This year Janeites around the world are celebrating Jane Austen’s 250th birthday (December 16, 1775). Although she wrote only six polished novels before her death in 1817, she has become one of the most popular novelists in history. (If Pride and Prejudice is the only title you can remember, refresh your memory at https://carolynmulford.com/writing/vacationing-with-jane-austen.)
She may be more popular now than ever. That’s partly because the movie and TV adaptations of her books over the last 30 years have drawn and delighted readers not doing assignments. Another factor has been the proliferation of novels imagining the life of Austen’s characters and of contemporary people from around the world in plots roughly paralleling one of hers.
Writers surely must rank among Austen’s most enthusiastic readers. The woman wrote brilliantly about her time with characters like people we know today. Some poor souls have dismissed her as “only” a romance writer or novelist of social manners. She actually offers up biting social commentary with devastating humor. She also took novels in a new direction and had developed superb craftmanship by P&P.
Each novel features a distinctive protagonist, with the wealthy and wildly over-confident Emma (modernized in the movie Clueless) following the impoverished and insecure Fanny of Mansfield Park, Austen’s longest, most complex, and least-loved novel.
She doesn’t repeat secondary characters either. Even her “bad” women and men, as essential to her plots as a murderer in a mystery, behave quite differently from each other.
For more than a century Janeites, a term popularized by Rudyard Kipling, have written full-length novels as homage to their idol. Academics have produced countless papers and numerous books on major and tiny elements of her work, her life, and the Regency period.
Her 250th birthday has brought an even bigger crop than usual, far too many to name. Check your library’s catalog, your bookseller’s shelves, or such online sources as janeaustenbooks.net for whatever you crave after digesting her novels. I’m listing a few recent and new sample titles, ones I’ve read or heard about, to give an idea of the variety available.
Fiction
Longbourn by Jo Baker: Below the stairs in the P&P household.
Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor: Being the First Jane Austen Mystery by Stephanie Barron: Opening a long-running series in which Jane applies her wit to solving crimes.
Death Comes to Pemberley by P. D. James: Trouble on the estate a few years after Elizabeth and Darcy marry.
The Austen Society by Natalie Jenner: A well-researched novel on post-World War II efforts to save Jane Austen’s last home.
Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors by Sonali Dev: A modern Pakistani family’s story parallels that of the Bennets.
The Austen Affair by Madeleine Bell: A rom-com with young actors in a movie based on Northanger Abbey accidentally time traveling.
Nonfiction
What Matters in Jane Austen? Twenty Crucial Problems Solved by John Mullan: Answers to many questions for Janeites and those interested in the Regency period.
Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane by Devoney Looser: A scholar with a nonacademic style portrays Austen’s not-so-quiet life.
Jane Austen and the Creation of Modern Fiction: Six Novels in “a Style Entirely New” by Collins Hemingway: For readers and writers. And professors.
Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness by Ingrid Sigrun Bredkjaer Brodey: All about the (sometimes unsatisfactory or controversial) endings of the six novels from an original thinker.
Jane Austen, Abolitionist: The Loaded History of the Phrase “Pride and Prejudice” by Margie Burns: The use of the phrase before and after Austen and what it meant to her.
What Jane Austen’s Characters Read (and Why) by Susan Allen Ford: What reading choices reveal about the characters in the novels and about their creator.
Jane Austen: The Original Romance Novelist (Pocket Portraits) by Janet Lewis Saidi: Moments in the life of a brilliant, complicated woman that shaped her writing and led to lasting popularity.
The Jane Austen Insult Guide by Emily Reed: Clever takedowns from Jane for your use in uncomfortable situations.
We’re never going to find new Jane Austen novels, but they’re all worth rereading and rereading. Doing so is likely to lead to reading lots of books about her.
—Carolyn Mulford