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They like to be called the Janeites. Unlike the members of many other cults, they are difficult to spot in the wild. They have no orange robes, no shaved heads, no Rajneeshi sandals, no taste for tie-dye. They do not travel in caravans of Volkswagen campers or chant in airports.
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Make no mistake, though. They may be invisible, but they are everywhere. They are the passionate, the devoted, the true Jane Austen believers. Perhaps surprisingly, one of their chief haunts is the Internet. Austen, the Elvis Presley of English literature, has been dead for 179 years, an unfortunate condition which has done her career nothing but good. “Emma,” fifth in a string of recent highly successful adaptations, opens this week. Last year’s BBC mini-series “Pride and Prejudice” was a blockbuster on both sides of the Atlantic; “Clueless” (Emma Goes To The Mall) did so well ($56 million) that Paramount is producing a TV version. “Persuasion” made many critical top-10 lists; “Sense and Sensibility” raked in $42 million, an extraordinary amount for a period literary adaptation. Austen’s novels are back on the bestseller lists as well. Sales are up 40 percent at Penguin, a long-time Austen publisher. “Very, very strong sales,” agrees a publicist for Amazon.com, which lists more than 200 Austen-related titles in its online catalog. One might expect that the Janeites, as a group, would be more concerned with contemplating the deep mysteries of Fanny Price over cucumber sandwiches than with embracing new technology. But before Jane was everywhere, before she was applauded in People magazine and profiled on CNN, before Entertainment Weekly “photographed” her sitting poolside at a posh Beverly Hills hotel, the faithful were already worshipping at electronic shrines around the world. It takes only a few minutes of surfing to pull up Austen home pages in Spanish, Polish, Swedish, and German. JASNA, the Jane Austen Society of North America, is online. A tourist page sponsored by the British government describes famous places from Jane’s writings and her life. |
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Jane Austen films and books are hot stuff. "Emma," fifth in a string of recent highly successful adaptations of Jane Austen novels, opens Friday.
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(You may, for example, care to know that a pub called The Juniper Berry now occupies the site of one of Jane’s former homes, or that the Dolphin Hotel, where Jane attended dances, still stands.) There are a vast number of academic and personal pages devoted to one Austen topic or another. |
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The mother of all Austen pages belongs to a man by the unlikely name of Henry Churchyard.
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But the mother of all Austen pages belongs to a man by the unlikely name of Henry Churchyard. Appropriately enough, Churchyard is a distant relation of King Edward III. “But so are millions of people,” he says, “So is Jane Austen.” Churchyard’s page is staggering, an encyclopedic colossus packed with writings, illustrations, bibliographies, letters, juvenilia, genealogy trees of the Austen family, notes on Jane’s mysterious seaside romance, the e-text of “Jane’s wickedest tale,” a list of sequels to the novels, a catalog of past and present movie adaptations, and endless links. “Promiscuous linking is the way of the World Wide Web,” says Churchyard, a wry character whose site also includes a list of Jane Austen jokes. The site “looks nice now,” allows Churchyard, a linguistics graduate student at the University of Texas (in Austin, of course.) “But it took about two years.” Churchyard professes himself “a weird kind of techno-Neanderthal,” but in the next breath he is explaining, self-deprecatingly, how he didn’t type all the text himself. “You can write little teeny programs,” he explains. The little teeny programs — written in Unix — help you to move text around. Churchyard is surprisingly typical of the Austen lovers on the Internet. Far from looking down their noses at Jane’s current mainstream popularity, they seem to welcome fresh perspectives. “I loved Clueless,” says Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, an assistant professor at McGill University in Montreal. With the help of her husband, Reid-Walsh started an Austen mailing list, Austen-L, five years ago. The group is a mix of purists and pop culture hounds. In the early days “people were nervous about technology,” and contributions tended to be painfully brief. “Things like: ‘how I named my dog Darcy’ (a character in Pride and Prejudice),” says Reid-Walsh. Membership in the list now hovers around 900 — it has doubled since Jane-Mania began — and postings have grown longer and much more ambitious. “I feel we’ve re-discovered the epistolary art,” says Reid-Walsh, who also heads the Montreal chapter of JASNA. This October, JASNA will descend on Richmond, Va., for its annual convention. They will take afternoon tea, dress in Regency costumes, view Faberge eggs at a nearby museum, and, most importantly, talk about Jane Austen. Once again, scholars and pop culture junkies will rub elbows harmoniously. Last year’s convention topics included “Fanny Price in Cyberspace.” This year’s theme is “Jane Austen Among Men,” and one of the featured guests is Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Carol Shields, who will speak on “Martians in Jane Austen.” Shields will use John Gray’s best-selling “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” as a tool to examine romantic relationships in the novels. In the lull before the convention, the Austen-L mailing list — scholars, shut-ins, avid readers, and film lovers from around the world — is abuzz with expectations about the movie version of Emma. “I love the Internet,” concludes Reid-Walsh, “because it’s a democracy.” |
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