27-05-2025
It's still Jane Austen's world we're living in – just look at the Beckhams
One of the highlights of my year so far was talking to the brilliant Jane Austen biographer Paula Byrne at the Althorp Literary Festival, to mark the 250 th anniversary of the maestra's birth. Byrne was on our screens last night as contributor and consultant to the BBC's celebratory series Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius.
What I particularly relish about Byrne's approach to Austen is that she puts family, humour and social engagement at the heart of understanding the novels – rather than the often espoused view of a shy spinster, slightly detached from the world. She makes a point of highlighting Austen's frequent travel and love of the British seaside, as helping form a literary vitality so fully realised that almost any character can walk off the page and into the 21 st century without feeling outmoded.
But then Byrne was brought up a middle daughter on the Wirral in a pack of seven siblings and views Austen through the prism of domestic life, with shared jokes and confidences. This makes good sense to me, as the middle child of five, who saw my own sisters reflected in Elizabeth and Jane Bennett's bond, while my book-loving publican mother's anxieties over our marital prospects closely mirrored Mrs Bennett's. (It was mum who gave me a full set of Austen's novels aged 11, forever awakening me to the potential eligibility of vicars and the importance of witty, combative discourse in courtship.) Whenever a young man from one of the locale's land-owning families came into our rural pub, mum would loudly call for my big sister Holly or me to come and join her from our linked cottage, although it was clear only one bar-hand was required to serve a pint. We were mortified by the blatantness of her strategy, but now I see it as an immensely practical act of love.
As an English Literature graduate in my twenties, I pined to be Lizzie Bennett, but recognised that I was almost certainly a less loveable, know-it-all Emma Woodhouse type, who tried to match-make friends with catastrophic results. I even ended up marrying my very own Mr Knightley, a kind, wise man 15 years my senior prepared to critique my less sensible decisions. You can't grow out of Jane Austen and her world is ever-pliable, encompassing updates and endless adaptations, of which my favourite may be Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The novels themselves withstand endless updates, makeovers and even down time tunnels, going back to the original serialisation form.
This month, the Novel Magazine Company publishes a glossy 'magazine novel', three-issue version of Pride and Prejudice, 'curated' by one 'SJ King Esq', complete with imagined early 19 th -century advertisements. There are also lavish fashion plates of real Regency beauties, such as Georgiana Cavendish (the future Duchess of Devonshire, who was brought up at Althorp House), brought to life by the digital witchcraft that is AI. Volume one contains the first 23 chapters of the novel, just like Austen's 1813 first volume of Pride and Prejudice, which was published in three parts. And purists need not fear, the text is faithful to the original while the digital creator runs riot with the visuals. I must confess to a ferocious yearning for this Annie Leibovitz-style reimagining of P&P.
It seems to me that Austen herself might applaud a Tatler-style rendition of her best loved novel. Her letters to her sister Cassandra betray a rich love of gossip and, if writing today, Austen would surely mull over family dramas in the public domain.
Just imagine what the author's wry take would be on Victoria Bennett's – I mean Beckham's – estrangement from her feckless son Brooklyn, due to her new daughter-in-law's presumed machinations. How she would have laughed at Lauren Sánchez's staggeringly ostentatious hen night and wedding plans. The formats may change, but human folly remain the same. We are all living in Jane Austen's world.
