Austen Inc.

Jane Austen has much to answer for. Her novels, collectively, seem to have set the template for everything from Mills & Boon to the Date Movie to everything in between. Bad enough. But now its an industry, the unceasing juggernaut of which appears to have taken off sometime when Colin Firth, playing a one note Mr. Darcy, emerged from a lake to the collective excitement of Ms. Bennett and a few million other women. A scene, one may note in passing, that does not exist in the novel, Pride and Prejudice. Since then we have been subjected to one remake after the other of her six novels and Austen’s life is also increasingly the subject matter for some very dubious films. Predictably a new Austen film has just been announced.

I don't dislike Austen, it is hard to dislike one of the most beloved novelists writing in the English language. And it is not her fault that its the romantic template that has carried over into much subsequent fiction (and not her satire and irony, for example). But the persistence of this template well into a century in which women are no longer living a "little piece of ivory" life is inexplicable. Given the varied nature of women's lives today, its surprising that audiences repeatedly consume the same banal romance. It is not even that women's literature of the past wasn't rich and varied. In fact, one can reach right back in time and find that even writers as famous as the Eliots and Brontes are unlikely to find themselves the centre of so much current female adoration. Eliot has almost dropped off the radar given that she is drawn to the great moral and political themes of her age. The Brontes are far too untrammelled to properly fall within the genteel conventions of romantic literature. Women, it would appear, don't like weighty issues or unreasonable passion. Only Jane Eyre, a reworked Cinderella story, is any competition to the Austen industry.

So women obviously recognise themselves in Austen's novels. Even those who are old enough to not buy into the romance myth. But I am uncertain if any modern man recognises himself in the typical Austen hero. Even though Austen was read by both sexes in her time, a few centuries later it would appear that no man reads or watches adaptations of her work except under duress. No one after all can be Mr. Darcy because he is a mythical creature. And the heirs to Austen, chick-lit and chick flicks have become pejorative terms with half the population because its men are about as real as Lara Croft or the Bond girls.

Still, women like this template, no matter how unrealistic it is. Two feisty women I once met, both studying to be doctors, simply loved Austen and Darcy, in no particular order. P&P is not exactly my favourite novel partly because of its house pornography (Ms. Bennett in fact appears to fall in love with house and man). Also let's face it, Austen's world, though not her prose, is limited. So I pointed them to A Room with a View. They fell about laughing. Its true that no romantic novel with any credentials, would make a depressed railway clerk with a direct manner and lofty ideas a romantic hero. Women trade up, not down. Women like to be wooed. And A Room with a View, with its critique of class and its emphasis on the authentic emotion (which precludes societal conventions like wooing), is really a homosexual love story in disguise. My mistake.

Its not a mistake I will make again. I stay silent while all around me otherwise sensible women are watching whatever it is that is the new romantic fiction (even Sex and the City is really an Austen template updated to a specific locale in the 20th century). And feel a silent sense of vindication when others concur - witness why dudes don't read (Austen in Vampireland!) and Dowd's bemusement.