It is a truth universally acknowledged that every column on Jane Austen must begin with the words “It is a truth universally acknowledged”. Don’t blame me. That’s the law.
Anyway, it is a truth universally acknowledged – or it should be – that we are living in the age of Jane Austen. What’s going on?
I’m not complaining, but it wasn’t always so. Popular acceptance as the essential British novelist of the 19th century is relatively recent. For much of the Victorian era she remained a relatively obscure figure.
Yet, a few months before the 250th anniversary of her birth, Austen is, as she has been for three decades or so, everywhere in popular culture. A riotous adaptation of Emma – complete with Charli XCX bangers – has just ended its run at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The BBC is screening a well-received adaptation of Gill Hornby’s Miss Austen, a study of how the author’s sister engaged with the her legacy.
And then there’s the most conspicuous (and apparently indestructible) millennial successor to Pride and Prejudice. Next week, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, fourth in the sequence about Helen Fielding’s definitive singleton, arrives on the big screen.
Originally a newspaper column, later a book, then a film, Bridget Jones’s Diary is unimaginable without Pride and Prejudice and without the BBC adaptation of that book from 1995. This is not only the 250th anniversary of Austen’s arrival on earth; it is the 30th anniversary of the event that gained the author mainstream popularity beyond any contemporary or any close successor.
If, over the previous 150 years, you had asked any half-educated person to name the most conspicuous 19th-century British novelist, they would almost certainly have said Charles Dickens. This is not about personal taste. The respondent may well have preferred Anthony Trollope. It is not about academic respectability. George Eliot (and Austen for that matter) were long talked about more enthusiastically in the senior common room.
But the author of Bleak House and A Christmas Carol boasted a visibility in anglophone pop culture with which none of those others could compete. Dickens, with his exhausting readings, began the business of stage adaptation.
Filmed versions of the novels began in the 19th century and continued through George Cukor’s great David Copperfield, from 1935, and David Lean’s untouchable Great Expectations, from 1946, up to an Oscar best-picture win, for Oliver!, in 1969.
It is, in contrast, bewildering to consider that Ang Lee’s tremendous Sense and Sensibility from (that year again) 1995 was, following a workaday Pride and Prejudice with Laurence Olivier in 1940, only the second big-screen adaptation of an Austen novel. Yes, there had been a few on the telly, but that cinematic drought still says something startling about how Austen was perceived.
Few tastemakers in the mid-19th century took her seriously. “Why do you like Jane Austen so very much?” Charlotte Brontë asked the critic George Henry Lewes. “I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.”
Among Austen’s close contemporaries, Walter Scott – now little read or adapted – was seen as inestimably more worthy, not least by Brontë herself. “For fiction – read Scott alone; all novels after his are worthless,” the author of Jane Eyre wrote in 1834.
The historian Amanda Vickery, in an article celebrating the 200th anniversary of Sense and Sensibility, dates the stirring of popular interest to the publication of a biography in the 1870s. Critical attention heated up through the 20th century, reaching boiling point in 1948, when FR Leavis, a famously awkward academic, named her as one of eight great English novelists in his influential study The Great Tradition. Sales continued to grow.
It took, however, Colin Firth, as Fitzwilliam Darcy, jumping into a pond in 1995 to raise Austen above all other English novelists in the public perception. That same year saw the initial publication of Bridget Jones’s Diary in the Independent newspaper. The novelisation, whose plot owed much to Pride and Prejudice, named its love interest for Mr Darcy, and, with dizzying intertextuality, the 2001 film cast Firth as Fielding’s variation on the character he had played six years earlier.
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So, when asking “why Jane Austen now?” – or “why quite so much Jane Austen now?” – we are really asking why Austen mattered in the era of lad culture, Britpop and John Major’s back to basics.
That Andrew Davies TV adaptation leant against an already open door as it permitted viewers (and readers) to sexualise characters who had too often been portrayed as varnished mannequins. Lee’s Sense and Sensibility admitted chest-heaving emotion. Fielding connected those traits with the England that was waiting for Tony Blair. One could hardly have imagined a more complete and perfect rebranding.
Any chance we could do the same for Walter Scott in 2025?
