Now, on the 250th anniversary of her birth, Austen is less an author than an institution. She belongs more with the House of Lords and the Bank of England than with Thackeray and Trollope. The British have an insatiable appetite for studies of her, however coy or twee. If you want to retire tomorrow with a fat bank balance, write a book called Jane Austen and Dogs. There aren’t actually any dogs in her fiction, but no matter. The Secret Sex Life of Jane Austen would do even better if you’re prepared to lie through your teeth for a couple of hundred pages. Studies of a gay Austen, predictably enough, abound.

It is with Austen, though, along with Walter Scott and Maria Edgeworth, that the novel in Britain becomes a serious literary form, not simply a matter of Gothic horror or soppy romance. Before she came to write, the genre was seen by polite society rather as The Sun is regarded in Oxbridge senior common rooms: despised as swashbuckling or sentimental trash, rather than a medium of serious moral inquiry. Austen was well aware that she was up against a widespread contempt for what she was creating, but refused to concede that fiction was just fantasy for upper-class women with too much time on their hands.

One might also claim that she invented the typical English prose style. Reading her work, the bluff, hearty tones of Henry Fielding now seem antiquated, along with the sanctimonious moralizing of Samuel Richardson. In their place, we have a style of writing which is good-humored but not quite genial, reasonable and temperate yet also quietly devastating. It’s this supple, self-assured prose, laden with ironies and obliquities, which descends from Jane Austen to George Eliot, Henry James and E.M. Forster, and which even finds a resonance as late as John Le Carré. Fiction of this kind is mannered but not elaborate; sharply satirical, yet intent on keeping its cool. The very shape of Austen’s sentences, with their delicate equipoise and complex symmetry, reflects the social and moral values she upholds. Previous novelists tended to deal in epic characters and events, but Austen is one of the first English writers to find moral significance in such minor but critical matters as remembering to light a fire for someone in their bedchamber, or failing to wait for a companion who has gone off to fetch you a key. What the Henry Fieldings of this world would scarcely have noticed becomes of momentous importance to an author on whom nothing is lost.

Given this miniaturizing way of seeing, more typical of a woman of the time than a man, Austen has sometimes been accused of overlooking the great historical events of her time (the Napoleonic wars, for example). Yet nothing could be more crucial to the social history of her age than the fortunes of the landed gentry and aristocracy. By and large, it is these men and women who populate her fiction, and generally speaking they aren’t looked upon in a favorable light. This is partly because Austen wasn’t of their number herself. She was the daughter of a clergyman of modest means and earned at most £1,000 from her writing, but her family had connections with the wealthier gentry. In this sense, she was on the fringes of the social order she observed, half in and half out, familiar enough with its ways to portray it convincingly yet enough of an outsider to be dismayed by its selfishness and arrogance — the appalling Lady Catherine de Bourgh of Pride and Prejudice being a memorable example of the latter.

Later novelists in Britain would find themselves in an equally ambiguous position. The major Victorian novel — the Brontë sisters, Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy — is the product of the lower-middle class. Its authors are close enough to the common people to dramatize their lives from the inside, but at the same time aspiring, reasonably well educated and on terms with their social betters. If the internal exile finds himself in a painful place, caught between alternative identities and chronically anxious, it’s also a peculiarly creative one. From Henry James, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound onward, 20th-century “English” writing is dominated by literal émigrés rather than spiritual ones.

Austen’s position, then, in the genteel society of her time was an awkward one. As a semi-outsider, she found herself upholding the ideal values of the gentry and aristocracy in the face of an actual upper class which consistently violated them. She was sufficiently part of that class to have a quick eye for the size and value of a landed estate, and the likely social status of its proprietor. She rarely sees anyone working on the land. All the same, what she sees around her, as well as good sense and sound judgment, is a landed class which is investing more and more in trade and the financial markets; and though Austen had nothing against honest tradesmen, she saw this as threatening to undermine the social order she esteemed. In her eyes, the gentry weren’t just a bunch of entrepreneurs, but the linchpin of a whole paternalist way of life. Hence the ritual trips to poor tenants’ cottages and the dutiful tending of low-life sickbeds which figure in her fiction.

But social mobility was on the increase, as the impecunious younger sons of baronets were in pursuit of the daughters of city merchants. There is a chink in even the most closed family known as marriage, through which insidious influences may enter. Urban wealth, moral frivolity, glib metropolitan manners and ruthless self-interest were invading the tranquility of the English countryside. The custodians of English culture were at risk of being infected by various forms of moral anarchy, from the disowning of parental authority to the giddy pursuit of fashion, from sexual flightiness to the worship of money.

