Jane Austen

Jane Austen (1775–1817) achieved a certain measure of success as an author during her lifetime, but no fame. That's because her books, the first being Sense and Sensibility, published in 1811, listed their author only as "A Lady." Even if her name had been printed on her books, as was the unquestioned practice for male authors of the Georgian Era, Austen's career was short-lived. From 1811 until her untimely death in 1817, she saw just four of her novels make it into print. In addition to Sense and Sensibility in 1811, there was Pride and Prejudice in 1813, followed by Mansfield Park in 1814 and Emma in 1815. Two other novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published in 1818 shortly after her death, while a third completed novel, Lady Susan, would not be bound between covers until 1871. In 1833, between the milestones of her first two posthumously published works and the third, Austen's novels would be republished by Richard Bentley as a part of his Standard Novels series, which included titles by James Fenimore Cooper, Mary Shelley, Geoffrey Chaucer, Victor Hugo, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. During the Victorian Era, in 1869, interest in Austen's writing would be rekindled when her nephew published a memoir about his famous aunt. That event led to that first publication of Lady Susan in 1871, as well as republications of Austen's other novels throughout the 1880s. For the English literati, who considered the sober consumption of Jane Austen novels as a rite of passage into their world of intelligence and sophistication, this popularization grated. Even worse was the late 19th-century development of a Jane Austen fan base who called themselves Janeites, which came to be used by the literati as a term of dismissal and condescension. Today, readers can have fun imagining what these self-righteous arbiters of taste and culture would have thought of the countless film adaptations of Jane Austen novels, from Clueless in 1995 (loosely based on Emma) to Bridget Jones's Diary in 2001 (Pride and Prejudice) to the 2009 novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which predictably spawned the subsequent 2016 film of the same name.