Looser’s book sets out to understand how the real Austen became the Austen we know by examining the early context, reception and response to her work. Austen’s literary reputation, she explains, is a posthumous concoction, cultivated first by her siblings, descendants and reviewers, and then by “celebrity endorsements, logrolling quotes, trash talk, commercial efforts and enthusiast activities”. But as Devoney Looser indicates in her new study, The Making of Jane Austen, her celebrity owes something to these very writers. Henry James, a more measured admirer of Austen, mocked the uncritical culture around “our dear, everybody’s dear, Jane”. Janeites will enjoy this scholarly but approachable book on the redoubtable Miss Austen."Every time I read Pride and Prejudice”, complained Mark Twain in a letter of 1898, “I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.” But for every bad-tempered Twain, there is a troupe of loyal “Janeites”, devoted to Darcy and in love with Lizzie, ready to be laced into an empire-line dress or to take a tumble from the Cobb in Lyme Regis. Of special interest may be the chapter on the politicization of Jane Austen the first citation of her in this way was in 1872, by a Conservative Welsh MP opposed to female voting rights.
Readers will appreciate behind-the-scenes looks at Pride and Prejudice’s play and film adaptions, notably MGM’s 1940 version starring Laurence Olivier, and some amusing Marx Brothers and Gilligan’s Island connections.
Educators also helped increase awareness of Austen by frequently assigning her works. Bentley hired illustrator Ferdinand Pickering, who emphasized intense moments between female characters in anachronistic Victorian, rather than Regency, garb, making Austen seem “fresh and timely” to contemporary readers. She partly ascribes Austen’s lasting popularity to publisher Richard Bentley, who secured the rights to the novels from her estate and original publisher after her death. Looser ( Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850), an English professor at Arizona State University, considers the factors-illustrations, dramatizations, and publications, as well as politics and education-influencing how past and present generations have perceived Jane Austen. Austen fans have another book to add to their libraries, one explaining how an author who died quietly and little known in 1817 became one of the world’s best-known authors.
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