Further reading

Inside the Jane Austen theme park

By Tanya Gold

Throughout Britain, finance capital was flying to the aid of mortgaged estates about to sink without trace; but in Austen’s eyes, there was a high price to pay for this liaison between city and country in terms of conduct and manners. Manners for her meant not the passing of beefburgers without dropping them on your partner’s lap, but a whole other set of moral values that were now under siege: kindness, considerateness, patience, sympathy and deference. Grace and good breeding were matters of virtue and self-discipline, not simply drawing-room airs which any charlatan might assume. There was a new cult of spontaneous feeling abroad, which would later be called Romanticism. For Austen, all this was dangerously subjectivist and self-indulgent; there was something to be said for sensibility, but it needed to be firmly restrained by sense.

One could write much of this history by tracking the fortunes of the word “gentleman” in the English language. A merchant or industrial capitalist, however prosperous and well-connected, couldn’t be a gentleman in Austen’s time, but his public-school-educated son certainly qualified. In Emma, Robert Martin is a “gentleman-farmer”, man deemed “respectable and intelligent” by the head of the local gentry, Mr Knightley; but this doesn’t mean that Knightley would invite Martin on a shoot or propose marriage to his sister, since he isn’t gentlemanly enough.

A growing alliance was being sealed between landed, mercantile and industrial capital by the public-school system, in which the sons of dukes learnt not to patronize the offspring of cotton barons. The had to learn to be less proud, and the middle classes less prejudiced. The result was a powerful ruling bloc which later in the 19th century would prove easily capable of taking on and defeating the burgeoning working-class movement. Over the Channel, in revolutionary France, the nobility and the bourgeoisie had faced each other across the barricades; in England, the two classes combined in a spirit of moderation for which the nation became renowned. If ever we decide to drive on the right, we shall do so gradually.

Further reading

Spare us another Pride and Prejudice remake

By Poppy Sowerby

Yet if Austen was an astringent critic of upper-class society, she delivered that critique with a stylishness and lightness of touch which were themselves part of that social order. The question is how to unite sobriety of judgment with vivacity of spirits, a combination brilliantly illustrated by Elizabeth and Jane Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. The ideal is to be both good and fine. You need sprightliness but not levity, independence of thought but not errant individualism. Emma Woodhouse of Emma has too much liveliness, whereas Fanny Price of Mansfield Park has too little. Austen’s own prose is an exemplary fusion of the instructive and the entertaining.

Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice remarks that she first became aware of her affection for Mr Darcy when she set eyes on his elegantly laid-out estates. The reader suspects for a moment that this is ironic, as though Elizabeth were to confide that she first fell in love with him when she saw the size of his bank balance. But there is no irony intended. What Elizabeth means is that the way Darcy has laid out his estates is a moral as well as aesthetic affair — a matter of sound judgment, a sense of proportion, an aversion to vulgar spectacle or useless ornamentation. A man’s taste is a guide to his soul.

In the end, there is no clear distinction between the moral and the aesthetic; and this is true of Austen’s own fiction, which blends artistic pleasure with moral insight. The problem, as the novels themselves reveal, is that there are people in the world who have the manners of an angel and the morals of a tomcat.

I try to book a walking tour online. But it will only take bookings for two — so technically Jane Austen wouldn’t get on her own walking tour. I book another and, by the Pulteney Bridge, I meet a young American woman who is impersonating the heroine of a Netflix Christmas film. She bounces up in curls and bobble hat and duffle coat and announces she has just finished Pride and Prejudice. Her praise, though, is understated, baffled even. She understands that Austen is a brand now and Bath is a city of brands: Cos; Mountain Warehouse; the Romans. But my Netflix friend is still a seeking woman: an Austen heroine. We all are, and that’s the game. Austen offers not a portrait but a mirror, and a woman reads Austen not to find Austen, but herself.

The tour is guided by an ancient German émigré who lives in Chippenham and is also, I think, in his Sunday best. As he takes us round — the house in Sydney Place, which is in denial about being Austen-related, almost sulking; Trim Street, which was too rough for Austen; the house in Gay Street — he treats her like another edifice of the city. In his words, she might be an abbey or a Roman bath: you can just get in her.

