When Jane Austen started writing in 1787, she could never have anticipated the crowd of New Yorkers in Lululemon leggings who lined up outside an East Village cinema on a recent evening, awaiting a screening of Jane Austen Wrecked My Life. The film, a confection of Austen-lite motifs — clever women, complicated suitors, inevitable reconciliations — wasn’t surprising in its content. But the effect was memorable: it summoned a congregation — a testament to the fact that America has rebranded Austen into a pastel prophet of self-optimization.
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.
A few months after I moved to America, a sweet friend invited me to her 25th birthday. There, at her apartment in New Haven, 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.
“Austen offers a sanitized simulation of aristocracy: just enough status anxiety to titillate, never enough to threaten.”
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.
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.
