Jane Austen: the author with an enduring popularity (Mei 2024)
28 januari 2013 markeerde de 200ste verjaardag van de publicatie van Jane Austen's meest geliefde roman, Pride and Prejudice, en twee eeuwen na het verschijnen van de roman waren de vele fans van Elizabeth Bennet en Mr. Darcy - en van Austen zelf - klaar om te feesten in een jaar lang feest. De media, de academie en lokale bibliotheken in de Verenigde Staten en Engeland sponsoren al sinds 1995 Regency-festivals en andere evenementen met Austen-thema, toen de BBC TV-miniserie van Pride and Prejudice Austen's spectaculaire postmoderne beroemdheid initieerde.
Meer dan 200 jaar achting voor de romanschrijver en haar werk was verschillende keren uitgegroeid tot winstgevende populaire vogues. Haar neef A Memoir of Jane Austen (1870) wekte interesse in haar persoonlijk en in de jaren 1890 werden de romans opnieuw gepubliceerd - Pride and Prejudice meest weelderig - met charmante illustraties van Hugh Thomson. In de 20e eeuw ontdekten nieuwe fans Austen via MGM's Pride and Prejudice (1940), met in de hoofdrollen Laurence Olivier en Greer Garson. Vanaf de jaren negentig creëerden herhalingen van die film en nieuwe versies op televisie voor het grote scherm en voor televisie een enorm nieuw publiek wiens verlangen naar alles Austen romantische bewondering combineerde met een bekende vertrouwdheid, minachting en zelfs spot.
De roman zelf werd de toost van het Londense seizoen in 1813 toen Annabella Milbanke, de serieuze en intelligente jonge vrouw die spoedig met de dichter Lord Byron zou trouwen, het een 'superieur werk' vond, de 'meest waarschijnlijke' fictie die ze ooit had gelezen. (Ze bewonderde vooral de heer Darcy.) Sindsdien heeft het in druk het leven en de taal beïnvloed, evenals de dromen en ambities van generaties van lezers en schrijvers. Ongetwijfeld het eerste vervolg van Austen - het herzien, heroriënteren en perfectioneren van de verkeringstabel van de eerste van haar zes gepubliceerde romans, Sense and Sensibility (1811) - Pride and Prejudice blijft versies en variaties genereren en de naam van de auteur, die onbekend was, behouden. in haar leven, in de schijnwerpers.
In 2013 a mixed lot of books and films targeted the segment of the book-buying public sometimes referred to as “Janeiacs.” The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things by biographer Paula Byrne was published in January, and in April an unusual study by political scientist Michael Chwe praised Austen as a pioneer of game theory. Meanwhile, self-mocking self-help books, fan fictions, parodies, and books about Austen’s fandom continued to glut the market. Moviegoers anticipated an upcoming new version of Persuasion (published posthumously in 1817), as well as Death Comes to Pemberley, an adaptation of a 2011 sequel to Pride and Prejudice by the crime novelist P.D. James. Austenland (2013), based on a 2007 novel about giddy antics at a Jane Austen theme park, was already drawing fans to cinemas. On television a vlog, Emma Approved, was forthcoming from the makers of another successful vlog, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (2012).
Scholarly celebrations in 2013 included a conference at the University of Cambridge, while at Chawton House Library in Hampshire, Eng., an international conference on women’s writing of the “long 18th century” was entitled “Pride and Prejudices.” Aficionados of costume, country dancing, and romance could attend an Austen summer camp in Connecticut; the yearly Jane Austen Festival in Bath, Eng.; the Grand Jane Austen Ball in Nürnberg, Ger.; or gatherings in Pittsburgh, Hyde Park, Vt., and Canberra, Australia.
