In Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle (1949), the heroine Cassandra is asked by her sister Rose, ‘Did you think of anything when Miss Marcy said Scoatney Hall was being re-opened? I thought of the beginning of Pride and Prejudice.’1 So too have many other writers, adapters, and fans of Jane Austen in a variety of circumstances and contexts, but they have not confined themselves to the beginning of Austen’s most famous novel: they have ranged over almost everything she wrote. There seems to be no end to the ways in which readers, viewers, and the general public want to engage with Jane Austen, be it Amy Heckerling’s film Clueless, which transplants Emma to Los Angeles, or the annual Regency ball at Chatsworth, for which guests are invited to dress as Austen characters.2 It is true that Pride and Prejudice dominates, particularly as it was brought to the screen in the 1995 BBC adaptation written by Andrew Davies. For instance, in Pride and Platypus, billed as being by ‘Jane Austen and Vera Nazarian’, Mr Darcy is a platypus so often that he has a wet shirt,3 a clear reference to the iconic image of Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy emerging from the lake. Mr Darcy has told his own story at least three times,4 the Bennet family’s servants have had theirs told in Jo Baker’s Longbourn,5 and the central love story of Pride and Prejudice has been co-opted for various dubiously erotic retellings.6 Both Austen’s characters and Austen herself have turned detective,7 and Austen has also become an action figure and a vampire,8 while Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies does what it says on the tin.9 Even such a list as this, various and multifarious as it is, by no means exhausts the reuses and reworkings of Austen on screen and in print, and there are also numerous self-published fan fiction responses to Austen and her novels. I do not think she has been to outer space yet, but it is surely only a matter of time.
However, Austen is also a contested figure. In January 2014, two twitter trolls were convicted of making rape threats against the feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez after she had persuaded the Bank of England to put Jane Austen on bank notes. Although it seems to have been feminism in general rather than Austen in particular which triggered the trolls’ ire, it is still striking that the image of Austen can arouse such vitriol. Austen’s image has also proved controversial in other respects too. When Wordsworth Editions decided to produce a ‘deluxe’ edition of her works, managing director Helen Trayler was worried that
There have been other, less strident but still striking, attempts to reshape the general public’s perception of Austen’s appearance. Both the owners of the Rice portrait and also Austen’s biographer Paula Byrne, who was given a putative portrait of the author by her husband, the critic Jonathan Bate, remain committed to securing acceptance of the authenticity of their respective images,11 and in December 2013 James Andrews’ watercolour version of the sketch by Austen’s sister Cassandra fetched £164,500 at auction. From banknotes to book sales to picture values, determining what Jane Austen looked like is worth money. The issue of her appearance also implicitly raises other questions: does she conform to society’s expectation that women should curate how they look to please and appease men, or does she inherently challenge that expectation by the cool, ironic gaze she levels at Regency society?The poor old thing didn’t have anything going for her in the way of looks. Her original portrait is very, very dowdy. It wouldn’t be appealing to readers, so I took it upon myself to commission a new picture of her. We’ve given her a bit of a makeover, with make-up and some hair extensions and removed her nightcap. Now she looks great – as if she’s just walked out of a salon.10
Discussing the so-called Byrne Portrait and the BBC programme about it, Deborah Kaplan argues that it was a mistake on the part of the programme-makers to assume ‘that readers derive a sense of what Austen looked like only from visual representations. The program reveals instead that Austen’s novels and letters and even her family members’ reminiscences and scholars’ biographies and literary criticism enable readers to develop impressions – call them fantasies – of what she looked like.’12 Readers also form views about Austen characters, which may colour their responses to screen adaptations in particular, and the prevalence and nature of Austen fan fiction shows that many readers could indeed be said to have fantasies about Austen characters. The chapters in this collection are all in various ways about how Jane Austen looked at things and how others have looked at her. They also touch on the question of her monetary value, since any appropriation of Austen is predicated on the acknowledgement that she sells. Before considering them, though, I want first to look at the biopic Becoming Jane (dir. Julian Jarrold, 2007), because it helps us think about both what Austen was and what she might have been, which are the two things implicit in all adaptations and appropriations of her.