He is filled with detail, not sensibility. I think of Charlotte Brontë’s criticism of Emma: “anything like warmth or enthusiasm; anything energetic, poignant, heart-felt, is utterly out of place in commending these works”. But Austen was English, and she spoke to the speechlessness of the English: Brontë was half Cornish and half Irish. So we stare at the house on Gay Street, and we do not talk about whether Mr Darcy would be a hot fuck, though I think he wouldn’t. All Austen’s heroes are duds, except Captain Wentworth of Persuasion (“you pierce my soul”) but it doesn’t matter what I think, because Austen wrote someone for everyone. Hilary Mantel was writing a novel about Mary Bennet when she died.

Austen had stupid children in novel form: the Bridgerton siblings of the novels, now a Netflix juggernaut. The Bridgerton tour is led by an angry man from Surrey who I doubt has read all six novels. This is testament to Austen’s reinvention as theme park: anyone can have a go on her. The Bridgerton novels take the Austen aesthetic and run wild, mostly with lilac. They are pleasing and mindless and they speak to those who travel to their idea of Regency England for the clothes, and the comforting truism that, here, women do not work. Empire line is easy to replicate and flattering. A big girl — Penelope Featherington, who featured in the TV version — can look as good as a slender one, or better. Bridgerton also gives us the sex Austen denies us. Martin Amis, who wrote that he “wouldn’t have minded a rather more detailed conclusion [to Pride and Prejudice] — say, a twenty-page sex scene featuring the two principals, with Mr Darcy, furthermore, acquitting himself uncommonly well”, would have liked Bridgerton.

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Jeff Bezos belongs in Venice

By Tanya Gold

We fight our way through the Christmas market and our guide has a stand-off with carolers by the Colombian Coffee Company. We do a quiz as we follow him up Pulteney Street and the winner gets three out of 20 right and wins a bar of chocolate. This is Janeland as numbing out.

The true addicts are at the Jane Austen Centre on Gay Street, which has quotations from the novels on the back of the toilet doors. Austen lived a few doors up the hill at No 25, but when the centre tried to move to that house, the dentist tenant resisted them, which means people with toothache are stared hard at by Janeites, who then move on to the exhibition here. The door to the centre is manned by Henry Tilney from Northanger Abbey, who I always liked because he is funny. There is a male cast roving around the centre — Mr Bennet, Willoughby, Wickham — but they don’t dare have Mr Darcy for fear he might be groped by Janeites.

The gift shop sells a Pride and Prejudice photo casebook featuring hamsters in bonnets. Even hamsters can’t resist Jane. Or you can buy an Elizabeth Bennet bath duck or a Captain Wentworth Christmas decoration. Or Jane Austen bingo. Or, elsewhere in Bath, Jane Austen’s Christmas. Or Jane Austen’s Wardrobe. I meet a woman who has an Austen tattoo and another who reads Sense and Sensibility when, and only when, she is unhappy. Austen isn’t just an analgesic, of course, but she’s the best. Amis complains that she sets her bad girls loose, and this is “the limitations of her art” — Lydia Wickham, only 15, who believed in Wickham just as Lizzy did, is exiled without a tear — but you can hardly tell a (female) national novelist who to love, and who to push off the page.

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Spare us another Pride and Prejudice remake

By Poppy Sowerby

The Janeites pass through in a reverential hush because they are communing with a god. I meet young women who bonded through a shared love of the novels — she guided their friendship— women who go to Austen for her feminism and women who go to her for her femininity. This is Jane Austen as life coach. At the town bookshop, I find a compendium of her wisdom called Janesplains. All her writing is how-to-be-a-girl, among the things girls want — houses, clothes, and love. And they send letters of thanks: “Dear Jane, thank you for your writing”; “I’ve found my Mr Darcy! Thanks for sharing the blueprint”; “You’re the best!”

Of the true addicts, the very truest have tickets to the Yuletide Ball at the Pump Room: I heard the tickets sold out in eight minutes. I get there early and stand outside — no press is allowed; press is a modern intrusion — and stare through the window at women setting up the ballroom in a kind of trance. Their movements are over-deliberate, and over-graceful: they would pull the curtains on the world if they could. Soon, the guests gather outside in the mandatory Regency costume, alongside the drunks in Christmas sweaters, and when Christmas drunks approach them to ask them to take photographs for them the Janeites look astonished. It’s the intrusion. These women — all women, a few with hostage husbands — are clearly, though temporarily, not living in this world. The Janeites are the most functional of all obsessives and so, like her, are the most socially acceptable. They are racing back in time to 1812, but they pause to tell me that, “her stories relate to women even now”, or “I am here for the sarcasm”, or “She was a Feminist!” or “the characters learn from their mistakes”. The older ones love Persuasion, the purist’s favorite, because it gives a woman love late in life, and that is incomparable solace. (Anne was 27.)