Despite the international interest, there was some insistence on Austen’s being still, in Rudyard Kipling’s phrase, “England’s Jane.” The U.K. in February issued six stamps illustrating the six novels (four stamps were issued for the Jane Austen bicentennial in 1975). In early July a 3.7-m (12-ft) statue of actor Colin Firth, the Mr. Darcy of the 1995 miniseries, rose from a lake in London’s Hyde Park to promote Drama, a digital TV channel dedicated to British programs. The fibreglass figure, according to a spokesman, represented more than that production’s most celebrated scene (which Austen never wrote): “We’ve got a wet shirt on him, we’ve got sideburns. He’s portraying many of the Darcys that have appeared over the years in film and TV adaptations.” In a quieter move, Ed Vaizey, the British minister of culture, barred the export of a ring that had belonged to Austen, which the American singer Kelly Clarkson had bought at an auction in 2012 for £152,450 (about $237,000). Finally, the Bank of England chose Austen to “grace” the new £10 note. The sketch of Austen on the proposed bill provoked protests from the faithful, who argued that the likeness used is a deliberately prettified portrait, that the big house portrayed is her brother’s, and that the “Austen” maxim recommending reading quotes Caroline Bingley, a character who only pretends to read. Skeptics asked, Will the new bill misrepresent Austen as the for-profit Jane Austen industry so often has done?
Since 1995 “Jane Austen” has been—in addition to a “classic” writer’s name—a commercially successful brand and a contested signifier, widely understood to mean upper-class English attitudes and values, “high” culture and English literature, and nostalgia for a prettier, simpler world. Ironically, especially for people who have not actually read her novels, the Austen “brand” has also represented scorn for all of the above, as well as romance (with a leer) in tight trousers and plunging décolletage.
The story of dowerless Elizabeth Bennet (no beauty), who snags Darcy and his beautiful grounds at Pemberley, has merged over the years with the equally improbable story of the country parson’s spinster daughter who wrote six small novels about decorous virgins and—after dying poor and obscure—became a household word. Narratives akin to Pride and Prejudice about poor but clever girls who get transformed into “something,” as Elizabeth puts it, are tales of wishes fulfilled, society turned on its head, and, in the end, virtue and love conquering all. By the middle of the 18th century, Englishwomen such as Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, and Fanny Burney and the Anglo-Irish Maria Edgeworth were writing romantic narratives that combined domestic comedy and social satire. Pride and Prejudice, when it appeared, was not new, merely superior—written in “the best chosen language.” Readers were delighted to recognize Elizabeth and Darcy and their embarrassing relatives as literary types and interesting individuals; moving in and out of her characters’ minds, the witty narrator of their story made them probable, plausible (as people said), and realistic.
William Dean Howells claimed that he could feel the fresh winds of revolutionary democracy sweeping through the love story of Elizabeth Bennet, whose happy marriage forces the well-born Darcy to accept as his relatives not only her vulgar mother and sister Lydia but also Wickham, who was the son of Darcy’s father’s steward and had tried to seduce Darcy’s sister. If it is hard to do a political reading of Austen’s “light, and bright, and sparkling” second published novel, it is equally hard to read it as apolitical. It is, rather, at once conventional and revolutionary, romantic and antiromantic, meta-Romantically—and delightfully—divided. Its deepest moral message may be to avoid self-seriousness.
“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?” feckless Mr. Bennet asks. If it is not the moral of the story, it is not a point to be dismissed. To submit to being laughed at by the neighbours and to anticipate laughing back is the basis for modern democratic comedy, as opposed to courtly comedy in which the jester trades places with the king. Toward the end of her story, Elizabeth reflects that Darcy “had yet to learn to be laught at”; we, as readers, understand that under her tutelage he will learn that. The reader learns to laugh a little at Darcy as well. Austen’s irony attracts us still, but her balance and poise often elude readers—driving some people to the grotesque excesses of sweetening her stories into banality or scrawling virtual graffiti on her image.
Two hundred years after Pride and Prejudice was published, it speaks to a culture that is often ambivalent about both love and literature and is simultaneously nostalgic for tradition and disdainful of it (one favour distributed at a Jane Austen conference was, reportedly, a lacy thong). Jane Austen’s books remain more readable than those of most of her predecessors, contemporaries, and even her snappiest imitators. Informed by a rich tradition of plays, novels, satires, and romances, Austen’s genius is still legibly extraordinary.
