AUSTEN’S POWER
Arts & Books
01 Jul 2006
Jane Austen’s novels have been repackaged as chick-lit to reflect our modern conception of her as a romantic novelist. But her world is less comforting than we’d like to think, argues Laura Thompson
As a young girl in love with buying books, I recall spending £1 on a bargain edition of Jane Austen’s Persuasion. The cover showed Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth silhouetted, in a clinch, with the moon behind them glowing in the shape of a heart. The blurb read something like: “Will Anne ever again be held in the arms of the man she loved and lost?” Pure Mills & Boon, in fact; and sublimely inappropriate to the tone of this sad, shadowy novel.
More than 20 years on, Mills & Boon has given way to the phenomenon that is chick-lit and — what do you know? — Jane Austen has been repackaged for that ragingly successful market. Headline Books has published a new edition of the six novels, each of them billed as “a classic romance”, its matchless prose contained within the kind of bright, girly cover usually associated with Marian Keyes or Cecilia Ahern.
The visual implication is that, had Austen been writing today, she would have had no trouble swapping her bonnets and billets-doux for blow-dries and e-mail. She would have....
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