Trying to "Out-Austen" Jane Austen

Jane Austen is everywhere! And I love Jane Austen. But if I hear “It is a truth universally acknowledged…” at the beginning of another novel (other than Pride and Prejudice), or a variation thereof, I’m going to something drastic.

The literary world and the world of movies have been inundated with everything Jane Austen. Now, don’t get me wrong. I love Jane Austen. I have read all of her books, and I love them. I have enjoyed most of the film adaptations of her books. I have read many of the modern “sequels.” But lately I’ve read some “Jane Austen rip-offs” and seen adaptations of her books that have not been the best quality. No one can really get it right. Only Jane Austen.

I recently read about a reworking of Lady Susan, a novella that I don’t think Jane ever wished to have published (not in the state that she left it anyway). In the description it states, “Jane Austen’s novella Lady Susan was written during the same period in which she produced Elinor and Marianne. Like Elinor and Marianne, Lady Susan focused on the economic and romantic plights of two heroines displaced when the family home passes to an unworthy heir; but while Elinor and Marianne was revised and happily expanded to become Sense and Sensibility, Lady Susan was abandoned. Until now.”


It just gets my goat that the publishers say “until now” referring to its abandonment. The novella was still abandoned, because Jane never rewrote it. Just because another author rewrote it, it doesn’t change the fact that Jane abandoned it. Okay, maybe I just need to lighten up, but there's more. The publishers also state, “In Lady Vernon and her Daughter, Jane Rubino and Caitlen Rubino-Bradway have taken letters from this novella and transformed them into to a vivid, authentic, and more recognizably “Austen” milieu.” Now, what can be more “Austen” than something that Jane Austen actually wrote? I ask you.

End of rant.

However, as much as I complain, I’ll probably still read it. Hypocrisy at its highest.