Over at The Book Studio, I have a review (UPDATE: Full review now appears below break, as WETA has erased the site) of Claire Harman's Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World -- a fun and brisk depiction of Austen and her unusual legacy. From the book review:
For all the love showered on Jane Austen through cinematic lovefests, academic treatises, and “I’d Rather Be Reading Jane Austen” bumper stickers, the author herself gets rather lost in the chatter. The sparse details of Austen’s biography and her brief catalogue of six novels permit today’s fans to imagine whatever they will of the British literary titan. Among the most common tropes about “Divine Jane?” That she was indifferent to fame, writing novels set squarely in the domestic sphere merely for the amusement of her intimates and neighbors.
Claire Harman begs to differ. In Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World, Harman tells of a Jane Austen who knew well what her literary powers were worth. Citing a wealth of letters, documents, records, journals, and other curious remnants of her life and legacy, Harman convincingly reveals Austen as an ambitious, hard-working writer who wanted to make money from her fiction and was attentive to how her work was received. Indeed, Austen kept a log called “Opinions,” where she tallied responses both favorable and critical to her novels. This is a far different image than the myth of Austen as a blushing spinster who hid her tales in her desk drawer, lest anyone discover her scribbling.
Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World – by Claire Harman
For all the love showered on Jane Austen through cinematic lovefests, academic treatises, and “I’d Rather Be Reading Jane Austen” bumper stickers, the author herself gets rather lost in the chatter. The sparse details of Austen’s biography and her brief catalogue of six novels permit today’s fans to imagine whatever they will of the British literary titan. Among the most common tropes about “Divine Jane?” That she was indifferent to fame, writing novels set squarely in the domestic sphere merely for the amusement of her intimates and neighbors.
Claire Harman begs to differ. In Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World, Harman tells of a Jane Austen who knew well what her literary powers were worth. Citing a wealth of letters, documents, records, journals, and other curious remnants of her life and legacy, Harman convincingly reveals Austen as an ambitious, hard-working writer who wanted to make money from her fiction and was attentive to how her work was received. Indeed, Austen kept a log called “Opinions,” where she tallied responses both favorable and critical to her novels. This is a far different image than the myth of Austen as a blushing spinster who hid her tales in her desk drawer, lest anyone discover her scribbling.
Beginning in Austen’s lifetime, as she struggled to be published, and moving into the present day of film adaptations, biopics, and spin-offs, Harman lays out how Austen’s legacy developed into the dominating, and at times misguided, force that it is today. (“Jane Austenä” is the title of one of the chapters.) Harman keeps both her wit and sense about her as she chronicles the passionate, the virulent, and the absurd of Austen-mania past and present. As well, she allows herself space to explore where Austen, who published anonymously in her lifetime, found some of her most fervent fans – including the trenches of World War I and a French prison cell that incarcerated an anarchist.
In the brisk telling of Jane’s Fame, Harman moves through 200 years in not much more than 200 pages. It is most successful in the first half, when Harman remains close to the facts of Austen’s century. As the book moves into present day, the broad scope of Jane’s Fame turns diffuse; the information, while interesting, feels anecdotal, detached from a clear through-line. At its best, however, Jane’s Fame is both well-researched and well-written, clever and intriguing. Harman takes Austen seriously as a writer while not romanticizing her or her legacy. This book is a refreshing response to a world grown tipsy on Jane Austen, as well as an enticement to take Austen’s fiction as seriously as she intended it to be.
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