200 Years After Jane Austen's Death, Why Are People Still Obsessed With Her?

Readers of popular romance have moved much of their attention to Fifty Shades of Grey, yet Jane Austen is still what a large share of them pick up. Then again, who says the two have nothing in common?

Make a list of the most famous couples in the history of the novel and Jane Austen's Elizabeth and Darcy will sit near the top.

This 19th-century woman wrote about marriage and courtship in terms of class and money, but what readers remember is the sincere love that plays out on a country estate — made more moving, not less, by the twists the old world's rules forced upon it.

Even today, 200 years after her death, readers of popular romance have moved much of their attention to Fifty Shades of Grey, yet Jane Austen is still what a large share of them pick up. Then again, who says the two have nothing in common?

Austen's best-known novel, Pride and Prejudice, has sold more than 20 million copies. In the BBC's 2003 poll of "Britain's 200 best-loved novels," it came second, behind The Lord of the Rings, which had only just begun its run of popularity. Pride and Prejudice has been adapted six times for film and seven times for television, and YouTube holds more than 400,000 videos about her.

Austen wrote six novels: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion. No one has summed up what they share better than Austen did in a letter home: "Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on — the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work."

When these "country stories" first appeared, they did not sell fast. They were fashionable reading for a small circle, nowhere near as popular as Charlotte Brontë's full-throated romance Jane Eyre. But in the two centuries since Austen died on her family's estate, they have won the mass reading public over — slowly, completely, and in the same mild, level-headed tone.

Meanwhile, the middle class Austen wrote about had only just appeared in 19th-century Britain, and at first had to prove itself to the aristocracy. Today that class, all but unchanged in outline, runs mainstream society in both East and West. So readers can hang their nostalgia on Austen's balls and Regency dress and read her modernity without any friction at all.

That is how Jane Austen came to hold a place of her own among novelists old and new, and why she is still read. Her fans call themselves Janeites, and for sheer size and devotion the fan club that name stands for has almost no rival but Shakespeare's.

What Lies Behind Jane Austen's Love Stories?

"If you would do me the honor of dancing with me, Miss Austen, I would be delighted."

At a country ball in Hampshire in the late 18th century, Jane Austen, just turned 20, stood in a corner with her friends. She had just had an unpleasant moment: a clumsy-footed heir to a fortune, the very man her mother favored, had embarrassed her in front of everyone.

Then a young man came over and asked her to dance. She knew who he was — a neighbor's nephew, an Irish law student named Tom Lefroy. So they took the floor for their first dance. The two proud young people sparred through the whole conversation, but looking back, it was where their story began.

The scene comes from Becoming Jane, the 2007 film about Austen's life. As the story goes, it was after this meeting that she wrote First Impressions, the early version of Pride and Prejudice. She wrote it at 20, in 1796, in letters, and when she finished she read it aloud to her family in the parlor of their Hampshire house.

More telling than the anecdote is the romantic formula the film runs on. Public embarrassment — a foil — a rescuer's arrival — conflict that sticks — an abrupt stop that leaves you wanting more. That is the formula built into Pride and Prejudice. Its narrative frame is so complete, and its rich man with an unreadable interior so classic, that today's wish-fulfillment romances need borrow only one piece of it to keep readers hooked.

In the American sitcom The Big Bang Theory, the scientist Amy names Pride and Prejudice and Garfield as her favorites. Her boyfriend Sheldon, also a researcher, objects that the book isn't worth reading.

This is the standard scene in any argument about Austen. Most of her readers are women, who like reading about household detail and small private feelings, far from historical upheaval — the panic the French Revolution set off among the upper classes, the Napoleonic Wars, the wars between Britain and France. Men wave it away, the way women react to blunt, testosterone-driven fight scenes.

A readers' group called the Jane Austen Society of North America holds a themed gathering every year. In a video of one, most of those attending are grown women, talking at length about what Austen has meant to them. One says: "If you can still laugh about it, it means things aren't that bad yet."

Sheldon picks Pride and Prejudice apart as he would a scientific theory, but his conclusion runs past that: "It turns out Pride and Prejudice is a flawless masterpiece. He's too proud, she's too prejudiced, and it works."

That, of course, is a joke. Scholars and critics have had more serious versions of the argument, and they largely agree: Austen's touch is sensitive and meticulous at once. E.M. Forster, one of the most celebrated British novelists of the 20th century, called her people "round characters," set against Dickens's "flat characters": "Her characters are hung with labels like 'pride' or 'sensibility,' but they are never confined by them." In 2014, the UCLA political scientist Michael Chwe published Jane Austen, Game Theorist, arguing that the moves of her characters, major and minor, always rest on strategic thinking and decision analysis — the tools of game theory.