As I leave, a round young woman in a red cape runs past me, ducks round the Christmas tree and sprints into the ball. She has flushed cheeks, is laughing with happiness and for some reason she reminds me of the woman dressed as an owl I met a furry convention many years ago. As a woman she was ordinary. But then I saw her as an owl with vast eyes — from a Coca-Cola bottle, she told me happily, which she painted — and, as an owl, she was a god. Both owl and Janeite in red cape have the same quality of power found and held. And I think that is Austen’s essential message: not love, not by itself, but self-possession.

That Austen should continue to provoke such rapt devotion in her 250th year is neither new nor surprising. Her novels, modest in scope and domestic in preoccupation, have become talismans. She died at 41 and was never famous in her lifetime, writing about love but remaining alone and staying by herself quietly in the parlor of a Hampshire rectory, immersed in her universe of characters. Her books were published anonymously or posthumously, but she now presides over a trans-Atlantic empire of adaptation, fantasy, and projection.

That empire is remarkable: Austen owns the American book market. Her romantic tome Pride and Prejudice outsells new John Grisham novels, and tickets to the upcoming Jane Austen Society of North America tour cost more than $1,300. They come with afternoon tea, a regency-style dance, and whatever might be involved in the “literary inclusions” advertised on the site. In the breadth and frenzy of her trans-Atlantic legacy, she has no equals. Dickens might be a sharp prose stylist — but you can’t exactly imagine any girls swooning over Great Expectations or adult women getting dressed up in full customs to re-enact Hard Times. Even Shakespeare needed the young, beautiful Leonardo Di Caprio to goad people to the cinema for Romeo and Juliet.

Dismissing Austen’s popularity as mere “fandom” misses its point. Rather, the cult of Austen showcases how America’s fetishization of tradition is at odds with a capitalist culture. For Elizabeth Bennett, the challenge was to find a husband who makes you both happy and prosperous. For Americans, whose country is still a year younger than Austen, it’s the bigger, blurrier project of using your life to find something that feels to you like happiness and prosperity.

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The manosphere meets its match

By Lily Isaacs

A few months after I moved to America, a sweet friend invited me to her 25th birthday. There, at her apartment in Williamsburg, Sense and Sensibility — the 2008 BBC version, not Ang Lee’s 1995 adaptation — played on loop on the TV.  I assumed we’d be drinking a beer and talking over the dialogue. It didn’t take me long to realize that quite a few of the others there could recite almost all of the words. For years, they had watched Sense and Sensibility, taking from it a charming story of love leavened by English humor. But also, I think, they recognized their own desires; not so much just to pursue happiness — a universal aspiration — but to seek something individually fulfilling; as Austen wrote, “to know your own happiness.”

But I shouldn’t have been surprised: it was actually first in America, not England, that the Austen cult bloomed. Serious Austen scholarship emerged not from Oxbridge, but from US universities in the early 20th century. Her biography was serialized in Harper’s and the North American Review. It is the peculiar achievement of the Austen-industrial complex to have made her miniature works of psychological realism into global entertainment products.

By the Nineties, a period in which “Austenmania” came into fashion, it had become apparent that Austen was no longer merely an author; she had been repurposed into something adjacent to a lifestyle brand. Colin Firth’s dripping Mr. Darcy, Keira Knightley’s feral Lizzy Bennet stomping through fields at dawn, Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones Diary, the eccentric Disney adults of Austenland — all of it coexisting in the same floating semiotic cloud.

The urge to inhabit Austen’s world is stronger in America than almost anywhere else; but love sells, as does the regency-esque aesthetic of babydoll silhouettes and silken bonnets. Americans, who once threw off the yoke of George III with a revolution, now seem determined to cosplay British class hierarchies in softened, candlelit form. Austen offers a sanitized simulation of aristocracy: just enough status anxiety to titillate, never enough to threaten. Her England is one where money is spoken of, but rarely vulgar; where virtue, if not always rewarded, at least enjoys a kind of narrative dignity.

