Once dismissed as the writer of demure dramas in drawing rooms, Jane Austen has never been more popular — or considered more relevant. Joanna Wane asks why Kiwis just can’t get enough of her.
Ever heard of the 1810 Clerkenwell diamond robbery? Jane Austen, a renowned brandy smuggler and master spy, was the brains behind it. Apparently, she knocked out a few novels in her spare time, as well.
More than two centuries after her death, at the age of 41, Austen’s status as a pop-culture icon has never been more pervasive. Her latest reinvention, as a swashbuckling bad-ass in the TV series Good Omens, turns the trope of a fluffy chic-lit writer on its head.
To the demon Crowley, played by a deliciously louche David Tennant, Austen was a ballsy criminal mastermind, while the angel Aziraphale (Michael Sheen) — who owns an antiquarian bookshop in London — has first editions of her collected works on the shelf. Both are big Austen fanboys, although for very different reasons.
The show’s Austen throwbacks don’t end there. In another episode, Aziraphale stages a ball straight out of Pride and Prejudice because he thinks all it takes is a spot of cotillion dancing for humans to confront their true feelings and realise they’ve fallen in love. It works, of course.
To gauge the Regency writer’s cachet in the 21st century, look no further than the famous white linen shirt Colin Firth dripped in so fetchingly as Darcy in the BBC drama inspired by her most-beloved book — the gateway drug for many Austen fans. In March, it sold at auction for £20,000 ($41,800).
A “deep dive” into Darcy’s shirt was one of the topics put under the microscope at last year’s Virtual JaneCon, an online convention dedicated to all things Austen, which also held a session on whether Austen was classist (see Emma, adapted by our own Eleanor Catton in 2020). Bonnets at Dawn, which began as an Austen v Bronte podcast, ran for six seasons and hatched a Facebook discussion group. Pride and Prejudice even gets a satirical nod from Greta Gerwig in Barbie.
Kiwis also remain firmly in the grip of Austen fever, with three adaptations of her work set to open in Wellington. Next week, a chamber production of Mansfield Park by NZ Opera, featuring Kiwi singers Robert Tucker and Kristin Darragh as Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, tours Wellington and Auckland. A season of Persuasion — Austen’s final completed novel — is on at Stagecraft Theatre in May. Then Auckland-based comedian/actor/writer Penny Ashton directs her own witty take on Sense and Sensibility at Circa in July, with a cast of six women playing 24 roles.
Perhaps best known for her saucy one-woman musical Promise & Promiscuity, Ashton has been immersing herself in the world of Austen since 2008, when she developed her first improv Regency riff, Austen Found. Since then, she’s “romped all over the world” with her shows.
Over the past few years, she’s given a talk at the University of British Columbia about Austen in adaptation and lunched in Adelaide with “Janeites” (as the writer’s most passionate fans are called). She’s visited Austen’s house in the English village of Chawton, where Pride and Prejudice was written, and teared up at her grave in Winchester Cathedral. When she performed at the Jane Austen Festival in Bath, where two of Austen’s novels are set, people in the audience wore period dress. That happens when she’s on stage in Palmerston North and Invercargill, too.
Recently, Ashton was hired as part of the entertainment for a themed birthday party. “She [the birthday girl] has a master’s in English literature so that’s the kind of fiercely intelligent women who love a little bit of fond skewering,” she says. “There’s a lot of maligning of women who love Austen, whereas because Jane Austen was an intelligent, clever, hilarious, sarcastic woman, that tends to be the fan as well.”
Bizarrely, Ashton’s fifth great uncle is a distant relative of Thomas Langlois Lefroy, an “Irish friend” of Austen’s who’s been described as the love of her life and may have inspired the character of Darcy. In the fictionalised feature film Becoming Jane, he’s played by James McAvoy, opposite Anne Hathaway. Despite receiving at least one proposal, in her late 20s, Austen never married — a radical choice at the time — preferring to retain her independence.
Austen’s skill and depth as a writer can’t be underestimated, says Ashton, who believes her acute powers of observation and shrewd insights into human psychology are just as relevant today. By her bed is a much-thumbed book titled A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Reasons Why We Can’t Stop Reading Jane Austen. Among the high-brow writers featured are Martin Amis, CS Lewis, JB Priestley, AS Byatt, Fay Weldon and Virginia Woolf. New York writer Fran Lebowitz, known for own sardonic social commentary on modern life, is also a fan. Yet Austen had only been a published author for six years before she died.
There’s a catch in Ashton’s voice when she talks about that. “I’m quite invested because she’s so maligned for writing about ‘women’s stuff’. Somebody once asked me if I wanted a show to be called a romantic comedy and I bristled. I mean, she pioneered a new style of [free indirect] narrative; she’s a massive blockbuster seller. It’s the patriarchy in such stark fashion.”
Currently on tour with her Shakespeare-inspired solo musical The Tempestuous, Ashton thinks Austen’s work has such enduring popularity because it’s not just about the search for love, but also for security. “Sense and Sensibility is all about housing insecurity and the wage gap after you’re widowed, and that’s massively relevant today. The amount of money women have in retirement now is still vastly less [than men]. In many ways, her life was so tragic. But the thing is, if she’d married and had children, we might not have had these stories.”