In The Great Tradition in English Literature, the well-known book by the 20th-century British critic Annette T. Rubinstein, Austen's work is called one of the earliest and most influential of the "modern novels" — a form that fills its characters out as fully as it can while sketching their minds in a few strokes. It is the way of writing novels we now take for granted:

"Darcy had seen a collection of people in whom there was little beauty and no fashion, for none of whom he had felt the smallest interest, and from none received either attention or pleasure. Miss Bennet he acknowledged to be pretty, but she smiled too much." Believable, true to life, and not so absorbed in fine shades of psychology — the way an Ian McEwan can be — that it tests a reader's patience past the breaking point.

Clever but moderate is probably the honest description of this clergyman's daughter. She mocks the "marriage market" with a light hand, yet admits plainly that marriage was "the only honorable provision." You can see it in the characters she made: almost without exception, her heroines pull off a rare double, conservative and progressive at the same time — educated women with modern minds who still obey the survival rules of real life.

In public politics, shifting your position looks like unreliability. In a novel it looks as complicated and forgiving as life, which is exactly what pleases most people. And in these novels, written in the late 19th century, the virtues of reason and restraint are rewarded in the end. Austen never married, but she gave her heroines perfect endings: tested first, they all get marriages — and true love — that match their own virtue.

Against a society where men held most of the economic and political power, Darcy plays two parts at once: a practical means of support, and a cultivated, sensitive soulmate. Austen put it neatly herself, describing a union that "must have been to the advantage of both; by her ease and liveliness, his mind might have been softened, his manners improved; and from his judgement, information, and knowledge of the world, she must have received benefit of greater importance."

You see, she worked out the logic of the sweet innocent and the domineering tycoon long before today's wish-fulfillment novelists did, and explained it more cleverly too.

How a Popular Novelist Was Made, and the Fashionable Taste of a Rising Class

This careful, refined way of handling life rose alongside a class that emerged in the 19th century. It started in Britain, and today, under the name of the middle class, it has swept the world.

Billiards, that traditional middle-class game, took centuries to travel from its birth in Europe to popularity everywhere. Austen's wide popularity came late too.

According to the Austen scholar Brian Southam, in the half-century between 1811, when she first published Sense and Sensibility, and 1870, she was not among the bestselling novelists, and for a time her books went out of print. Charles Dickens, who was good at writing the suffering of the poor with strong feeling, sold better. Oliver Twist and David Copperfield came out in monthly installments, and even people who could not read would eagerly pay a halfpenny to have a scholar read one aloud to them.

Still, a small group prized her. Her readers came from the aristocracy and the literary elite. The elite praised her skill and craft. The novelist Walter Scott was the first to admire her realist touch: "That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements, feelings and characters of ordinary life."

The aristocracy found her novels good entertainment. The Prince Regent's 15-year-old daughter thought the younger sister in Sense and Sensibility had a temperament much like her own. Lady Vernon told a friend that Mansfield Park was not merely a novel but a true history of family gatherings in the country. Anne Milbanke, the poet Byron's wife, called it "the most fashionable novel of the present day."

Fashionable here does not mean showy. It means something other than the reading matter of a decaying aristocracy. People still leafed now and then through the Baronetage, as Sir Elliot does in Persuasion — a roll of honor recording the rise of great families. But the world was about to change. At the turning point of the European Renaissance, between the 14th and 17th centuries, the first stirrings of a capitalist commercial revolution came with the banners of humanism and science, authority was challenged, and the modern age was set in motion.

Jane Austen was born in 1775 into a clergyman's family in Hampshire, in southern England. Not rich, but comfortable enough, with "an open, cheerful, unconstrained intellectual atmosphere" at home. Her characters come from much the same social ground. As Elizabeth says in Pride and Prejudice, describing where she stands with Darcy: "He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman's daughter; so far we are equal."

Today "gentleman" is a general word for a well-mannered man. In the Britain of that era the gentry was a social class. The word goes back to the medieval French genterie, a term for nobility of royal descent. From the 16th century, landowners rising as a new kind of enterprising proprietor were taken into respectable society in Britain.

After Austen's time Britain reached the peak of the first Industrial Revolution. By the late 19th century its industrial output was greater than that of the rest of the world combined, and a middle class with money to spare grew larger than ever before.