Last year, a viral personal essay in The Cut headlined “The Case for Marrying an Older Man” devoured my friends and my conversations. The essay’s author, Grazie Sophia Christie, was pure Maria Bertram in Mansfield Park, who marries a very unexciting man, because “a large income is the best recipe for happiness.” The writer described being “daunted by the project of becoming my ideal self” but having found the cure in an older, richer husband, who taught her how to live, to behave, and provided for their life. She watched her friends’ relationships with pity: “If you’re equal in all things, you compromise in all things.” The piece elicited both rage and praise – some defended her for playing the patriarchy, others attacked her for falling for it.

Like Christie, Austen recognizes that in these constraints, there is freedom — or at least, the performance of it. Elizabeth Bennet says no to a wealthy idiot and yes to a haughty, emotionally stunted aristocrat. Emma meddles and is corrected. Anne Elliot gets a second chance. The novels contain, over and over again, the fantasy that a character can transcend material reality. But unlike Christie, for Austen’s women, this is their only option.

The idea of transforming oneself through marriage, money, a job — take your pick — is so concrete an American fantasy, that I’ve found it’s only here that people radically “pursue happiness actively, as Americans believe it their right to do,” to borrow from Zadie Smith. It’s the fantasy that drives Austen’s Emma Woodhouse, who decides to begin “the very kind undertaking” of transforming a less becoming woman to up her standing in society. Austen warns us, of course, that “happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance,” but that doesn’t mean her characters can’t try. They move within the limited scope available to any woman in their day; and as far as finding “happiness,” the notion of falling in love was a pretty good start.

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How Jane Austen makes fools of her fans

By Tanya Gold

Virginia Woolf, in her essay “Indiscretions,” written in 1924 for Vogue, noted the impossibility of loving Austen appropriately. “We needs must adore,” she wrote, “but she does not want it; she wants nothing; our love is a by-product, an irrelevance; with that mist or without it her moon shines on.” Woolf, characteristically, was half-merciless and half-right. Austen, who lived her adult life in a small house with her mother and sister, now presides, at least paranormally, over a cultural empire whose currency is romantic transformation. She is the patron saint of witty heterosexual courtship, and she is utterly absent from it.

But the courtship she presides over, combined with this sense of American optimization, means that Austen’s charming directions toward love land off their mark here. The hyper-individualist is always transforming: confronted with Equinox ads to “want it all,” to preempt their wrinkles with Botox, to meditate into transcendence while working into oblivion. But Austen knows, even when we try to change everything around us; it doesn’t do the trick, “it must be from within.” It’s why those who have examined her narrative prose in detail, know that she makes no promises. When I watched The New Yorker’s literary critic, Merve Emre, being asked for advice, she knew to quip: “Honestly? Marry rich.” Whether or not serious, it’s still a truth universally acknowledged.

What Austen understood, and her American readers often prefer to forget, is that the ending is never guaranteed. She is a patron saint of love who leaves her characters behind on the altar. Happiness, like love, is provisional. And narrative is only ever an attempt to make peace with that.

Alderton’s version, tellingly directed by Euros Lyn, responsible for the school-romance slop Heartstopper, promises to be “both familiar and fresh” with its cast of “hilarious and complicated characters”, and will star Olympic moper Emma Corrin, Jack Lowden (who he?), and everyone’s Favorite period drama doyenne Olivia Colman. Commenters scoff that the novel’s adaptation has already been perfected — twice. They beg Netflix to look to other Austens, perhaps forgetting that their last, disastrous attempt in 2022, Persuasion, saw Dakota Johnson blunder her way through as lovelorn, headstrong spinster Anne Elliot, with Fleabag rip-off winks at the camera and a conceit which tried to ram modern dating into a world of phaetons and ponies. It was broadly hated, a condescending CliffsNotes parody which approached Austen’s era as irreverently, and far less comically, as Blackadder II did the Elizabethans. Perhaps the question is less “do we still get Austen” than “are we trusted to understand her”.