Becoming Jane is centrally concerned with the two topics of looks and money, but it uncouples them. The film implicitly intervenes in the debate over Austen’s appearance by its casting of Anne Hathaway as Austen. To a certain extent, this served its general and commendable commitment to a reasonable degree of factual accuracy. Hathaway made a determined effort to get to grips with the part, noting that she ‘moved to a village in England for the month before shooting began. “I lived in a house and had tea every day,” she says…“And I learned how to speak in a British accent. On certain days, I would go off and explore, and pretend to be British, and try to pass.” She also ate Marmite’ (not so much method acting as method eating, perhaps).13 Hathaway’s desire for authenticity was completely in line with a general aspiration to accuracy on the part of the film, whose script pays careful attention to Jon Spence’s biography of Austen, Becoming Jane Austen (later relaunched as simply Becoming Jane).14 The film is careful to give a credible view of the constraints of a young woman’s life—when Tom calls out ‘Miss’, Jane attempts to walk on and says ‘I am alone’ and explains that she therefore cannot talk to him because of ‘the rules’. It also makes an effort to give a sense, however attenuated, of Austen’s literary heritage in the shape of her encounter with Mrs Radcliffe, and it indicates the key role that letters played in Austen’s life (and in our knowledge of her): we see a letter of hers to Cassandra, suitably ‘crossed’; the Judge exclaims, ‘This letter makes it absolutely clear’; and a letter reveals Tom’s family’s dependence on him.
Although in many ways it models itself on Shakespeare in Love (dir. John Madden, 1998), Shakespeare’s life is ‘mysterious’—and anyway Shakespeare in Love has no qualms about inventing Viola de Lesseps entirely from scratch, with nothing more than her first name to go on (any similarity to the engineer of the Suez Canal is presumably coincidental). Jane Austen’s life is much better documented, and few of those likely to want to see this film can be expected to be ignorant of the fact that she never married (the title of Miss Austen Regrets [dir. Jeremy Lovering, 2007] openly acknowledges this). One of the results of this sustained interest in the actual facts of Austen’s life (or at least in some of them) is that the film bravely showcases Jane’s arguably two most surprising relatives: George, who is the first of her brothers to be introduced, and her cousin Eliza, who follows immediately afterwards. Eliza was the daughter of Philadelphia Austen, sister of Jane Austen’s father George, who was sent out to India in order to find a husband, and this she duly did, marrying an Englishman named Tysoe Saul Hancock, but her only child, Eliza, may in fact have been the daughter of Warren Hastings, first Governor-General of Bengal, who certainly always took an interest in the girl and after whom Eliza named her only child, Hastings de Feuillide, whose father was a French count guillotined during the Revolution. That Jane Austen should have a cousin who was a French countess may not seem very likely, but it was indeed so, and in fact the connection between them became even closer when the widowed Eliza married Austen’s brother Henry. As for George, he is a much more obscure figure because, as the film makes clear, he appears to have suffered from at least one form of disability and so was always kept in the shadows. The only hint in Jane’s letters of what was amiss is an unrelated remark incidentally revealing that she apparently knew some form of sign language,15 which she had presumably learned in order to communicate with George, as she is seen doing in Becoming Jane; other possible clues are to be found in letters from her parents, one written by her mother mentioning that he suffered from fits and one by her father expressing gladness: ‘we have this comfort, he cannot be a bad or a wicked child’, which presumably implies mental incapacity.16 As Patricia Ard has pointed out, George was in fact sent permanently away from the family at some point in his childhood and has therefore been either briefly passed over or totally ignored in many biographies of Austen17; in Becoming Jane, though, he is a recurrent presence. To make George and Eliza such prominent members of the Austen family throws emphasis onto its social and economic precariousness and vulnerability: George, incapable of earning, had to be supported throughout his life first by his parents and then by his siblings; Eliza lost her husband to the guillotine, her only child (also mentally disabled) died young, and her probable father, Warren Hastings, saw his career brought to an ignominious end when he was impeached, something which the Austen family always bitterly resented. Along with the death of Cassandra’s fiancé, the stress on George and Eliza makes it clear that this is a family which must struggle in order to survive, and that Jane cannot simply disregard material considerations.
The inclusion of George also arguably softens the sense that the film’s ending is solely and necessarily an unhappy one. Yes, Jane’s romance with Tom Lefroy is thwarted, but the fact that so close a relation of Austen’s suffers so obviously from a disability makes us realise that not all marriages produce happy, healthy offspring, and this is underlined by Lady Gresham’s remark that she herself has no children. Lefroy’s reference to White’s The Natural History of Selborne may also remind us that Jane Austen lived at the very beginning of the period when natural history was starting to yield intimations of extinction, and she seems to have had some interest in the topic. When her brother Frank was in Sweden she asked him ‘Gustavus-Vasa (sic), & Charles 12th, & Christiana (sic), & Linneus (sic) – do their Ghosts rise up before You?’18 Three of those are monarchs, and it is not surprising to find an interest in them from someone who had already written about kings and queens, but the fourth, Linnaeus, is famous for his classifications of species. There may just conceivably have...