July 18 marks 200 years since the beloved novelist’s death—or, as some of our staff superfans like to say, since Austen achieved immortality. In her honor, we’re hosting a bi-Austen-tennial celebration of essays and reader discussion. Come back every day this week for more questions and responses, and check out the rest of our Austen coverage here.
If Jane Austen were alive today, I like to think she’d be pretty at home on the internet. That eminently judgy narrator of hers would delight in quipping and snarking her way through Twitter and Tumblr—not to mention the fact that so many of the dynamics she observed in Regency-era England continue, even 200 years later, to be just a little too real. As one Tumblr user puts it:
Austen is a relentless observer of her world and its ironies, of her characters’ absurdities and their redeeming graces. Austen analyzes a minor social interaction and sums up the universally acknowledged truths in it—those feelings you could hardly express, much less find funny, until you saw them elegantly summed up in one or two sentences. Austen, in other words, is excellent fodder for memes.
I’ll be honest: I am by no means as well-versed in memes as I am in Jane Austen, although I did write at least two college papers on each of those topics. (Did you know, for example, that “Socially Awkward Penguin epitomizes the inverted self”? I assure you that it does.) But I’m partial to this widely covered series from the writer and blogger KC Kahler: a mash-up of Onion headlines and Austen-adaptation scenes that perfectly captures Austen’s seamless blend of large-scale and small-scale social satire. Juxtaposing text in a crass or clinical tone with gauzy romantic imagery, she addresses broader issues like class and gender dynamics by noting how they play out in everyday awkward moments. Such as this uncomfortable truth that underlies the romance of the well-intentioned-yet-slightly-snobbish matchmaker Emma Woodhouse:
But again, my meme knowledge is limited. So I’m turning to you: What’s your favorite Jane Austen meme? If you’ve created or spotted one that gets at the heart of Austenian humor (or pathos), please share it on Twitter and Instagram with the hashtag #biAustentennial, and we’ll post a roundup of some of our favorites next week.
Maybe you’ll emulate this one from the Tumblr user janeaustentextposts, and wryly critique the economic realities of romance. Or go for the personally relatable, like this one from the Tumblr user whatwouldelizabethbennetdo. Or this one:
“The first rule of Fight Club is: One never mentions Fight Club. No corsets, no hat pins—and no crying.”
That’s Lizzie Bennet, dictating to her fellow fighters the rules that govern an improbable collective: Jane Austen’s Fight Club. The club, portrayed in a viral YouTube video first posted in 2012, features a collection of Jane Austen’s most notable heroines (Lizzie, Fanny, Emma, Elinor, Marianne) slapping each other, hitting each other, kicking each other, swinging off trees, flipping their way over well-manicured lawns, and in general acting like a bunch of punch-drunk characters in a Chuck Palahniuk novel. Except … lady characters. Feminist characters. Characters who, despite being boosted of breast and empired of waist, can totally fend for themselves. “You’re very clever, aren’t you?” an anonymous man asks Lizzie. “How’s that going for you, being clever?”
Lizzie smiles a knowing smile. “Splendidly,” she replies.
Jane Austen’s Fight Club is essentially, as HuffPostsummed it up after its launch, Pride and Prejudice and Punches. It is purposely absurd. It is also undeniably brilliant. It resonates—the original video currently has more than 1.5 million views on YouTube—in large part because it captures something essentially and enduringly true about the worlds Austen’s books portray with such sharp specificity: the belligerence that underscores all the daintiness. The eat-or-be-eaten quality of the early 19th-century marriage market. The Darwinian forces lurking within the most innocent meal, or country ball, or “turn about the room.” Women, in Austen’s novels, are often sisters and friends who truly love each other; they are also cruelly cast as each others’ competitors by a society that values women primarily for their willingness to become wives.
Jane Austen’s Fight Club translates that, cleverly, to a world that congratulates itself for having progressed beyond such reductive views. And it isn’t the only recent work to have done that. The video joined a teeming field of films and TV shows and writings and web videos, from the cheeky to the serious, that have sought to situate Austen’s stories and themes within the drawing rooms of contemporary life.
There was, in 1995, Clueless, which located the story of Emma within Beverly Hills’s Bronson Alcott High School. There was the short-lived TV show that followed it. There was, in 2001, Bridget Jones’s Diary, based on Helen Fielding’s newspaper column, which adapted the themes of Pride and Prejudice to the dating culture of early 21st-century England. There was, in 2004, Bride and Prejudice, a Bollywood-inflected take on the Austen novel’s marriage plot. There was The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, the Emmy-winning, multi-platform series that imagined Pride and Prejudice’s heroine as a grad student—still living at home, still prone to romantic (mis)adventures. There was Austenland, Keri Russell’s 2013 comedy about the misadventures of a woman who spends her vacation at a Pride and Prejudice-themed fantasy camp. There was 2016’s Eligible, the novelist Curtis Sittenfeld’s “modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice.” And there was also, in 2016, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which offered a feature-film take on some of the themes Jane Austen’s Fight Club had explored: fighting, feminism, the hermetically sealed universe of life in Regency England.
