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Confessions of a Jane Austen-Spinoff Addict

A review of A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen.

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, a mash-up of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice with “all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action,” was a terrible idea. If you cringe in horror every time you see sexed-up paperback titles like Mr. Knightley’s Diary 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 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. 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. 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. The details were meticulous. I got an A.

Tags: Jane Austen, Jane Austen and zombies, Jane Austen spinoffs

Sara Dabney Tisdale is a Jane Austen fan and a staff reporter for Style Weekly in Richmond, Virginia.

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