The pressure to get period drama right is immense. Netflix’s announcement has been partly overshadowed by horror at long lens set images from Emerald Fennel’s Wuthering Heights. Jacob Elordi, as Heathcliff, has sideburns and a gold tooth; Margot Robbie, who fans have pointed out is nearly two decades older than Cathy Earnshaw, looks more than a little goth rock, with more décolletage on display than might have been acceptable at a 19th-century wake. But these details are calculated to perturb; we know Fennel will have the last laugh, being already well known for pulling off unexpected casting and clashing aesthetics. And, crucially, she is not known for the biggest possible crime of the cinematic adapter: being sentimentally wet. She, at least, will not handle this precious material with timidity, nor use it as a vehicle to funnel insipid romance, or patronizing lessons about girlpower, down audience’s gullets. She will trust us to go along for the ride. And she will probably use a bit of Kate Bush.

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Andrea Dworkin was right about men

By Poppy Sowerby

The fact is, as Alderton and Fennel will soon find out, you cannot win in a battle with purists — nor do they make up the bulk of general audiences anyway. The most outraged critics will be die-hard fans of other film or TV adaptations, not readers — they gave up the battle for verisimilitude long ago. How many people have actually read these novels? Increasingly, Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights share sainted status as two teen-girl favorites which only happen to have started life as novels.

An unbearably depressing investigation in The Atlantic last year revealed the extent of Gen Z’s declining readership, surveying professors from elite universities in the US who confessed to paring down their syllabuses to extracts and summaries so as to retain the dwindling attention of students. One Columbia don described undergraduates from 20 years earlier reading Pride and Prejudice and Crime and Punishment in successive weeks; now this rate and complexity “feels impossible”. Students have become unused to the feelings of boredom or confusion or quiet contemplation; extended quotations now baffle them, as does a knotty “overall plot”.

You can see the problem with material like Austen’s; she is a writer who stacks clause upon clause, sometimes confronting us with sentences which span entire pages. To return to her after watching any recent film adaptation is to find oneself in the weeds of a sometimes chapter-long discourse on etiquette and morality; her greatest talents — wit and warmth — are accessible only to readers willing and able to deal with a barrage of subordinate clauses. Her writing is sumptuous intellectually, not visually; imagery is strictly secondary to an attendance to social quandaries. For a generation force-fed on a glut of rapid-fire visual media, this is unappealing.

There is now an intellectual ocean between those who regularly read and those who do not; one is trained in difficulty, empathy, and the power to imagine — the other, whose refuge is probably social media, has a dearth of all three. Surface-level takes on Austen’s heroines see them as a gallery of already-perfected women waiting for a love match; far from it, in the novels they are frequently jealous, capricious, and hampered by prejudice. But this can only be understood by following their internal worlds through close reading.

Publishing houses aren’t helping matters. Earlier this year, Puffin announced a series of new Austen editions to appeal to young romance readers, with cartoon covers and taglines promising “meet-cutes, missed connections and drama”. The characters are illustrated with pink hair, choppy bobs, and cat-eye winged eyeliner. Puffin seems to assume that readers won’t be interested unless they can directly identify with the protagonist — does she look like me, does her suitor resemble a musician I fancy. Where this has worked (Clueless, 10 Things I Hate about You), modern scripts have mirrored, in a different time, the sharp brilliance of the original. Plonking a cartoon from Heartstopper on an unchanged Georgian text will only highlight Gen Z’s illiteracy, and its understanding that romance books — “smut” — serve only for titillation.

But don’t grind the printing presses to a halt just yet: there is still one demographic we might solidly rely on to shore up the publishing industry. For many a young man in search of companionship has been known to dabble in a bit of good old-fashioned performative reading; now that the sun has returned, I challenge you to go to any cafe, pub or park and not find a thirsty, tote-bag-brandishing, bescarfed berk in little square sunglasses. How often is he turning a page? How often is he looking about, ruffling that floppy hair, angling his pristine volume so that the girls by the window can’t help but notice the word “DIDION”?

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The literary man isn’t dead

By Matthew Sini

I must say I respect the hustle of performative reading — but it is no amateur’s game. For the regrettable entirety of one liaison of mine, a man carried around a translation of Candide — a novella approximately the same length as Mog the Forgetful Cat. He never did get round to finishing that slim-volume babe magnet; never once, as summer became winter, did I witness him even open it. Its job, it seemed, was to sit face-up on a pub table. God knows women fake lots of things, but reading isn’t one of them. You’re not a vibe bro. If you must read performatively, make sure you at least read.

That may be our only hope; such is the reality of the dreary intellectual environment which awaits Dolly Alderton as she prepares to revamp Pride and Prejudice. If we’re still buying books, it’s only because of a honeytrap cartoon cover or because we’re café-dwelling faux-intellectual horndogs.

