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Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World

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She has the second most quoted line in literary history (the opening to Pride and Prejudice) and a following in the Millions. In fact just looking on the lists of Amazon this month, there are something like 10 new books with Jane Austen in the title (not including Pride and Prejudice and the Zombies). Claire Harman traces the growth of the Jane Austen Phenomena. From Jane Austen's early life to the present day.

Written beautifully, Harman has done an incredible job in tracking down the rise of Austen as the world's favourite author. Dispelling the myths along the way and enlightening the reading public as to the real background to Jane.

Austen was a writer from early on, her Juvenlia were also part of an active, intelligent, and witty family collection. Clearly she wrote to appeal and entertain as with the rest of family. However Jane did show a special interest - and was supported in this at a time when there were female authors - but they were rare. The known facts of her life are laid bare, which reflects on the later biography by her great Nephew Austen-Leigh as less than honest reflection. Letters Harman has sourced between Austen-Leigh and other relatives show that much was concealed and the attempt was made to paint Jane Austen as gentle kindly lady.

Jane Austen's fame grew from the mid to late nineteenth centry - up until the 1850's there had been fewer than 10 critical articles in literary journals on her work, and while her works were in print, an attempt to sell the copyright to them in the 1830's hardly fetched the sum her family had hoped for - a mere 500 pounds. So while they eventually sold the copyright much cheaper, the books at least stayed in print for several decades.

Austen was loathed by the Brontes who saw no emotional merit in her workds, and Mark Twain (who thought a library could be considered a good library if it did not have any of her works, even were it to have no books in it at all!) Austen's cult grew.

I found Harman's precise and detailed story excellent reading. And what a story - who would have thought the spinster, dead in her early 40's, the last two books she published ended up pulped between 1818 and 1820. Could rise to such fame - her books epitomising a realism and wit which seams to transcend ages - and of course a romance.

This book is definitely for fans of Jane Austen however it should find a broader reading audience in those who have enjoyed the rise of the austen novel and the modern film adaptations along with HOllywood's obsession with her.

It is a well written and immensely readable book. Harman brings a fresh eye to Austen and a fresh turn of subject. She also has a clarity of expression which allows you to understand Austen's life clearly and the age she lived in. I found her discussion of the relationship between Jane and her sister fascinting. But like all the other authors before her - Harman can shed no light on what Austen was doing in the period of early nineteenth century where for several years she was silent, and unheard. Perhaps one day something will be revealed - however given that CAssandra had burned or edited most of their letters this is unlikely. Harman does make a pretty good fist of ruling out issues it was not likely to be.

Really worthwhile reading - and highly recommended.

The reading public is not all clamoring for the next popular thriller. There are reasons to be confident that people are at least sometimes reading truly great literature. If you need evidence, look at the continuing popularity of the novels of Jane Austen. They have not always been popular, and were wrenched from obscurity decades after her death, but it does not seem as if they will ever need such a rescue again. In _Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World_ (Canongate), biographer Claire Harmon has given something of a posthumous biography, although she does provide some useful insights about Austen's life and attitude toward her work. The important chronicle here, though, is how Austen, well appreciated as an author by her family circle, had significant but minor success with publication in her lifetime, was forgotten, became a literary staple, and then became a phenomenon. Harmon expects that readers will know something of Austen's works (not a bad assumption to make), but her book even when concentrating on what academics have made of the novels is unstuffy and brightly written.

Austen died at age only 41in 1817. In the chapters devoted to Austen's life, Harmon tries (as have so many) to understand how this rural spinster could have produced such worthy novels. It was family influence that helped. Her family read. They talked about books, and they made fun of the bad ones and valued the good. "Jane Austen became a great writer," says Harmon, "partly because she was a great reader, and had a highly developed _consumer's_ understanding of her favourite form." Her family, though they loved her writing, underestimated the value of her novels, and certainly would have been surprised that generations later would find Austen a world-class author. The famous gravestone the family set down within Winchester Cathedral is full of praise, but does not at all mention that the lady wrote novels. After she was set beneath it, the family lost or discarded most of her papers and letters, and the early editions of her books were remaindered or pulped. Harman proposes that the turnaround began with a memoir from her nephew James in 1869. Aunt Jane was quiet, she was modest, she was a loving and lovable family member, went this portrait. That she was a careful and determined professional author was not emphasized, but she seemed simply a nice, ordinary, English gentlewoman. Readers rather liked this depiction; after all, many of them were nice, ordinary English gentlewomen, too, and so began a strain of affection for Austen that has not been equaled for any other author, and has continued to our day. Also like no other author does Austen repay the attention of the ordinary reader as well as the academic. Although her novels take place among the members of a few families in a village, larger themes of religion, nationalism, warfare, and slavery can all be cited, as well as the constant interest within women's studies.

