Owning Jane Austen

I own Jane Austen. She lives deep in my heart and I love to learn anything about her that I can. Her way with words still takes my breath away even 25 years after I fell in love with her. I took a wonderful class in college where we read all six novels and then did the best thing ever - we talked about them. We talked about them within the context of her contemporaries and all the sly references her readers would have understood. We talked about her indescribably wonderful use of indirect speech and the complexities - or lack of - of the characters she wrote. We read essays about the physicality of her characters and essays about the homoeroticism of her characters. I discovered then how vastly different the takeaways from her work could be. I suspect some of these essays are just opportunities to be shocking and to overcome the necessity to really reach to write anything new about this classic and beloved author. 

I belong to this Facebook group for Jane Austen fans. It’s the word “fans” that should have tipped me off, but I was naive. I personally prefer the term Janeite. Taken from a Rudyard Kipling poem, it seems more an academic adoration - a fangirl instead of a hopeless romantic in love with Mr Darcy. So many of the posts in this group are about deciding which film (or tv) version of Darcy is sexiest. Oh - and what current heartthrobs would you cast should there be yet another adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. This group ardently follows all of the films and frequently argues vehemently over which are the best adaptations, declaring all others terrible. Particularly disputed is the 1995 miniseries of Pride and Prejudice vs the 2005 film. If these (mostly) ladies met in person, I believe there would be fisticuffs. 

It’s interesting to me just how beloved Darcy is. He’s not that exciting of a hero. He begins fully priggish and boring and ends with a head-spinning change in personality. Our beloved Elizabeth Bennet must learn to check her own pride to win the happy marriage, but Darcy must become another man entirely to win her heart. There is not much witty conversation between this odd couple and he only appreciates Lizzie’s sparkling personality from an aloof space, never quite becoming a part of it. However, it is Darcy that Jane Austen fans from all over obsess over. A quick search of Jane Austen merchandise gives us “Talk Darcy to me” shirts and “I married my Mr Darcy” mugs among myriad other items. 

It’s because of the movies. First Laurence Olivier - a smoldering ball of talent in the shape of a man, then there were others that became nothing when Colin Firth stepped out of that lake in his clinging white shirt. The swooning could be heard all over the world. Then Matthew Macfadyen stepped in to play a Heathcliff sort of Darcy whose agony without Elizabeth made him a most pitiful character. Oh there are a fair share of Wentworth fans out there too and enough Colonel Brandon fans to keep Alan Rickman’s memory alive forever. But it is definitely Darcy that sums up this perception of Jane Austen as a bodice ripper predecessor. 

These movies make me furious. Who has the audacity to think they can write a better Pride and Prejudice than Jane Austen?  Who decides they will make major character changes to works of perfection? Why not just write your own stupid story set in the Regency period and leave my beloved Jane alone! I started thinking about this after I tried to watch the 2007 adaptation of Persuasion. Within 15 minutes I was so irritated I had to turn it off. When I went to see Becoming Jane with my mother, I told her I would pinch her every time there was something wildly inaccurate and she had multiple bruises before we were halfway through. I can’t get through the ITV adaptations of Emma or Mansfield Park. I understand that Fanny Price is a problematic character but don’t make the movie if you can’t wrap your head around the heroine. You don’t get to just change her into someone lively and arch because you feel like it. Except you can. You can rape and pillage these lovely, perfectly-crafted pieces of literature because there is no one to tell you no. There is no one to protect what is in the public domain. How could it be allowed that someone can just poach the language from the books and randomly insert zombies? It’s like spray painting the Mona Lisa. And yet it was so well-received they made a movie out of it.  

Members of my FB group are also huge fans of Jane Austen extension books like P&P from Darcy’s point of view. Or the romantic life of his younger sister. These often seem like bodice rippers to me and I wouldn’t read one of them not based on Austen, so I won’t read these either. Not my cup of tea. But many of my fellow Jane Austen “fans” discuss them and swap favorites and some even write these extensions. Putting aside my own intense snobbery over my ivory tower ownership of Jane Austen, I started to wonder what about the Austen novels lead these people to love the extensions? So I asked the question in a post and was not surprised at the answer. Many said they loved the characters so much that they wanted to keep their stories alive. Jane Austen’s characters are so believable and real that they easily come off the page and into your heart, I agree. One woman who wrote a book about Charlotte and Collins said that an idea had occurred to her that she just couldn’t stop thinking about so she wrote it. As an aside, I am blown away by that and green with envy. How wonderful to get down on paper what’s in your head - well done, you! She’s another writer inspired by Jane Austen. Others said they just wanted sex in the stories. This explains the explosive popularity of Bridgerton. 

All of this led me to investigate how I read books and how that might be different from how others read books. I love the stories and I adore the characters - I named my daughter after Elizabeth Bennet - but they are finite characters to me. Only what Jane Austen wrote in her finished manuscript is what happens to these characters. Nothing beyond that could ever exist for me. I read the books for the writing and the character detail and the text and the subtext. I study the way that these novels have been interpreted over time and how Jane Austen has been held up as an ideal for feminism and conservatism at the same time. We see in Austen what we want to see. Some see a dissection of a certain class of people in a very specific time and place in history and some see the aching romance that stays with them for so long. So I have to accept that I don’t own Austen at all. I will not do this gracefully, though. That I must share her with everyone, even those who approach her or see her completely differently from the way I do, will always make me grumble a bit. I must release any judgment of extension literature and let conservatives have her as well as feminists. But I will still hate the movies!