At first these families were not much drawn to the outdoors and stayed home most of the time. They preferred to settle in the country rather than the city, which produced their habitual amusements: visiting, talking, and reading novels. So more and more people came to enjoy Austen's kind of fashion — and what made it fit so well was that the fashion in her novels was their own life.

Britain's first wave of Austen fever came in 1869, set off by the publication that year of A Memoir of Jane Austen. Her family commissioned the book and her nephew James wrote it. Austen's most famous portrait comes from its cover: the elegant, intelligent "Aunt Jane."

Over the next two years her novels were reissued in paperback and hardcover, and more commentary appeared about them than in the previous 50 years put together. She became an author fit for Victorian family reading, celebrated the way an idol novelist would be. Austen herself never traveled far, but from the 20th century on, as economic and cultural ties tightened, she has been a global traveler. Her novels and the films made from them have been translated into dozens of languages. High schools and universities around the world put her books on their literature syllabuses.

"There Is Nothing Like Staying at Home for Real Comfort" — and That Is Very Modern

The heart of this new, fashionable way of living shows up in Austen's writing as comfort. She divided the spaces where her scenes happen by function, finely, and the divisions still feel familiar: a ball or a meeting in a large parlor, set off by the durable Georgian fireplace; courtship in an English garden; anxious turning-over of things in the bedroom.

The New York Times columnist Witold Rybczynski wrote a book called Home: A Short History of an Idea, and there he says of Austen:

"She used them to express a new kind of experience: the sense of contentment a person draws from taking pleasure in their actual physical surroundings. She calls Fanny's room a comfortable little nest of her own. In her books we find not only a comfortable room and a comfortable carriage but comfortable meals, comfortable views, comfortable circumstances; she seems almost unable to stop herself."

This new experience is real rather than affected, and different from the idea of strengthening carried in the Latin root of comfort. When the word reached England, the English-speaking world "added to it its modern, domestic meaning," which it has kept ever since.

Women were both the heroines of Austen's novels and their main readers, and their waking sense of individual identity also came out of the way the middle class rearranged the home. The parlor was where people gathered — in richer houses large enough for a ball — and at the same time the number of bedrooms rose sharply.

Fanny Price, the heroine of Mansfield Park, has exactly such a room: "whatever unpleasantness she met with outside, she had only to come to this room, look about her a little or think something over, and she could find comfort at once. Her plants, her books, her writing-desk and her various ingenious works were all within her reach." Rybczynski's example holds up just as well today. It is one reason Austen's novels have lasted.

It shows too in the Georgian interiors in her novels, a style that rose with the country estates of the 18th-century Georgian kings and is the ancestor of what people now call "simplified European" decor. It was the prevailing style in Britain then, and it is closer to modern furnishing than what came before. Around this period the fireplace became the focus of the parlor — and by the time of the Second World War, people had done nothing more to it than add a television.

In the Old World, Class Was Lovable

There is no doubt, though, that the world Austen drew is largely an old one. Her characters wear Regency clothes, and the men like to carry canes.

At a Janeite event in 2012, more than 700 Austen fans in 19th-century gowns and bonnets tied under the chin gathered in Brooklyn, New York, for three days of lectures, an antiques show, banquets and balls. Judging by the photographs that came out, they skewed somewhat older.

Some argue that what keeps bringing Austen up generation after generation is not only the modern reading experience but the last trace of classical feeling in her era. She sits between old and new, tradition and modernity, so people can always find a safe place to park their nostalgia, telling themselves that the life, the manners and the feelings of that time suited us better. Scholars also like to set Austen beside Eileen Chang, who, in the Shanghai of the 1940s — "qipaos, erhus, permed hair, old-fashioned elevators, transoceanic liners" — dealt in the same small, realistic, ironic affairs that do not end too badly, and who has been just as popular over the past several decades.

In the United States this sometimes takes the form of Janeites' undisguised love of England, and of charges of political Anglophilia from their opponents. Mark Twain is the classic case. He wrote with open loathing: "Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone" — and not only because he was a Mississippi tough who could not stomach sentiment.

The last generally acknowledged wave of Austen fever broke in 1995, set off by the BBC's television Pride and Prejudice. On the biggest night, 9 million people in Britain sat in front of their sets to watch the period drama, with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle. That same year Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility, adapted from Austen's novel, took seven Oscar nominations.

"Right now, it looks like Jane Austen is even bigger than Quentin Tarantino." That was the verdict the following year, in 1996, of a New Yorker piece titled "Jane's World".

