Jane Austen Through the Ages

Our programme is not a narrow study of Jane Austen; nor is it a biography. Instead The Many Lovers of Jane Austen takes a historical view of one of the best loved figures in English literature.

Austen was the subject of a long Victorian eclipse. During the 1820s and 1830s she was barely read at all. Her funeral at Winchester Cathedral was sparsely attended; the memorial that stands there today is largely made up of Victorian additions. It took a long time for her to regain her literary reputation.

Charlotte Brontë hated her. In a letter to George Lewis, who was an early advocate, Brontë described her as a ‘stranger to that stormy sisterhood of the passions’. Austen’s novels remained the preserve of writers, fanatics and critics for some time. It wasn’t until Edward Austen Leigh published a saccharine biography in 1870, authorised by her estate, that she began to emerge to a wider public and even then she was ‘domesticated like a wren’.

America has played an important role in our changing perceptions of Austen. She was first brought to the attention of the American public in the edition of her novels illustrated by Hugh Thompson, published in 1890. In both the US and in Britain, her rediscovery was linked to a growing market for nostalgia for a more stable, rural life before the Industrial Revolution took hold. It was a conservative fantasy, ’the world we have lost’, but one that, like the works of Shakespeare, is open to multiple readings.

From the late 1890s into the early 20th century, ‘Janeites’, of whom Rudyard Kipling was the most prominent, were aesthetes; Austen’s novels were a special taste among refined men. The First World War saw further changes in her reception. She became a source of solace and wit and was read widely in the trenches. Hers became novels of consolation, of which Emma (1815) was considered the most perfect. The same was true to a lesser extent during the Second World War: Churchill claimed that ‘antibiotics and Jane Austen got me through the war’.

A number of people I interview in the documentary, such as the writer Howard Jacobson, were students at Cambridge under F.R. Leavis, whose ‘great tradition’ gave Austen a prominent role. His students, including Jacobson, then went off to the colonies, as teachers of literature themselves, to spread the word. This idea of Austen being a moral and improving author has long had purchase.

But it is in the US that, once again, Austen has found a vast new audience and the reason for that is Andrew Davies’ 1995 television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, which was an enormous hit over there. The Jane Austen Society of America is an extraordinary organisation and its meetings attract a broad cross-section of people. Two hundred years on from her birth, Austen’s popularity and standing probably have peaked, but her literary reputation seems to be secure.

Amanda Vickery is Professor of Early Modern History at Queen Mary, University of London.