Dorice Elliott, a professor of English, has a file several inches thick of “Jane Austen sightings.”  Austen references found in the popular media. Among the examples is a Newsweek cover featuring “181 Things You Need to Know Now” with Miss Austen front and center.

Written By Deborah Ground Buckner

January 2008 

Dorice Elliott, a professor of English at the University of Kansas with a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, has a file several inches thick of “Jane Austen sightings.” This is an exercise in her class devoted to Austen's literary works, asking students to bring in Austen references found in the popular media. Among the examples is a Newsweek cover featuring “181 Things You Need to Know Now” with Miss Austen front and center.

“The surge in interest is extraordinary,” Elliott says. Jane Austen is taking a place “that until five years ago was held by Shakespeare.”

Elliott recently spoke to a Kansas City audience about “The Perennial Appeal of Jane Austen.” She identifies three groups of people behind the demand for all things Austen: “The Jane-ites” who measure everything by faithfulness to the author; “The Jane Consumers” who measure the relevance of Austen's work to the present day (and might actually prefer the films based on her works to the works themselves), and “The Jane Austen Scholars” who study the content of the novels, their historical background and their settings. Elliott places herself in all three camps.

Elliott observes that “every reader is a writer” in the sense that “we read through our own historical lens,” so what we bring to a book, our own perceptions and life experiences, for example, will affect the story we ultimately read. Applying this to Austen's works, she illustrates the point by showing film clips from three different versions of Pride and Prejudice. First is a trailer for the 1940 film starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier. Billed as the story of “5 love-happy sisters and how they got husbands,” the film took the approach that women are interested in marriage above all, and “historical accuracy means nothing.” Elliott pointed out that costumes left over from the film of Gone With the Wind were used for this story of the late-18^th century! A clip from the 1995 BBC “Colin Firth” version (dubbed “Wet tee-shirt Mr. Darcy”) matches “an attempt to make it sexy” with the wit and independence of women. Finally, the 2005 “Keira Knightley version” displays “gritty realism” and a heroine who is “cynical, pouty, and hip--with attitude.” All three interpretations, Elliott states, present an assumption of their own historical moment.

Austen's stories of finding true love are told with sufficient humor that, even though they are set within the picturesque nature of Regency England, they lend themselves to the “historical lens” of each new generation of readers.

There is much to be learned of social history from an Austen book. Austen's characters lived in a time of crucial social change from an agrarian to a business society where new opportunities for social advancement came into being. Her characters of the Gentry Class, supported by the land, could be viewed as “the lowest rung of the upper class” or “the highest rung of the lower class.” These women were well educated, brought up to be ladies, taught to speak and dress correctly, display good manners and follow the social rules, but they lacked a dowry. Marriage, in this era, was “much more than just who's in love with whom,” Elliott stresses. “Marriage was about the only choice these women got to make,” and it was a choice that determined not only their own standard of living, but their children's and perhaps their parents, too.

The daughters of the gentry were placed in competition with middle class girls from families in trade, suddenly coming into money, but trying to marry into the gentry for social status. Marriage was a great game of maneuvers, as some “married up” while others married equals, and still others might “marry down socially, but up financially.”

Against this social background, Austen expresses her approval and disapproval for varying reasons, and “that, in itself, is a social statement,” Elliott says. The idea of marriage for companionship and personal happiness was relatively new, and Austen displays a feminist directive, “dealing with critical social issues in a witty, but very serious way.”

Elliott observes “you never see physical intimacy in an Austen book.” It is a deliberate withholding—other writers of the time were not averse to including a kiss or embrace--”because she knew the reader can imagine it better than she could write it.”

Elliott also identifies Austen's literary style, along with her subject matter, as a factor in her enduring appeal. Austen was one of the first writers to use “free and direct discourse,” combining the narrator's description of the character's thoughts with what the character says. Prior to this style, characterization came about in two ways, either through psycho-narration, where the narrator describes what the character is feeling but isn't going to say, or through “interior monologue,” where the character's thoughts are gleaned from his or her own words. Austen combined the narrator's voice with the character's thoughts, with phrases that sound like the character, but use the past tense and third person pronoun. The narrator and the character merge into almost one voice. This gives a window into the character's mind, both what she can articulate herself but also what her sub-conscious is thinking. The result achieves a level of intimacy and understanding with a character that readers were not accustomed to before Austen's works. Her use of dashes and exclamation points give “the feeling of stream of consciousness,” Elliott notes, a style of writing that is a precursor to the style of Virginia Woolf, for example.

When asked about the many recent film adaptations of Austen's novels, Elliott opined “Clueless makes no attempt to be faithful to the book or its plot, but it's faithful to the tone. In that way, perhaps, it is the most faithful film adaptation.”

The University of Kansas has included Jane Austen studies in its curriculum for some forty years. Elliott notes in the 1970s as feminist interest in women's literature escalated, many colleges and universities began offering Austen studies. Austen's decision to focus on women and their anxieties and concerns within their social and political settings keeps her work alive today as those concerns continue to have an impact.