Its author, the contemporary British novelist Martin Amis, went on to write, in a tone of regret, that people had forgotten how frightening traditional authority and class once were. Audiences of the past would have walked out in anger, or thrown things at the screen; now nobody minds any of it. "Class is harmless, class is lovable, class has even become … classic."

These serious questions of principle have not, in fact, held anyone's attention. Austen's last two novels, Mansfield Park and Persuasion, where in middle age she began to rethink class and love — stories of regret produced by cautious renunciation — are rarely anyone's favorites either.

For the 200th anniversary of Pride and Prejudice, the BBC made a documentary called Having a Ball, reconstructing every one of Austen's signature details. It turns out that forgetfulness is forgivable: in mood and in function, these scenes have the classic feel of a faraway country, no different from a magic world in a fantasy.

In Lionsgate's 2016 Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, adapted from the bestselling novel, the estate ball becomes a plague scene, and the elegant young ladies waiting for their intended suitors turn around, pick up machetes and go monster-hunting in teams.

The New York Times writer Deborah Yaffe understands this. In Among the Janeites she writes that today's Janeites have the same qualities as Trekkies, the fans of Star Trek. People are willing to pull themselves out of a dull, cluttered reality and time-travel into one of Austen's balls.

Amanda, who lives in London, is one of them. She travels through a door beside her bathtub into an Austen ball. As night falls over the ballroom she is back in the winter of 1813, listening to sheet music from the Austen family, starting to dance as the head couple falls back to the end of the line. This heroine of the 2008 British fantasy series Lost in Austen endures a dull job day after day like most people, and only in the world of 200 years ago does she feel at ease.

Take one slice of this and you find that manners and mores can swing back in real life too. Hadley Freeman is an American who lived in London for more than 20 years. Writing for The Guardian, she said young Londoners had long since settled into getting sloppily drunk in a pub and going home with whoever was there. When she moved back to New York around 2011, she found that young Americans on dates, especially those who had met through dating sites, had if anything gone back to the Austen-era practice of stopping short of impropriety.

Pop Culture Changes; Some Things Don't

Some evidence suggests Austen's influence may be fading, or flattening out the way most classics do.

A great many academic papers still take Austen as their subject every year, and the industry around her never misses a chance to cash in, but pop culture turns over fast and people have more to choose from. Pride and Prejudice ranks 270th by sales in Amazon's classic-fiction category, with Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Lord of the Rings and The Great Gatsby near the top. The 2007 film Becoming Jane took only $18.66 million in the United States and £3 million in Britain. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, released the same year, made about 16 times as much.

What sells a love story has changed too. One thing critics praised in the 1995 British Pride and Prejudice was that it put on screen the erotic charge Austen had kept under her manners. Twenty years later, right on cue, people got Fifty Shades of Grey.

Austen still has every chance of going on succeeding. Look around: a little boringly, the substance of what counted as fashionable in her day has barely moved in 200 years, except that there is now a television beside the fireplace and the ball has become the party.

Most romance novels have never climbed out of Austen's mold. The worse ones skip around loosely; the better ones make small adjustments.

The British bestselling novelist Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary, and the films made from it, have been the model for the contemporary chick-lit story since the 1990s. Fielding has said she built her book directly on Pride and Prejudice. She was captivated by the BBC's 1995 series, she said, and decided to "steal" Austen's plot.

A 2013 piece in The Atlantic wrote that Bridget is a "modern heir" to Austen's heroines, carrying on Austen's traits while adding new contemporary ones. A 30-year-old Londoner, Bridget still has the kindness, the liveliness and the loneliness of the "leftover woman" — only her troubles are now her weight, her job, sex.

You will also notice that 200 years on, today's young women and Austen's heroines share a good deal in principle: they reject the old constraints on the sexes yet still hold to the idea of family; they carry the pressure of getting by, and find healing and escape in spending. Like the people Austen wrote, they try to see through the world and mock it while insisting on attending to their own lives — with no intention of actually breaking anything.

Satire or humor, the practical function of both is the same: they don't prod you to change society, they help you put up with it. In a letter home written the year Pride and Prejudice was published, Austen wrote: "I am wild and ungovernable, because I am not my own master. It is not my fault."

All of it includes fantasy, of course, and the traditional view of marriage that fantasy reveals. Fielding carried the name Darcy straight over into Bridget Jones's Diary. Darcy: a cultivated, sensitive soulmate, and a practical means of support at the same time. No wonder Linda Berdoll's 2004 fan novel Mr Darcy Takes a Wife was a bestseller that year.

Cover image and in-text images from Douban Movie and Wikipedia.