The Jane Austen phenomenon is bigger today than twenty years ago mostly because of movies. More people come to her novels because of film and television, and of course some never get from the films to the original books. Harman is of course correct to consider this a real loss, but although Austen's reputation needed no boost, her visibility has certainly been increased. There are Jane Austen societies on either side of the Atlantic, with thousands of members who go to conventions and talk about the latest slant on the novels and participate in quizzes on trivia within the books (one scholar wrote about how badly fellow scholars do on such competitions: "We rarely recollect the colour of this character's dress or that servant's name"). In 1913 came the first sequel to the novels, a genre that continues to grow, and has branched out into tongue-in-cheek porn and even Austen-meets-Zombies or Austen-as-sleuth spinoffs. You can, if you wish, advertise your Janeite enthusiasm by an "I [heart] Mr. Darcy" bumpersticker. Miss Austen would be astonished. I would love to talk with her about all this; I have a feeling that she would be amused by all the spinoff novelties. Even zombie sequels, I would remind her, are a reflection of a sincere regard for her unmatchable originals. Harman's delightful book about increasing appreciation though the decades proves it.

When the Archbishop of Dublin made this statement in a long article he wrote in 1821, just four years after the death of Jane Austen (1775 - 1816), he was recognizing the genius of a writer whose identity was unknown during her lifetime. Now, two hundred years later, with "Jane-mania" reaching epic proportions, Claire Harman writes a scholarly and readable analysis of the events over the past two centuries which have led to Jane Austen's increasing popularity, ultimately explaining "How Jane Austen Conquered the World."

Writing for the public was still a man's activity in the early 1800s, and Jane Austen spent most of her life writing privately, for family and friends. For twenty years, she wrote and, more importantly, rewrote her six famous novels, before Sense and Sensibility was finally published anonymously in 1811, when Jane was thirty-five. Pride and Prejudice followed in 1813, Mansfield Park in 1814, and Emma in 1815. Two more novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, were published posthumously, in 1817. Her books did not sell a large number of copies, though she was praised by the literati, including dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Sir Walter Scott, who, in 1815, wrote a four thousand-word praise of Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, and Emma.

After her death and public acknowledgement of her authorship, her work remained in print, and by 1840, Jane Austen was being compared to Shakespeare by Thomas Babington Macaulay. As the nineteenth century continued, Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and others all praised her work. (Charlotte Bronte was a well-publicized dissenter.) In 1869, Jane Austen's nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh published a memoir about Jane which went into extra printings, and by the 1890s, the "Janeites" were almost a cult. In the 20th century, Henry James was regarded as Austen's "literary son and heir." The Bloomsbury group loved Austen, and Virginia Woolf became a "penetrating and sympathetic critic" of her work.

The biggest boost to Jane Austen's popularity came with the movies of the 1940s. Her books, regarded as romantic, have continued to gain popularity, and author Claire Harman believes that the current popularity of "chick lit" owes much to the fact that these books are often based on Jane Austen's plot outlines, with their "erotic potential." All of Austen's books have now spawned their own TV mini-series, gaining instant fans for Austen across the globe. Jane's fans will love this thorough, scholarly study, filled with anecdotes and thoughtful, new insights into Jane Austen's legacy. Harman's analysis of the trends which have made Jane Austen popular for almost two hundred years is sensitive to changing tastes while also acknowledging the universal characteristics which make Jane Austen so beloved by her fans today. Mary Whipple

I was all ready to love this book, and there are parts that I did mark so as not to lose. The first is on pages 69-70, a comment exploring how Austen "gave away more about how women think and behave than any previous writer." In passing, there are also some good brief remarks (for example, that Benjamin Disraeli, who said that if he needed to read a good novel he would write one, had nonetheless read Pride and Prejudice 17 times). But on the whole the author seemed to go into the greatest detail on matters that to me seemed tangential and to skim the surface on things I wanted to hear more about. This may be due to Austen having both a popular and a literary following and the resulting difficulty of knowing how to satisfy both. I think the book leans toward the interests of the first. Harman tells us that the earliest biographical writings about Austen by her family members were largely embroidered and not that reliable--and then for some reason we get a multi-page guided tour of each point these tainted sources supply. On the other hand, there is only a one-sentence mention (on page 182) of the first time that Austen was viewed as having pioneered the great tradition of English novel writing (as F.R. Leavis assessed it). If you are interested in what this or that scholar or writer added to our understanding of her books, you're mostly out of luck. Tony Tanner, whose introduction to the old Penguin edition of Pride and Prejudice was so highly esteemed that it was reprinted in the back of the new edition even though a newly commissioned introduction by another writer appeared at the front, is mentioned only once in a list of Austen scholars who have had insightful things to say about Jane. Well, great, but just what were some of their insights? This probably sounds harsher than I mean it to. Harmon seems to be addressing an audience of mostly general readers and not going very fully into the contributions of a century or more of literary study.

