serving tea and scones on a white tablecloth to my AP English classmates as part of a presentation on Austen. My project included authentic period mood music from a family CD called Musical Evenings with the Captain, color printouts of scenes from artist C.E. Brock’s 1895 illustrated version of Pride and Prejudice, and an overview of Regency-era fashion cribbed from the formidable Austen fan website the Republic of Pemberley [9]. The details were meticulous. I got an A.

When I went off to college, I brought with me a book called The Making of Pride and Prejudice [10], which lays out in obsessive detail how the 1995 miniseries film was made, from writing to location selection to the creation of costumes, interior settings, and dance-party scenes. Did you know that Colin Firth rejected the role of Mr. Darcy several times? That “roast capon upon a bed of forcemeat” is a fancy 19th-century supper dish? That “Mr. Beveridge’s Maggot” is the name of a country dance? That the actress who played Elizabeth Bennet, Jennifer Ehle, is naturally light-haired and dyed her eyebrows the night before her audition to better match her brunette wig? I did.

I could go on about my other flings with Austen spinoffs—my covert bedtime reading of Darcy & Elizabeth: Days and Nights at Pemberley [11]; the college paper on archival ephemera surrounding Pride and Prejudice; the dark period that arose from watching too much of Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility [12]—but for your sake, reader, I hope you’re getting the picture. The point of my rambling, and the question looming over A Truth Universally Acknowledged, is: Why is this so? How could an early 19th-century lady novelist—a woman of modest education who notoriously limited her subjects to the marriages of well-to-do families in the English countryside—inspire such fierce identification not only in her readers, but in so many who encounter her indirectly through spinoffs?

“We read Austen because she seems to know us better than we know ourselves,” says Harold Bloom in his foreword to the book. “Who can resist believing that she, too, possesses the ‘fine eyes’ of Elizabeth [Bennet, heroine of Pride and Prejudice]?” echoes Carson in her introduction. “Austen has a way of putting things that often strikes us as exactly right—as even better than what we could have come up with to describe our own experiences,” says Carson. Many of the contributors to A Truth Universally Acknowledged suggest there’s something self-congratulatory about reading Austen—and that Austen set out to make us feel this way. Austen’s playful narrative voice confides in us and entices us; we are with her in every perceptive observation and ironic comment, and we always feel as if we’re in on the joke. When we’re with Austen, we’re the most deadpan social critics around.

Maybe she is so easy to identify with, as many of the essays note, because her stories concern the everyday. Austen knew, says Eudora Welty, “that the interesting situations of life can take place, and notably do, at home.” Birth, marriage, death, family—Austen is a master of anticipation because she makes a damn good story out of the pleasures and sorrows surrounding rote but widely experienced environments. Of course, other modern writers have done this—Virginia Woolf comes to mind—but Austen was among the first, and injects genuine romance into the otherwise mundane lives she describes—and we are encouraged by her wisdom to seek these things in our own.

At the same time, we’re not quite sure that we’re catching everything. Austen’s relationship with her fans is entirely romantic: She fashions herself as the unattainable and oh-so-desirable heroic author. As readers, we want to please her and live up to her standards. But she is coy and quixotic and defies her own self-professed limitations. E.M. Forster has it right: “To be one with Jane Austen! It is a contradiction in terms, yet every Jane Austenite has made the attempt,” and even in wishing so, we bashfully feel what Austen biographer Lord David Cecil must have felt when he said, according to contributor Rebecca Mead, “I should be seriously upset, I should worry for weeks and weeks, if I incurred the disapproval of Jane Austen.” I wonder if the late Lord Cecil had some particular transgression he was thinking of—had he been reading Old Friends and New Fancies [13], a sequel published in 1913 that may be the first Jane Austen spinoff ever written?

Despite its frequent celebration of sheer girlish joy, A Truth Universally Acknowledged is unapologetically academic in tone and probably not for the pedestrian Austen enthusiast—anyone who hasn’t read most or all of Jane Austen’s novels will be lost. As Lionel Trilling puts it, “The new reader perceives from the first that he is not to be permitted to proceed in simple literary innocence. Jane Austen is to be for him not only a writer but an issue.” Um, yeah.

It’s an intense experience to engage Austen’s works so deeply for pages upon pages of criticism—I was sometimes reminded of wading through my Norton Critical Edition of Austen’s famous love-it-or-hate-it novel, Mansfield Park [14]. But the essays are always engaging and often fun. Literary critic Brian Southam tells how he devoted years of his professional life to recovering an obscure Austen manuscript from her direct descendants. (My love for Austen is more sentimental than studious, but I appreciate his zest!) Martin Amis pokes fun at the habit many Austen critics—I’ll add self-conscious essay collections—have of beginning their works with an arch riff on the immortal first line of Pride and Prejudice. Amy Heckerling, the creator of Clueless [15], describes how she translated the characters and scenes of Regency-era Emma into the teenage romps of 1990s Beverly Hills. Benjamin Nugent writes a forceful defense of the “nerds” of Pride and Prejudice (Mr. Collins and Mary Bennet, that is).

And Trilling hilariously recounts how a 150-person turnout for his 30-seat undergraduate Austen class unexpectedly led to a cutthroat series of emotional interviews, unsolicited faculty recommendations, and downright pleading. I can back him up here—I remember stoically sitting on the floor for at least the first meeting of a popular Austen seminar in college. (That was the same class for which I used Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility DVD commentary as source material for a paper. I had no qualms.)

The book also acknowledges some fair criticisms of what Harold Bloom calls Austen’s “great art founded upon exclusions”: that Austen didn’t deal with the major world events of her day, that she dealt a moral upper hand that bordered on priggishness, that she wrote the same novel six times. But A Truth Universally Acknowledged offers some strong and surprising refutations of these criticisms. True, more than one essayist describes Austen as approaching “cozy.” But what the hell is wrong with cozy? As for me, there’s no other author I’d rather curl up with.

Even the essayists of A Truth Universally Acknowledged can’t help getting gushy. Would Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet have objected to Mansfield Park’s home theatricals? What would happen if the romantic couples of the novels were rearranged? Is Wickham better in bed than Darcy? I easily forgive these lapses in academic rigor because they put me in good company. If E.M. Forster could declare, “I am a Jane Austenite, and therefore slightly imbecile about Jane Austen,” then I can’t feel too bad about my own obsession.

I’m not sure a real Austen fan can ever help herself in this regard. Writes Carson, “Other writers have admirers; Jane Austen has fans, societies … other books are read; Austen’s are devoured, digested, and reinterpreted in the everyday lives of her readers.” And if A Truth Universally Acknowledged is just another spinoff, it’s a lot less embarrassing to read than that zombie one.