The Observer view on Jane Austen’s immortality | Observer editorial | Opinion
Jane Austen, who died 200 years ago last Tuesday, has been enjoying an impressively vigorous afterlife. First, as an icon of her gender, there has been her controversial debut on the new £10 note, an appearance that sent some indignant Jane-ites into a tizzy about her image. “Airbrushedâ€, they cried; “inauthenticâ€, they snorted.
Worse was to follow. The bank’s misguided choice of Austen quote from Pride and Prejudice â€" “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading†â€" had been uttered by Caroline Bingley, a hypocritical crawler with zero interest in books, who was simply sucking up to Mr Darcy. Three days later, in a scene that would have given Miss Austen exquisite moments of immoderate joy, the leader of the Commons, Andrea Leadsom, a foot-in-mouth politician not renowned for her grasp of the English canon, described her as “one of our greatest living authorsâ€. Cue howls of parliamentary mirth and a social media feeding frenzy.
Photoshopped, misquoted and brought back from the dead by a Tory minister, the author of Persuasion and Emma, who once observed that “a woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she canâ€, would surely have relished this roller-coaster of publicity. And yet the accident-prone Leadsom’s delicious slip does point to some greater truths about our literature, not least that all our finest writers are indeed immortal. This is especially true of those, such as Austen, who wrote immortal characters. Shakespeare, Dickens, Wodehouse, Conan Doyle and Le Carré flourish among the reading public through the lives of Falstaff, Scrooge, Jeeves, Sherlock Holmes and Smiley. As the creator of Mrs Bennet and Emma Woodhouse, Austen lives on.
Leadsom’s brief moment of shame might also hint at the bank’s long-term vindication. While Austen suffers the indignity of airbrushing, her words and characters linger in the English imagination. Most novelists are condemned to oblivion, sometimes in their own lifetimes. To be caricatured and misquoted is a supreme accolade. Besides, at this altitude on Parnassus, the words and phrases of great books become strangely braided into the national conversation.
Shakespeare never wrote “lead on Macduffâ€, or “methinks the lady doth protest too muchâ€. A living culture mashes up books and quotes, giving Holmes a line he never uttered: “Elementary, my dear Watson.†Great writers, living or dead, such as Austen, get reinterpreted in ways beyond their control. There’s a manga Sense & Sensibility as well as the Observer’s favourite, Emma and the Werewolves.
Play it again, Jane.
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