One other example: Emma Thompson said in writing the screenplay to Sense and Sensibility that the sentences in the novel itself were sometimes hard to adapt to spoken screen dialogue so she resorted at times in her script to excerpts from some of Jane Austen's letters to make comparable points--that the letters employed an idiom more suited for the screen. There's no mention of that in the book. Harmon discusses the Ang Lee/Thompson movie in about a page--mostly to say that casting Hugh Grant was an attempt to cash in on the success of Four Weddings and an Funeral, and Harmon also mentions the publication of Jane Austen's correspondence in a longer section elsewhere. Of course you can't cover everything in a 200-page or so book, but getting those two topics together more deeply would have addressed a real need here--that at times the book is maybe a bit rushed and skimming the surface of things.

I have been no great admirer of Jane Austen, having long considered her the mother of the romance and chick-lit genres, but still an author whose reputation demands that her work be sampled. I have, in fact, read only four of her six novels. My opinion of her work falls between that of Mark Twain who said, "Every time I read `Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone" and that of the most ardent Janeites who read little other than Jane Austen novels. I have, however, often wondered how Miss Austen became the literary icon she is today. In "Jane's Fame," Claire Harman explains exactly how that happened.

As Harman points out, despite the great fame she enjoys today, very little is known about the "real" Jane Austen. No proper image of her was left behind and, with the help of her sister Cassandra, the bulk of her private correspondence and papers was destroyed after Jane's death. Jane Austen died in 1817, at age 41, living to see the publication of just four of her six novels and only some local success as an author. Even this came to her only after almost twenty years of work as an unpublished author - and for most of the 1820s, the decade immediately following her death, none of her books would be in print. Jane Austen would, in fact, be almost forgotten by the reading public for most of the next forty years.

All that would finally change when Jane's nephew, one James Edward Austen-Leigh, published his "Memoir of Jane Austen" in 1870, beginning a steady rise in his aunt's reputation. The book, written fifty-three years after Jane's death, is based upon the reluctant memoirist's impressions about his aunt and it offers, at best, a misleading view of her life and her attitudes toward her writing. By World War I, a British soldier seeking mental escape from the horrors of war was likely to lose himself inside the pages of a Jane Austen novel, buried in the calmer, saner England he would find there. But the best for Jane Austen's reputation was yet to come.

In 1995, the BBC had a huge success with its production of Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" and a new industry was born - a steady flow of adaptations of Jane Austen novels for the cinema and television. "Pride and Prejudice" would be followed by other BBC adaptations and big-screen versions of several other Austen works, including "Emma" and the highly regarded "Sense and Sensibility," starring Emma Thompson. Suddenly, Jane Austen was mainstream - and the rest is history.

"Jane's Fame" is a well written explanation of how such an unlikely rise to fame for Jane Austen could happen despite her near disappearance from the literary landscape in the several decades following her early death. She is now a cultural icon (one of those people instantly recognized by just her first name) even to those who might never read one of her six novels, but serious fans of the woman who wrote about "three or four families in a Country Village" will almost certainly want to add "Jane's Fame" to their Austen collection.

It's hard to believe there was a time when Austen wasn't revered, idolized, copied, mashed up and didn't suffuse our entire popular culture and exist as a worldwide phenomenon. But Jane's Fame makes it clear that Austen's reputation grew remarkably over the years, and for that alone, it's worth reading. Ignorance about Austen is suprisingly present even in writers you'd think would know better, like Jodi Picoult, who claims kinship with Austen as a "popular novelist." That claim's deflty examined on The Huffington Post:

[...]

