Warisan Berkekalan Jane Austen

28 Jan 2013, menandakan ulang tahun ke-200 penerbitan Novel, Kebanggaan dan Prasangka yang paling disukai Jane Austen, dan dua abad selepas kemunculan novel ini, banyak peminat Elizabeth Bennet dan Mr. Darcy — dan Austen sendiri — adalah bersedia untuk berpesta dalam perayaan sepanjang tahun. Media, akademi, dan perpustakaan tempatan di seluruh Amerika Syarikat dan Inggeris telah menaja festival Regency dan acara bertema Austen lain sekurang-kurangnya sejak 1995, ketika BBC TV miniseri Pride and Prejudice memulai selebriti pascamoden Austen yang luar biasa.

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Lebih dari 200 tahun penghargaan untuk novelis dan karyanya telah meningkat beberapa kali menjadi popular vogues. Memoir keponakannya Jane Austen (1870) menunjukkan minatnya secara peribadi, dan pada tahun 1890-an novel-novel itu diterbitkan semula — Kebanggaan dan Prasangka yang paling mewah — dengan ilustrasi menarik oleh Hugh Thomson. Pada abad ke-20 peminat baru menemui Austen melalui MGM's Pride and Prejudice (1940), yang dibintangi oleh Laurence Olivier dan Greer Garson. Bermula pada tahun 1990-an, tayangan ulang filem itu dan versi baru yang dibuat untuk layar lebar dan untuk televisyen mencipta penonton baru yang sangat meminati semua perkara yang dipadukan oleh Austen dengan pujaan romantis dengan keakraban, penghinaan, dan juga ejekan.

Novel itu sendiri menjadi roti bakar musim London pada tahun 1813 ketika Annabella Milbanke, wanita muda yang bersungguh-sungguh dan cerdas segera menikah dengan penyair Lord Byron, menganggapnya "karya yang sangat unggul," fiksyen "paling mungkin" yang pernah dia baca. (Dia sangat mengagumi Mr. Darcy.) Sejak cetakan, ia mempengaruhi kehidupan dan bahasa, serta impian dan aspirasi, generasi pembaca dan penulis. Boleh dikatakan sekuel Austen pertama - menyemak semula, memfokuskan kembali, dan menyempurnakan plot pacaran dari enam novel terbitannya, Sense and Sensibility (1811) - Kebanggaan dan Prasangka terus menghasilkan versi dan variasi dan menjaga nama pengarang, yang tidak diketahui dalam hidupnya, di pusat perhatian.

In 2013 a mixed lot of books and films targeted the segment of the book-buying public sometimes referred to as “Janeiacs.” The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things by biographer Paula Byrne was published in January, and in April an unusual study by political scientist Michael Chwe praised Austen as a pioneer of game theory. Meanwhile, self-mocking self-help books, fan fictions, parodies, and books about Austen’s fandom continued to glut the market. Moviegoers anticipated an upcoming new version of Persuasion (published posthumously in 1817), as well as Death Comes to Pemberley, an adaptation of a 2011 sequel to Pride and Prejudice by the crime novelist P.D. James. Austenland (2013), based on a 2007 novel about giddy antics at a Jane Austen theme park, was already drawing fans to cinemas. On television a vlog, Emma Approved, was forthcoming from the makers of another successful vlog, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (2012).

Scholarly celebrations in 2013 included a conference at the University of Cambridge, while at Chawton House Library in Hampshire, Eng., an international conference on women’s writing of the “long 18th century” was entitled “Pride and Prejudices.” Aficionados of costume, country dancing, and romance could attend an Austen summer camp in Connecticut; the yearly Jane Austen Festival in Bath, Eng.; the Grand Jane Austen Ball in Nürnberg, Ger.; or gatherings in Pittsburgh, Hyde Park, Vt., and Canberra, Australia.

