Jane Austen For Dummies (66 page)
Read Jane Austen For Dummies Online
Authors: Joan Elizabeth Klingel Ray
Anita Brookner:
A distinguished art historian at Cambridge University and London's prestigious Courtauld Institute, Anita Brookner also has a highly successful career as a novelist, whose carefully crafted works are considered comedies of manners, like Austen's, though they are darker. But unlike Austen's characters, her female characters frequently experience disappointed love and loneliness. While literary reviewers and critics frequently align her with Austen, Brookner denied it in a January 28, 2001, interview with London's Sunday
Observer
newspaper! Brookner's
Hotel du Lac
won England's highest literary award, the Booker Prize, in 1984.
Austen characters are so vividly real for many readers that readers want to continue the characters' lives after the novels end. Sequels to
Pride and Prejudice
and
Emma
are especially numerous, perhaps because the marriages of such attractive characters as Elizabeth and Darcy and Emma and Mr. Knightley pique readers' curiosities. Others just need more Jane Austen(ish) novels. I have to admit that when I need more Jane Austen, I just reread Jane Austen. But for those readers who seek sequels, I refer you to the Republic of Pemberley Web site (
www.pemberley.com
), which has a link to sequels.
As you can tell from the previous paragraph, I am not a fan of sequels. But many lovers of Austen's novels are, and I would never attempt to convince them not to read the sequels. I've never read one because I'm content to let Austen's characters' lives end with her novels â although Austen, herself, would tell family members, when they asked, what happened to her characters after the book ended! But that's the point: The characters are
her
characters, presented in her inimitable way with her uniquely infectious wit and subtle irony. And I can leave them in her novels without the least concern about what happens to them after the last pages of her books. Now all the Austen sequel writers â which is a genre in and of itself â will hate me!
Austen left two works incomplete: her early (1805)
The Watsons
and
Sanditon,
a hysterical send-up of hypochondriacs that she wrote, with sad irony, while dying and left unfinished because she could no longer manipulate a pen or pencil.
According to Austen's nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, his aunt left
The Watsons
unfinished while living in Bath, a conclusion reached from the 1803 and 1804 watermarks on the paper on which it is written. (See Chapter 3 for Austen's Bath residence.) Austen-Leigh actually gave the manuscript, which was in his sister Caroline's possession, its title when he printed it for the first time in the second edition of his
Memoir of Jane Austen
(1871). According to Austen's family, her plan for continuing the work included the death of elderly Mr. Watson, causing his daughter, Emma (the work's heroine), to live with her brother Robert and his obnoxious wife. Emma would then turn down a marriage proposal from Lord Osborne, whose sister, in turn, was to be in love with the charming Rev. Mr. Howard, who loves Emma. (And in the part written by Austen, Emma appears interested in Mr. Howard.) True love would finally prevail when Emma and Mr. Howard marry.
By selectively using this information, two modern authors have attempted continuations.
John Coates rewrote much of the beginning (Austen's actual material!) and finished it, publishing the book in 1958; it was reprinted in 1977. His work changes Austen's lovely heroine, Emma Watson, into a rather unpleasant character! I read this out of scholarly duty back in graduate school. The whole work was un-Austen to me.
Joan Aiken, who has written Austen sequels and complements (such as
Jane Fairfax,
which as its subtitle states is “Jane Austen's
Emma
, Through Another's Eyes”), tried her hand at another version called
Emma Watson,
published in 1975. Because I'm not a sequel reader, I cannot comment on this work.
The incomplete
Sanditon
was completed in 1975 and published with the byline “Jane Austen and Another Lady.” Two different authors have attempted to complete this book.
An Austen sequelizer, Juliette Shapiro, is responsible for a more recent continuation, published in 2004.
Fay Weldon is currently writing a script for
Sanditon
.
Chick lit
is a term used to describe a form of popular fiction marketed to single young working women in their 20s. The term chick lit is derived from the slang
chick
for a young woman, as well as from the gum brand, Chiclets suggesting that chick lit is reading candy for young women. Many chick lit books are printed with candy-colored covers (pastels). Intending to make Austen novels more appealing to the young female eye, a British publisher is planning to bring out her novels in the summer of 2006 in a paperback edition for which all the covers will be in pastels, giving the books the appearance of chick lit. But if chick lit is more narrowly defined as literature dealing with a woman's fulfilling her needs and desires, then Jane Austen certainly is the mother of the genre. For all of her heroines' experiences are geared toward greater self-knowledge and self-fulfillment.
Popular culture critics normally credit Helen Fielding's novel,
Bridget Jones's Diary
(1996) with starting the chick lit genre. Fielding noted that her book was inspired by
Pride and Prejudice.
Bridget Jones's Diary
offers many superficial connections to Austen's novel.
The surname of both heroes is Darcy.
The personalities of Elizabeth's and Bridget's fathers are similar.
The relationship between Austen's Darcy and Wickham inspires that of Fielding's Darcy and Cleaver (the Wickham-like character).
The publication for which Bridget works is Pemberley Press â the name of Austen's Darcy's estate.
The heroine of Fielding's novel, however, is falling apart most of the time, making her totally dissimilar to the incredibly self-possessed and clever Elizabeth Bennet. Fielding's second
Bridget Jones
book,
The Edge of Reason
(1999), very loosely parallels
Persuasion
. Both books were made into successful films in 2001 and 2004. The movies further emphasized Austen parallels by having Colin Firth, who played Darcy in the 1995 television miniseries of
Pride and Prejudice,
play Mark Darcy. Close viewers of the films also see other actors who've played characters in other Austen-based films and television series doing roles in the
Bridget Jones
films, making the films more of an “in” joke for Austen fans.