Only one classic author is known by first name! Meet Jane Austen (1775-1817) who in her short life of 41 years produced a small but beloved oeuvre of novels. "Northanger Abbey"; "Sense and Sensibility"; "Pride and Prejudice";"Mansfield Park" "Emma" and "Persuasion." She also left fragments of such works in progress as "Sandition" and "The Watsons."
In "Jane's Fame" British scholar and Janeite expert Dr. Claire Harman traces the rise in the fame curve that in 2010 has made Miss Jane Austen the most beloved of British authors worldwide.
Jane spent most of her life seeing none of her books published. She had a few years of relative renown but her works did not catch fire until the beginning of the twentieth century. They began to sell steadily and were at last given critical scrutiny and study in the academy. Such scholars as R. W. Chapman, Lionel Trilling and David Cecil sought to raise the Janeite standard in the literary world. Fans of Jane became known as "Janeites" following an article calling them such was written in 1894. Austen has been despised by such authors as Mark Twain and Charlotte Bronte but beloved of many more including Virginia Woolf, Henry James, E.M. Forster and Sir Walter Scott. Austen's world of fiction was limited to a few rural families in Georgian England. Her topic was love and romance in which boy and girl meet, face difficulties but are united in the end with a kiss and a trip to the altar.
Jane created such immortal characters as Elizabeth Bennet, Mr. Darcy, Emma, Mr. Knightly and Anne Elliot. Her prose is realistic and she feared excessive romanticism in literature and life. She never married but turned down a proposal or two along the way. Her closest friend was her sister Cassandra; her father was a clergyman and her brothers served in the Royal Navy and in the business world. Jane's first biographer was her nephew Edward Austen Leigh in 1870. He viewed her as "someone like us" but failed to realize that Aunt Jane was a genius who sought fame and was not adverse to fortune. Austen is a humorously ironic author whose books can be interpreted in many ways.
Harman says that today Austen is everywhere from well made British teleplays of the novels to books based on her characters to movies. The little woman from Hampshire has become a marketing phenomenon. Harman discusses the formation of the Jane Austen societies and how people from all walks of life turn to her pages for escape from the hurly burly of modern life.
Claire Harman is always worth reading. This book will enhance your reading pleasure of works by Jane Austen. It is highly recommended. This reviewer is proud to be a Janeite!

I am giving this book five stars though I have not finished it. It is clearly an excellent book.

However, the Kindle edition has a terrible problem. It is entirely in italics.

I have not had this problem with any other book.

It is not ALWAYS entirely in italics. If I go to certain chapters and then come away from them, suddenly the book is NOT all in italics.

I think this is probably the result of faulty display coding of some kind.

In any case, I have not been able to control this phenomenon, so that the book is USUALLY all in italics. Imagine reading page after page, all in italics. It strains your eyes far more than, say, reading on a non-Kindle computer.

I have tried this, by the way, on Kindle for PC as well as on my Kindle 2 and the same phenomenon exists, so it clearly has nothing to do with my Kindle 2.

I am contacting Amazon customer service about this, but I think it's only fair to alert fellow readers to the problem.

An excellent book, well written and well organized. After reading, it's good for reference. I became a Claire Harman fan after reading this and am looking into her other books.

'What is there in her? What is it all about?' (Letter from Joseph Conrad to H.G. Wells in 1901)

Jane Austen (16 December 1775 - 18 July 1817) is one of the most widely read writers in English literature. Her novels are amongst the best known in the English language, and have been adapted for film and television. Today, close to 200 years after her death, Jane Austen is more popular than ever. But why is this? During her lifetime she had little fame and her novels were not particularly popular. Sales were modest, and at least some unsold copies were discarded or pulped soon after her death.

Of course, for the many fans of Jane Austen, her current popularity is no surprise. It is, after all, clearly deserved. But those of us who are not totally part of the Jane Austen cult, it is interesting to learn more about the life, times and influences on Jane Austen, as well as the growth of the Austen industry. In this book, Claire Harman combines elements of classic biography with an analysis of the events that have influenced Jane Austen's posthumous popularity.

Picture Jane Austen: an unpublished author for almost 20 years. During this time she revised and updated her works, a process of continuous improvement which has rendered the published product almost timeless despite the period settings. She was undoubtedly ambitious, yet patient enough to negotiate with publishers.
Two significant events are identified as pivotal in Jane's posthumous popularity: the publication of James Edward Austen-Leigh's `A Memoir of Jane Austen' in 1870 and Colin Firth as Mr Darcy in a wet shirt in the BBC adaptation of `Pride and Prejudice' in 1995. These are two very different events, speaking to the sensibilities of two quite different eras separated by 125 years.

`What would Austen have made of all of this?' I imagine that she'd be delighted.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith