Why Jane Austen?: Guest post by Abigail Reynolds, author of Mr. Darcy’s Undoing

It’s always a pleasure to have Abigail Reynolds as a guest on Diary of an Eccentric.  Abigail is the author of several retellings of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, her most recent being Mr. Darcy’s Undoing (check out my review).  I love how she always manages to throw a new obstacle in Darcy and Elizabeth’s path to happily ever after; I never get tired of reading them!  Abigail is here to talk about why she thinks Jane Austen and her novels are so popular more than 200 years after her death and why so many authors devote their time to keeping Austen’s characters alive.

Please give a warm welcome to Abigail Reynolds:

For a writer who has been dead for nearly 200 years, Jane Austen is doing remarkably well these days. Her works are more popular than ever. New film and television adaptations come out on a regular basis, and there’s an entire subgenre of Austen-related novels that has blossomed in the last few years. Readers don’t seem to be able to get enough of Jane Austen’s characters or her world.

Admittedly, Jane Austen was a brilliant writer who produced books filled with wit, insight, and timeless characters, but we’re not seeing a deluge of adaptations of Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Dickens, Bronte, or any other brilliant writers. There’s something unique about Jane Austen’s appeal for modern readers.

Jane Austen was in the right place at the right time. The Regency period is far enough in the past that modern readers can project their own fantasies onto it, but not so distant that it’s hard to imagine living there ourselves. Poised in the time between the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, the people living in the Regency seem much more modern than those in medieval or Restoration times. There was a middle class in Jane Austen’s day. Manufacturing existed on a limited scale. Men used guns for hunting and war, and women bought fabric created in mills rather than spinning and weaving their own. The London ton operated along social rules which parallel modern society in many ways, with popularity and taste helping define social status in addition to birth. It’s a society we can recognize and to some extent picture ourselves in it.

Just as important is what’s missing in Regency times. Massive industrialization, individual laborers turned into factory drones working themselves to death, clouds of soot, and clattering railroads were only a few years in the future. The First Industrial Revolution had started in the late 18th century, but its full effects on society weren’t felt until the 1830s, a mere two decades after Pride & Prejudice takes place. Wages for the poorest workers fell dramatically starting in the 1830s and didn’t recover until the next century. The pastoral pleasures of Jane Austen’s world turned into the bleak and painful landscape of Charles Dickens. Of course, there was plenty of poverty and suffering in Jane Austen’s day as well, but she doesn’t portray it in her books, so we can pretend it isn’t there. A sort of genteel poverty is as bad as it gets.

Many readers are looking for an escape from the ills of the modern world. If we want to think about poverty and starvation, we can read the newspapers. When we want a simpler, seemingly gentler world, one that is both familiar and yet lacking so many of our modern issues, Jane Austen’s world is the perfect place to go. Jane Austen adds to that by giving us love stories and looking at characters with an amused rather than a jaundiced eye. What’s not to love?

Well said!  Thanks, Abigail!  I can’t wait to read more of your Pemberley Variations!

Courtesy of Sourcebooks, I have a copy of Mr. Darcy’s Undoing for one lucky reader.  To enter, leave a comment with your e-mail address and tell me why you think Jane Austen is so popular today.  Because the publisher is shipping the book, entrants must have addresses in the U.S. or Canada.  This giveaway will close at 11:59 pm EST on Sunday, October 23, 2011.

**Please note that this giveaway is now closed**

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