On the Austen Beat

When I went to the annual meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America back in 2012, I wasn't quite sure what to expect, beyond the possibility of a colorful, possibly whimsical story with better photo opportunities than your usual academic gathering. I wasn't a Janeite, but I was Jane-curious (if not quite curious enough to have made it to Mansfield Park). I confess to feeling alarm when I approached the Brooklyn Marriott and saw someone standing on the corner in a bonnet and Empire-waisted dress, a wicker basket tucked on her arm.

Inside, I picked up tidbits about Regency underwear (or the lack thereof), nineteenth-century probate law, and the history of Austen worship. I picked up some Regency dance steps and, in the exhibition space, a box of Bingley's tea. I also—fatefully—encountered a group of academics who relished delivering papers to an audience that had actually done the reading, sometimes twenty or thirty times.

I didn't walk out a Janeite (a term I had only recently encountered). But in retrospect, that weekend was the beginning of my transformation into something perhaps even nerdier and more embarrassing: a Jane Austen scholarship fangirl.

Jane Austen isn't just an author. She's also, as it turns out, a viable beat. And as it happens, I had stumbled onto it at the right moment. We were well past Colin Firth and The Shirt. But we had just had Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which joined Austen to contemporary mash-up culture and made her safer for boys and, perhaps, for "serious" journalists.

Then came a flood of anniversaries, and of fascinating, varied scholarly projects that showed off, every bit as convincingly as Seth Grahame-Smith, that beneath the bonnets of Austenland there were more than enough brains for a reporter like me, charged with the amorphous task of covering "the world of ideas," to feed on.

It can be hard to write about literary studies as a journalist, at least when you don't have a canonical first-name-basis author (Will, Jane, Emily, Walt, Zora), a story of discovery in a remote, dusty archive, or, at the other end of the spectrum, some new angle involving digital technology. I've written those kinds of Austen stories. But given the interest in anything Jane-adjacent ("Pride and Prejudice and Clickbait," anyone?), she has also been a way of writing about the processes, preoccupations, and culture of scholarship itself, and the way that scholars, as much as fans and creators, continually remake books and our relationship to them.

Yes, there's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. But there was also, I discovered, Jane Austen and fan studies, Jane Austen and game theory, Jane Austen and evolutionary psychology, Jane Austen and the history of celebrity, Jane Austen and alt-right appropriation, Jane Austen's glasses and arsenic poisoning (OK, maybe not that one).

I'm better at the past than the future, but one thing I'm curious about is how Austen will intersect with today's burning debates about diversity, inclusion, prestige, and social and intellectual hierarchies. (I'm thinking here about the collective shudder at recent reports of alt-right interest in Austen.) I'm also interested in the way the trickle-down/trickle-up dynamics of the Austen world will evolve: What are the new things that readers, adapters, and fans will force Austen scholars to think about? And what are the new ways that scholars will use Austen to engage the public? Killing zombies is easy. Can Austen also save the humanities?

We are in a (brief) pause in the anniversary cycle. And it remains to be seen if two hundred years will be a kind of reputational inflection point similar to Shakespeare's Jubilee, as the editors of this issue hypothesize. But whatever happens, I see Austen remaining a standard-bearer and rallying point, both for ordinary, besotted "pleasure" reading and also for "high" culture, old stuff, literariness, and civilization itself. May both Janes win?