Austen’s reframing as a social and political subversive beyond the parlour room has gained traction in recent years, inspiring UK academic Helena Kelly’s book, The Secret Radical (not to mention a flurry of memes during lockdown). Reflecting the stifling structure of society at the time, her books aren’t classic feminist texts but champion female characters who press for greater agency in their lives and challenge gender norms. More than 30 million copies of her seven novels have been sold worldwide.
American philosopher Cornell West has said that if Austen were alive today, she’d belong to the Occupy movement and be a radical out on the streets. ”If you read her letters and you read between the lines in her books, Austen is a snarky bitch and I love that about her,” says Frances Duncan, who founded the Jane Austen Society of Aotearoa New Zealand (JASANZ) 10 years ago. “She’s such a sharp observer of people.”
Based in Wellington, where she’s training as a life coach, Duncan has written a collection of Austen-inspired short stories, hosts the Amateur Austenite podcast and runs an Austen book club. Recent topics include “Mansplaining in Jane Austen” and whether Darcy might be autistic.
Duncan also hires herself out for writing sessions and private one-on-one conversations. Her most recent hour-long booking focused on the Netherfield ball in Pride and Prejudice and why Lizzie and Darcy end up together, after their initial mutual dislike. On a website for one-star reviews of famous novels, Pride and Prejudice was once dismissed as “people going to other people’s houses”. Duncan reckons that’s like saying The Lord of the Rings is about going on a very long walk.
“Academics love Austen, of course, because of the complexity of her writing. Every time you read her books, there’s so much depth you’ll often find something new. I first read them when I was 13 or 14 and I’m still finding different nuances as my life changes.”
One of Austen’s less popular novels, Mansfield Park, might seem an unusual choice for an opera. Acclaimed British director Rebecca Meltzer, who’s at the helm of its New Zealand debut, has toured sellout seasons of the production in the UK, performed in boutique settings — including an authentic Regency house. When she asked composer Jonathan Dove why he chose to adapt it, he told her that the first time he read Mansfield Park, he heard music.
One of Meltzer’s favourite scenes in the opera, titled “Correspondence”, features multiple performers writing and reading letters, cleverly weaving together their vocal threads. “So you’ve got Maria Bertram tearing her hair out over Henry Crawford, and Mr Rushworth pining after his wife runs away. All these different ideas going on at the same time,” she says. “The opera is very playful and evokes a sense of that world and the charm of it, leaning into the more light-hearted elements without losing sight of the depth.”
Meltzer became such a devoted Austen fan that she started a journal and took up letter writing after seeing the 2005 film of Pride and Prejudice, starring Keira Knightley and Matthew MacFayden (the latter almost unrecognisable as the same man who played Tom Wambsgans in Succession). What resonates most strongly with her is not only the strength of Austen’s women but the relationships between them, something she says no other writer had done so successfully at that time.
“There’s also something about the way all her characters get what they deserve. Their actions have consequences and there’s a very clear trajectory of that in Jane’s writing. We might be living in a completely different world, but we still encounter the same challenges, the same joys, as she would have had with her own family and as her characters do in the books.”
Mansfield Park by NZ Opera is on at Wellington’s Public Trust Hall, April 17-18, and in Auckland at the Settlers Country Manor in Kumeū for two performances on April 21.
5 JANE AUSTEN-INSPIRED ADAPTATIONS
Only four of Austen’s novels were published during her lifetime. But despite her limited back catalogue and a career tragically cut short by an early death, her work has inspired adaptations of almost every kind, from opera productions and Oscar-winning feature films to podcasts and softcore pornography. Here are just five of them:
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
A parody mash-up novel set during a zombie apocalypse in England, it spawned an iPhone app and was later adapted as a feature film starring Lily James and Sam Riley. The thematic sequel, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, pits mankind against giant lobsters and man-eating jellyfish, with Colonel Brandon depicted as a part-man, part-squid mutant. Both books credit Jane Austen as co-author.
The Complete Works of Jane Austen
One of the best-known pieces by Californian artist Meg Cranston, this large inflatable sculpture was designed to contain the amount of air the artist’s lungs would exchange while reading Austen’s life work (100,000 litres). Described by Cranston as “a monument to the impact Austen’s writing had on me”, it featured in an exhibition of her work at Auckland’s Artspace gallery in 2007.
Marrying Mr. Darcy
A strategy card game where each player is a female character from Pride and Prejudice and has to improve their character and attract the attention of available suitors in the hope of marrying well. An Emma expansion and an Undead version of the game are also available.
Sanditon
This racy British costume drama was adapted from an unfinished Austen manuscript by Andrew Davies, the man behind the iconic 1995 Pride and Prejudice film and co-writer of Bridget Jones’s Diary, a modern interpretation of the same book. Set during the Regency era at a seaside resort, Sanditon was described by one reviewer as “good dirty end-of-the-pier fun”. Currently screening on TVNZ+.
Hana Yori Dango/Boys Over Flowers
Pride and Prejudice is translocated to an elite academy for rich kids in modern-day Tokyo in a Japanese manga by Yoko Kamio that was then released as a TV drama series. A Hindi soap opera Kahiin To Hoga (Will be Somewhere), also inspired by Darcy’s entanglement with the Bennet family, ran for 799 episodes in India from 2003 to 2007 and became one of the country’s most popular TV programmes.
• Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior feature writer in the New Zealand Herald’s Lifestyle Premium team, with a special focus on social issues and the arts.