Despite the international interest, there was some insistence on Austen’s being still, in Rudyard Kipling’s phrase, “England’s Jane.” The U.K. in February issued six stamps illustrating the six novels (four stamps were issued for the Jane Austen bicentennial in 1975). In early July a 3.7-m (12-ft) statue of actor Colin Firth, the Mr. Darcy of the 1995 miniseries, rose from a lake in London’s Hyde Park to promote Drama, a digital TV channel dedicated to British programs. The fibreglass figure, according to a spokesman, represented more than that production’s most celebrated scene (which Austen never wrote): “We’ve got a wet shirt on him, we’ve got sideburns. He’s portraying many of the Darcys that have appeared over the years in film and TV adaptations.” In a quieter move, Ed Vaizey, the British minister of culture, barred the export of a ring that had belonged to Austen, which the American singer Kelly Clarkson had bought at an auction in 2012 for £152,450 (about $237,000). Finally, the Bank of England chose Austen to “grace” the new £10 note. The sketch of Austen on the proposed bill provoked protests from the faithful, who argued that the likeness used is a deliberately prettified portrait, that the big house portrayed is her brother’s, and that the “Austen” maxim recommending reading quotes Caroline Bingley, a character who only pretends to read. Skeptics asked, Will the new bill misrepresent Austen as the for-profit Jane Austen industry so often has done?

Since 1995 “Jane Austen” has been—in addition to a “classic” writer’s name—a commercially successful brand and a contested signifier, widely understood to mean upper-class English attitudes and values, “high” culture and English literature, and nostalgia for a prettier, simpler world. Ironically, especially for people who have not actually read her novels, the Austen “brand” has also represented scorn for all of the above, as well as romance (with a leer) in tight trousers and plunging décolletage.

The story of dowerless Elizabeth Bennet (no beauty), who snags Darcy and his beautiful grounds at Pemberley, has merged over the years with the equally improbable story of the country parson’s spinster daughter who wrote six small novels about decorous virgins and—after dying poor and obscure—became a household word. Narratives akin to Pride and Prejudice about poor but clever girls who get transformed into “something,” as Elizabeth puts it, are tales of wishes fulfilled, society turned on its head, and, in the end, virtue and love conquering all. By the middle of the 18th century, Englishwomen such as Eliza Haywood, Charlotte Lennox, and Fanny Burney and the Anglo-Irish Maria Edgeworth were writing romantic narratives that combined domestic comedy and social satire. Pride and Prejudice, when it appeared, was not new, merely superior—written in “the best chosen language.” Readers were delighted to recognize Elizabeth and Darcy and their embarrassing relatives as literary types and interesting individuals; moving in and out of her characters’ minds, the witty narrator of their story made them probable, plausible (as people said), and realistic.

William Dean Howells claimed that he could feel the fresh winds of revolutionary democracy sweeping through the love story of Elizabeth Bennet, whose happy marriage forces the well-born Darcy to accept as his relatives not only her vulgar mother and sister Lydia but also Wickham, who was the son of Darcy’s father’s steward and had tried to seduce Darcy’s sister. If it is hard to do a political reading of Austen’s “light, and bright, and sparkling” second published novel, it is equally hard to read it as apolitical. It is, rather, at once conventional and revolutionary, romantic and antiromantic, meta-Romantically—and delightfully—divided. Its deepest moral message may be to avoid self-seriousness.

“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?” feckless Mr. Bennet asks. If it is not the moral of the story, it is not a point to be dismissed. To submit to being laughed at by the neighbours and to anticipate laughing back is the basis for modern democratic comedy, as opposed to courtly comedy in which the jester trades places with the king. Toward the end of her story, Elizabeth reflects that Darcy “had yet to learn to be laught at”; we, as readers, understand that under her tutelage he will learn that. The reader learns to laugh a little at Darcy as well. Austen’s irony attracts us still, but her balance and poise often elude readers—driving some people to the grotesque excesses of sweetening her stories into banality or scrawling virtual graffiti on her image.

Two hundred years after Pride and Prejudice was published, it speaks to a culture that is often ambivalent about both love and literature and is simultaneously nostalgic for tradition and disdainful of it (one favour distributed at a Jane Austen conference was, reportedly, a lacy thong). Jane Austen’s books remain more readable than those of most of her predecessors, contemporaries, and even her snappiest imitators. Informed by a rich tradition of plays, novels, satires, and romances, Austen’s genius is still legibly extraordinary.