4 - Always Wanting More: Desire and Austen Fan Fiction

Summary

Austen fan fiction is an endless tease: a manifestation of the desire for more Austen originals, which can never be fulfilled, by writing Austen-inspired literature to compensate for that lack. By continuing to create “Austen,” the Austen fan fiction archive is open-ended and ever expanding, like any fan fiction archive; it is “A World Without End for Fans of Jane Austen” as Pamela O’Connell titled her New York Times article on austen.com and the Republic of Pemberley. In this essay I argue that Austen fan fiction and its conventions articulate a specific set of desires as they attempt to fulfill them, but the fulfillment of those desires remains perpetually out of reach.

First, a few comments about the context in which Austen fan fiction flourishes. Popular culture, commercialism, postmodernism, and technology facilitated the rise of Austen fan fiction, which has been in full swing since 1995. The modern Austen invasion began with the critical and commercial success of Austen’s works on film and television between 1995 and 1999, as Austen’s works permeated modern culture. Austen fans celebrate: the 200th anniversaries of publications of her six major novels in the 2010s sustained, if not amplified, Austen culture. Austen is cross-marketed: her novels are sold with covers featuring actors from the film and television versions—and images of Austen (or what people think of as Austen), her characters, the actors playing her characters, and quotes from her works appear on posters, watches, mugs, towels, T-shirts, bags, calendars, and buttons. Austen fans behave like fans in other fandoms do, and they sustain these markets: on June 17, 2021, a search of “Jane Austen” on the cafepress.com search engine yielded 2,003 results. A search for “Jane Austen” on Etsy yielded 16,304 items that day.

Austen attracts fans all the time—and one of the ways that fans express themselves is by writing Austen fan fiction, which fits into and builds upon Austen culture. The literary devices that characterize modern and postmodern literature—pastiche, transposition, altered points of view, and metafiction—readily generate fan fiction. The Austen-inflected novels that have been published within the past 20+ years—like Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996),