Those have come, of course, in addition to the many straight-ahead adaptations of Austen that have sprung up in recent years: multiple versions of Pride and Prejudice, Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility, and the recent Love and Friendship, based on the novella Lady Susan.
With all those—and many others—in mind, we’d love to know: What are your favorite Austen adaptations? You could make a very good case, I think, that Gossip Girl, with its Edith Whartonian antecedents, could also be read, given its omniscient narrator, its stifling setting, and its obsession with class, as a very loose Austen spinoff. Or you could stan for 2007’s Becoming Jane, the gauzy Austen biopic starring Anne Hathaway. Or for Death Comes to Pemberley—the novel or the miniseries. Or for one of the many musical productions—Pride and Prejudice, Austen’s Pride, Austen—that have been performed in recent years. Or for 1914’s Old Friends and New Fancies: An Imaginary Sequel to the Novels of Jane Austen, which found the author Sybil G. Brinton writing fan fiction before that genre had a name.
Or you could, of course, argue for the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, the miniseries that introduced Austen to a new generation of fans, and that, via a brooding dive into a murky pond, catapulted Colin Firth to his current fame.
Whatever your favorite, we’d love to hear about it. (Or, for that matter, if there’s an Austen adaptation that especially rubs you the wrong way, we’d love to hear about that, as well!) We’ll be talking more about revisions of Austen as part of our celebration of her life and legacy next week, and, as part of that, we’re looking for your nominations. In this form, please share some of your favorite/least favorite tributes to Austen. We’ll discuss them in more detail in an upcoming thread.
Just before she began writing Emma, Jane Austen called the novel’s young protagonist “a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like.” Emma Woodhouse is privileged, self-involved, often frivolous, and sometimes even (unintentionally) cruel. In her overconfident attempts at matchmaking, she repeatedly misinterprets signals and muddles relationships to the point of catastrophe. She lacks the wise-beyond-her-years insight and the intellectualism of most of Austen’s protagonists. She’s also my favorite of all Austen’s characters.
When I was younger I loved witty, headstrong Lizzy Bennet and the diametrically opposed Dashwood sisters, self-contained Elinor and passionate Marianne. I enjoyed the pompousness of Mr. Collins and Lady Catherine de Bourgh and the sometimes awkward charms of love interests like Mr. Darcy and Colonel Brandon. I watched the 1996 film version of Emma and Clueless, a contemporary adaptation of the novel, but never felt much attachment to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Emma or to Cher, who came off as shallow and lacking in genuine compassion.
It was only when I read Emma for the first time as a freshman in college that Emma Woodhouse really got to me. As Austen wrote her, Emma felt flawed in a way I could relate to: good-hearted and clever, but too wrapped up in her own world and too assured of her own opinions and talents. She felt like people I knew, or maybe even like me—like a fortunate young woman trying, and sometimes failing, to live well.
I’ve never encountered another literary character quite like Emma. Well-developed female protagonists—including those in Austen’s other books—most often have some sort of edge: cynicism or anger or grief. But Emma doesn’t. Emma is fun, and she makes Emma fun, too. She’s open and optimistic, full of a youthful joie de vivre that permeates the whole novel. By virtue of circumstance and personality, she’s romantically independent and intends to stay that way, but she’s fond of conversation, of organizing and attending social events, and of dancing. She likes being around other people, and loves those closest to her earnestly, if clumsily. And at the end of the book, after she’s made a mess of her relationships, she reveals a wholehearted capacity for empathy and for change, working to better understand the people around her, to soothe the hurt she’s caused, and to become a kinder, more mature person.
What about you—who’s your favorite Austen character? Do you favor Lizzy Bennet or the Dashwoods, like I did when I was younger? Are you a fan of Mr. Collins and Lady Catherine de Bourgh, like my mom, or a Mr. Bennet aficionado, like my dad? Let us know which of Austen’s characters you like best, and why, in this form. We’ll use your responses to start a new reader discussion next week, as we celebrate Jane Austen’s legacy.