In such a dire situation, the big question is whether Alderton can keep intact Austen’s unique and brilliant observational style; as Netflix learned to its cost with Persuasion, what it should absolutely avoid is patronizing audiences by dumbing this quality down. If reading imparts the ability to imagine, to empathize, then its desecration by more compelling distractions — TikTok, or the fast and frenetic shots of reality TV — should not have panicking producers scrambling to flatter young readers’ desire to see themselves reflected in every novel in order to like it. It might be more difficult than ever to impress viewers with erudition, but with someone like Austen you have a duty to try.

Jane Austen is not a great writer. There’s as good an argument for putting Jilly Cooper or Joanna Trollope on our £10 note – or perhaps even a better argument. Of course, the Jane-ites – ghastly phrase, ghastly cult – will combust to hear it and I am happy to give them something with which fill their days. I hate all writers’ cults – imagine gathering to sing a hymn to individualism with one voice – but the Jane-ites are the most deranged. They gather in Bath – a vast, Georgian Cath Kidston emporium – and dress up as Elizabeth Bennett and talk nonsense about bonnets.

Even so, she sits there serene and prettified on her bank note: a titan of literature, the greatest female English novelist with her six fat novels. Like hell she is. I can think of at least five novelists I like better: only two of them are Brontës, and only one of them a drunk. Even so, she is now immortalised as currency, which is not something a writer should aspire to. But I get it. She doesn’t rock the boat, Jane. She doesn’t know there’s a boat.

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The inescapable misogyny of the modern world

By Tanya Gold

What did she write about? You already know, because her work has been on every English syllabus since syllabuses existed. But I will remind you. A yearning for marriage among upper-middle class women – a sort of very stylised Napoleonic Cosmopolitan featuring Elizabeth, Emma, Marianne, Catherine, Fanny, Anne and Elinor. You might say there is nothing wrong with that, and there isn’t. But if you argue that Austen is a great novelist, how can you forgive her choosing – and it was obviously a choice – to ignore the great themes?

Austen would swim to New York to avoid a great theme. She writes as if emotion – emotion – might contaminate her. She burrows, instead, into picnics and tea parties and balls. She is very interested in property, too: a modern Jane Austen would surely spend a lot of time on Rightmove. She touches on pain – her minor characters (Miss Bates, Mrs Collins, even Mrs Bennett) are the most interesting people in her books. But just as she gets interesting, she flees from the subject again. It’s too interesting.

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Marianne gets Brandon. Elinor gets Edward. Jane gets Charles. Always a happy ending, just like with the Mr Men. These endings are so finite they feel like death, not marriage. Even Persuasion, the closest she came to a masterpiece – it had the most pain because Anne was 27 (27!) – got its happy ending. It’s the happiest ending of all.

Want Austen to write about unhappiness, degradation, despair? She wouldn’t. And so she isn’t a great novelist. Her strivings are petty. Charlotte Bronte understood her. She said she had no heart. I would go further: I would say she had no energy. I would call her mainstream, and the BBC drama department agrees.

Austen was writing at the end of the Enlightenment. She was educated and informed. Yet her acknowledgment of the existence of slavery, for instance, was to have Sir Thomas Bertram return from his estates in Antigua. Did he have a mistress, did he beat his slaves, was Lady Bertram an opium-eater? These are all good questions, and she doesn’t answer them. She doesn’t even ask them.

Instead, she has Bertram rage that his children are performing a play. She didn’t just ignore the great themes, then. She fled screaming from them. Is that excusable in a female novelist, and only in a female novelist? It would seem so. The passion for Austen is misogyny. Bonnets are a great theme in female hands, and only in female hands. 

More from the series

Slaying dragons: Britain's national religion, the NHS

By Nigel Cameron

Then there is the impact she had on her readers. I will ignore the Jane-ites – they are not literary critics, they are re-enactors. An intelligent woman reads Austen and hears, under sediments of ribbon, the anguish of powerlessness. It is muted, but it is there. Austen should make anyone a feminist. But due to her artifice, generations of women instead drool over Fitzwilliam Darcy – and his big house. She makes modern, enlightened women think they want to live in Hampshire in the 18th century, and that is unforgivable. She actually makes her readers stupider.

She did write the perfect sentence, as a Hampstead Jane-ite once told me.  And it’s true. They are music, but still I don’t forgive; rather, I find it unforgiveable that such glorious cadences should be in the service of something so meaningless.

