200 years after 'Pride,' Austen still celebrated

A spark of joy lit up the literary and academic worlds this year: It's the bicentennial of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.

Published in 1813, when Austen was 37, Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy's love story has become one of her most beloved novels, having sold an estimated 20 million copies worldwide.

Austen's life and work will be celebrated in the region this month with three noteworthy events.

The Lantern Theater Company in Center City will host "Regency and Revelry: The Jane Austen Festival," a five-day Austenalia from Friday through Tuesday featuring lectures and readings by experts, performances, and workshops on all issues Austen. Events include lessons in Regency-era dance, demonstrations of the period's tea rituals, and a lecture to help readers match wines with specific Austen stories.

Lantern also has mounted a production of Michael Bloom's stage version of Emma, which runs through Oct. 27. From Oct. 29 to Nov. 24, Jon Jory's adaptation of Pride and Prejudice will be performed at the Bristol Riverside Theatre in Bucks County.

The last 10 months have seen an explosion of Austen and Pride and Prejudice-related conferences, festivals, concerts, and plays.

"This is the first anniversary devoted to a single publication since George Orwell's 1984," said Juliette Wells, an associate professor of English at Goucher College, and author of Everybody's Jane: Austen in the Popular Imagination. "Usually it's the author's birth date that's memorialized."

Austen famously worried in a letter to her sister Cassandra that it was "too light and bright and sparkling," with its optimism and straight-up happy ending.

Its popularity is due to that very fact, said author and Drexel University literature professor Paula Marantz Cohen.

"It's the one [novel] by which she's best known," said Cohen, whose own series of novels riff on Austen's work in modern settings, including Jane Austen in Boca: A Novel, set in a retirement home, and the teen story Jane Austen in Scarsdale: Or Love, Death, and the SATs.

Austen's work has never gone out of favor, she said.

"Walter Scott as early as 1816 saw that she had qualities that he didn't," Cohen said of the then-world-famous Scottish author. "He was a large, panoramic writer, and she was the one with an eye for the smallest detail and subtleties."

But Austen didn't become a pop culture goddess until the 1940s, when a wave of interest was spurred by the classic adaptation of Pride and Prejudice starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson.

"Her works began to be translated in several languages," Wells said. "And new printings of her novels were released with covers showing a couple who looked a lot like Olivier and Greer."

Austen's six novels, including Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Persuasion, have inspired dozens of film and TV adaptations. More than 10 are devoted to Pride and Prejudice alone, including a famous 1995 BBC mini-series starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth that some critics say helped launch our current Austen mania.

"There was a scene that had Darcy [Firth] in a wet T-shirt," said Carol Dole, professor of English at Ursinus College, who writes about Austen and film. "It made [a literary character] into a sex symbol!"

Austen's growing popularity seems counterintuitive: Why would stories about a social milieu rigidly circumscribed by social rules and taboos appeal to liberated men and women in the 21st century?

For that very reason, said Cohen.

"People crave her tremendous sense of respect and civility in our rude society," she said.

Wells said the explosion of Austen in pop culture was due in large part to a radical shift in the nature of being a fan.

"In 1975, academics organized some events to celebrate the bicentennial of Austen's birth, but it didn't attract nearly the same level of interest," she said. "The division between high and low culture was much stronger then, and for most people, Austen was someone you read in college . . . or admired for her talent."

We can thank post-structuralist theory - and a ravenous pop-culture marketplace ever-famished for more stories to sell as books, movies, and songs - for erasing that line.

Today, fans think of the author and her characters as intimate friends, said Deborah Yaffe, author of Among the Janeites: A Journey Through the World of Jane Austen Fandom, which has her travel the world meeting some of the most intense Austen fans imaginable.

"It's all about identification," said Yaffe. "We [Janeites] have developed a habit of identifying ourselves and other people with her characters: 'Oh, she's such a Marianne Dashwood,' we'd say, or 'My old boss was such a Mr. Bennet.' "

For some, Austen is an integral part of their sense of self.

"I chose to direct Emma because of my own emotional connection to it," said Lantern Theater Company's associate artistic director, Kathryn MacMillan, who read the novel when she was 15.

"It is part of my coming of age story, and it provided so many lessons and opportunities for personal growth along the way."

Regency and Revelry: The Jane Austen Festival

Friday through Tuesday at Lantern Theater Company, St. Stephen's Theater, 10th & Ludlow Streets. Tickets: $90; $75 students and seniors. 215-829-0395, www.lanterntheater.org/

Emma

Through Oct. 27 at Lantern Theater Company. Tickets: $20–$38 adult; $10 student rush 10 minutes before curtain time. 215-829-0395, www.lanterntheater.org/

Pride and Prejudice

Oct. 29 through Nov. 24 at Bristol Riverside Theatre, 120 Radcliffe St, Bristol. Tickets: $31–$46 adult; $10 students. 215-785-0100, www.brtstage.org/

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