Africa Studio / Shutterstock / Katie Martin / The Atlantic
I learned Jane Austen’s lines like a second language when I was growing up. My quip-quoting, BBC box-set owning, Austen-loving parents began immersing me in her literary world before I was old enough to comprehend all its nuances and ironic undertones. By the time I picked up Pride and Prejudice to read it myself when I was in middle school, the characters and scenes felt as familiar as memories from my own life—and I already knew my parents’ favorite lines by heart.
But the lines my parents love are still the ones I know best, and the ones I hold closest to my heart. So when I started listing out my favorites, I reached out to both of them, prompting two enthusiastic text conversations.
My mom is an especial fan of Pride and Prejudice heroine Elizabeth Bennet’s absurd, puffed-up cousin and suitor, Mr. Collins, and Mr. Darcy’s haughty aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh. This, from Lady Catherine, is her “all-time favorite” Austen quote—and also one of mine:
There are few people in England, I suppose, who have more true enjoyment of music than myself, or a better natural taste. If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient.
My dad, on the other hand, is a devotee of Lizzy’s wise-cracking, socially disenchanted father, Mr. Bennet. “The best stand-alone JA quote of all time,” he texted me almost immediately, is this one, spoken by Mr. Bennet to Lizzy:
For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?
It’s one of my very favorites, and the first one I thought of, too—because it’s a great line, but also because it always, always reminds me of my dad, and the days we’ve spent watching and discussing and laughing over Pride and Prejudice together.
Now we’d like you to join the discussion. We’ll be talking more about the best Jane Austen lines as part of our celebration of her life and legacy next week, and we’d like to hear your nominations. In this form, please share some of your favorite turns of phrase from her books (and the many adaptations they’ve inspired), and tell us a bit about what makes them your favorites.
If you, like me, are a fan of Jane Austen’s novels, you must acknowledge the crucial importance of a good introduction. And I owe my enduring Austen addiction to my mom—who, with all the best parts of a Mrs. Bennet’s concern for her daughter’s well-being, introduced me to Ang Lee’s adaptation of Sense and Sensibility when I was still young enough to play make-believe as Marianne Dashwood. From there I was hooked; we watched Gwyneth Paltrow in Emma and Laurence Olivier in the 1940 Pride and Prejudice, which I mostly appreciated for the hoopskirts. For a few years we made the viewing of the six-hour BBC Pride and Prejudice into an annual ritual, involving homemade cream scones (clipped from the New York Times recipe page), marmalade, English breakfast tea, and (this was the part I found most exciting) sugar cubes. Mom spread out the china and antique doilies she never had an excuse to use, and I’d stitch outfits for my dolls in imitation of the heroines.
At the two- or three-hour mark we’d take a break to clear away the crumbs; my dad, who normally folded laundry in front of a college basketball game, would bring a hamper up from the basement; and in this way my family absorbed Austen into our lexicon of inside jokes. Dad perfected the Mr. Collins wave; Mom adopted “icky Wicky” as an insult; and to this day we tease each other with imitations of Lady Catherine, pronouncing ourselves in haughty falsetto “most seriously displeased.”
I soon outgrew the tea parties, but I haven’t outgrown Jane. Today—200 years after Austen’s death on July 18, 1817—I still turn to her novels and to the many adaptations of them for insight and comfort. Austen’s shaped my interests as a reader, my voice as a writer, and my confidence as a young woman—but all of it traces back to watching those movies when I was a kid. And so, to kick off a reader discussion in Notes about Austen’s legacy, I asked my mom to tell me how she, in turn, was first introduced to Austen. She replied:
I think I must have met Lizzie and Mr. Darcy when I was a teenager, probably on a lazy weekend afternoon when I had time to kill and was flipping through channels on TV. Back then you could always find an old black and white movie, like an Abbott and Costello or an Alfred Hitchcock, on the local station. That’s how I discovered the 1940 version of Pride and Prejudice, with Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson. I loved it. It was so campy and lively, with the over the top costumes and stagey acting, and it seemed like the actors were having so much fun. I had never read the book, so I didn’t know that they took so many liberties with the story.
Years later, when I was a mom with two kids and money was tight and time was scarce (no more lazy Saturday afternoons), I heard on Fresh Air that there was a new annotated Pride and Prejudice. By then I owned the book and had read it a few times, but I was excited to get a hold of that annotated version even though I felt guilty spending the money. I wanted to read all the details, the background explanations, get to know them better. I remember sneaking in a trip to Barnes and Noble between errands, and then sitting in the car and opening up that fat volume. The sun was shining outside. I knew I had to get going, get back to work; but for a brief, stolen moment, I was alone with Jane and her lovers.
Do you remember your first meeting with an Austen novel? Have Austen’s characters played a significant role in your life? Fill out this form to tell us your story, and we’ll share some of the responses next week—and follow along on this thread for more Austenian discussion.
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