So Austen is my dragon. Except she wasn’t as exciting as a dragon, and I wouldn’t get to slay her, for she would just melt away. I have read her all my life for – and all I dream of now, in middle-age is – the novelist she could have been.

It began as a bit of office fun, a competition between colleagues to see who could get the most Twitter followers in a month. And there is no denying it is funny. Every day the account tweets out absurd headlines taken from local newspapers. “Mystery goat tied to post in Maidenhead High Street”, and “Woman taken to hospital after being knocked over by a cow in a field in Hethel”, are two of the more recent offerings. Though my favorite was the breaking news that “a Swansea town council is considering getting a colour photocopier” – imagine being the reporter sent to sleuth around after that one.

Now, I mustn’t get all morally superior about this, because I can’t help but laugh at it too. Nonetheless, there is something about @CrapLocalNews that I find just a little bit too smug – the metropolitan distain of young media trendies sitting in their central London offices poking fun at the dullness of parochial life.

Of course, this has long been a fault-line in English culture since at least the 18th century, with the English novel – Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy etc – continually returning to the divisions between town and country, between the parochial and the cosmopolitan. And it is there much further back too: think, for instance, of the urban snobbery of imperial Rome, the sneering attitude towards the provinces and their lack of cultural sophistication.

Globalisation has done something different to this well-worn theme. Air travel, international markets and a revolution in communications technology has meant that the cultural and economic elite of different regions of the world are able to live and work together, almost irrespective of geography. Just as the global elite become ever closer to each other, also they become increasingly distanced from those who live, as it were, parochially – even when sharing the same geographical space as them.

The word parochial derives from the Latin word for parish, paroecia – the parish being the basic unit of ecclesiological governance in this country since the Archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore of Tarsus, was sent here in the 7th century and revolutionised the structure of local decision-making. Since then, for the last millennium and a half, the church developed and then maintained a parish system in this country, establishing a local parish church and a local parish priest at the very heart of every local community.

But now, if you look up the world parochial in the thesaurus, you find this:

“…narrow-minded, small-minded, provincial, insular, narrow, small-town, inward-looking, limited, restricted, localist, conservative, conventional, short-sighted, petty, closed-minded, blinkered, myopic, introverted, illiberal,  hidebound, intolerant…”

Whereas the local community used to be the principle site of human flourishing, it is now something to escape from. Politicians call it social mobility, and they think it an unalloyed good thing that anyone with any gumption and “get up and go” will do precisely that. If you are born into a strong, thick, traditional community, if you come from somewhere provincial and parochial, it has become almost a duty to yourself to leave such places to go and find your way in the world. In the world of liberal individualism, deracination becomes a moral obligation. It is the price of individual flourishing.

Somewheres prefer the way things look now... a bit manky,

Why the so-called 'somewheres' hold so tightly to tradition

By Graeme Archer

Back in 2003 and 2004, The Idler magazine website invited its readers to nominate Britain’s “crappest” towns. Hull won in 2003 and Luton in 2004. These become the places from which young people especially are encouraged to escape. Luton-born Safraz Manzoor had it exactly right when he wrote about the resulting book:

“There is an air of unmistakable snobbery around the people behind such a book; the stench of rich kids having fun at the expense of those less able to afford to be professionally idle.”

As a parish priest for over 20 years, my commitment has always been to the parochial. Yet as a journalist, I inhabit newsrooms where the flow of information is constant, where things move fast and the reality of world events is ever-present. The fantasy of such places is that, because of their hyper-connectivity, they have their noses pressed up hard against reality.

Perhaps the most important thing about Brexit is that it has revealed this disconnect and forced us all to face it. Sunderland (third crappest town in the UK in 2004, according to The Idler survey) led the charge on 23 June 2016. This was the much maligned and unheard voice of the parochial.

But there are still those who will not listen. That Lot was co-founded by the actor and comedian David Schneider in 2003. He’s a funny, talented guy. And he is good at poking fun – that’s his job. He recently tweeted: “I’m off on a short Twitterbreak to write a telly thing about Brexit. It’s a farce with loads of really bleak humour. And so is the telly thing.”

His twitter account is a continual flow of jokes about Brexiters and how stupid they are. It reflects the easy moral superiority of the globally networked media existence, and the laughter of those who look down upon the parochial as little more that a source of crap local news. Little wonder people are so angry.