Introduction

Summary

HOW SURPRISED, AND HOW AMUSED, Jane Austen would have been if she could have known what an immense number of critical works would be devoted to her,” writes Jane Aiken Hodge in her 1972 biography of the novelist. “ ‘Who, me?’ one imagines her saying, with one of her occasional grammatical lapses. ‘All those books …’ ” (15).

All those books, indeed.

As Claire Tomalin observed in 1997, “Austen has become very big business” (25). Contemporary interest in her rivals that which Britons over the years have shown for members of the Royal Family, or which contemporary fans exhibit toward Hollywood celebrities. Today, nearly two hundred years after Austen's death, dozens of editions of her works are available, often sharing the shelves with popular romance novels and those of the latest “hot” genre, vampire lit. Additionally, as Moyra Haslett noted recently, “coffee-table books about Jane Austen outnumber those for any other English author” (203). High-school and college students frequently find an Austen novel on their literature class syllabus. Academics write treatises about her, while people who have not read much since finishing their formal education buy and read copies of Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility so they can discuss them with friends over coffee. In The Literary 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Novelists, Playwrights, and Poets of All Time (2001) Daniel Burt ranks Austen number eighteen among world figures.