Abstract
This chapter re-examines one of the most productive periods in the history of Austen’s popular culture: the 1990s. It reads print sequels and continuations of Austen alongside the screen phenomenon; for instance, Joan Aiken’s and Emma Tennant’s sequels of Sense and Sensibility are compared with the Emma Thompson/Ang Lee award-winning film adaptation. Setting the print afterlives in the context of feminist rewritings of the canon (1980s–1990s), I explore representations of womanhood, communities of women and disabled women’s bodies in the Austen sequels of the turn of the century.
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Notes
- 1.
The 1990s Austen boom is generally considered the second turning point in the writer’s posthumous reputation—the first one being the publication of James Edward Austen-Leigh’s Memoir in 1870 (Austen-Leigh, 1870). This spate of Austen adaptations has its antecedent in the rise of period drama during the 1980s, with dramatisations of E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1984) and A Room with a View (1985). Many brilliant collections analyse the Austen film phenomenon. See, for instance, the two pioneering works: Linda Troost and Sayre Greenfield’s Jane Austen in Hollywood (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998) (Troost and Greenfield 1998) and Gina and Andrew Macdonald’s Jane Austen on Screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). (Macdonald and Macdonald 2003)
- 2.
In the case of Langton’s Pride and Prejudice, this was also due to the much discussed sexual tone of Andrew Davies’s screenplay, which led to the famous Darcymania, or even Firthmania. See, for instance, Lisa Hopkins’s “Mr Darcy’s Body. Privileging the Female Gaze”, in Troost and Greenfield, Jane Austen in Hollywood, 111–21. (Hopkins 1998)
- 3.
Devoney Looser, “Feminist Implications of the Silver Screen Austen”, in Troost and Greenfield, Jane Austen in Hollywood 159–176, 159. (Looser 1998)
- 4.
Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 237. (Poovey 1984)
- 5.
Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 166. (Johnson 1988)
- 6.
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, xxix. (Butler 1990)
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
Margaret Kirkham, Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1983), xi. (Kirkham 1983)
- 10.
Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres (London: Flamingo, 1992). (Smiley 1992)
- 11.
Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision”, College English 34, no. 1 (1972): 18–30, 18. (Rich 1972)
- 12.
Ibid., 18–19. (Rich 1972)
- 13.
Rachel DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 122. (DuPlessis 1985)
- 14.
- 15.
Alicia Ostriker, “The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking”, Sings 8, no. 1 (1982): 68–90, 73. (Ostriker 1982)
- 16.
Christa Wolf, quoted in Liedeke Plate, Transforming Memories in Contemporary Women’s Rewriting (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 42. (Plate 2011)
- 17.
DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending, xi. (DuPlessis 1985)
- 18.
Joan Aiken, Mansfield Park Revisited (Naperville: Sourcebooks, 1984/2008), 80. (Aiken 1984/2008)
- 19.
Joan Aiken, The Youngest Miss Ward (London: Victor Gollancz, 1998). (Aiken 1998)
- 20.
Aiken, Eliza’s Daughter, 33. (Aiken 1994)
- 21.
In The Victorian Governess, Kathryn Hughes examines the ambiguous position of the governess later in the century. Although experiences varied, this was by no means an ideal position, for the governess was a paid dependant, generally regarded as a high servant; she was a vulnerable figure, often occupying a difficult and undefined position in the household. Kathryn Hughes, The Victorian Governess (London: Hambledon & London, 1994). (Hughes 1994)
- 22.
Joan Aiken, Emma Watson (London: Indigo, 1997), 185–186 (Aiken 1997). In Austen’s text, Aunt Maria shuns Emma following her marriage to Captain O’Brien; in Aiken’s continuation, Aunt Maria reappears, having become a widow for the second time when the Captain shot himself after squandering his wife’s fortune.
- 23.
Ibid., 202. (Aiken 1997)
- 24.
In the same decade that Emma Watson was published, Robyn Warhol conducted a feminist narratological analysis of Persuasion. She concluded that this was a feminist text because of its representation of the heroine’s access to knowledge (through the act of looking) and to pleasure (through the novel’s concern with bodily matters). No other Austen novel, Warhol argues, has so much of its action filtered through the heroine’s mind. Warhol, “The Look, the Body, and the Heroine: A Feminist Narratological Reading of Persuasion”, Novel: A Forum of Fiction 26, no. 1 (1995): 5–19, 6. (Warhol 1995)
- 25.
Aiken, Eliza’s Daughter, 316. (Aiken 1994)
- 26.
Literally, as well as rhetorically, there is no such original text, for Austen’s initial draft of Sense and Sensibility (written in 1795) has not survived. One can only speculate about what this first version must have been like and what Austen might have changed in later revisions, before the novel’s publication in 1811.
- 27.
Emma Tennant, Elinor and Marianne (London: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 73–74. (Tennant 1996)
- 28.
Ibid., 73. (Tennant 1996)
- 29.
Ibid., 92. (Tennant 1996)
- 30.
Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female Imagination (New York: Avon Books, 1975), 116. (Meyer Spacks 1975)
- 31.
Ellen Moers, Literary Women (Garden City: Doubleday, 1976), 71. (Moers 1976)
- 32.
DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending, ix. (DuPlessis 1985)
- 33.
Kristin Samuelian, “‘Piracy is Our Only Option’: Postfeminist Intervention in Sense and Sensibility”, in Troost and Greenfield, Jane Austen in Hollywood, 148–158, 156. (Samuelian 1998)
- 34.
Rebecca Dickson, “Misrepresenting Jane Austen’s Ladies”, in Troost and Greenfield, Jane Austen in Hollywood, 44–57, 55. (Dickson 1998)
- 35.
For a discussion of Austen’s connection to the eighteenth-century sentimental novel, see Marilyn Butler’s War of Ideas, especially her chapter on Sense and Sensibility.
- 36.
Looser, “Feminist Implications of the Silver Screen Austen”, 173. (Looser 1998)
- 37.
Ibid., 159. (Looser 1998)
- 38.
Alison Fell, The Mistress of Lilliput (London: Doubleday, 1999). (Fell 1999)
- 39.
Michèle Roberts, The Book of Mrs Noah (London: Methuen, 1987). (Roberts 1987)
- 40.
Aiken, The Youngest Miss Ward, 242. (Aiken 1998)
- 41.
Although Emma Tennant’s Pemberley (1993) comes near to the heritage film industry in its success (it sold 100,000 copies), her subsequent Austen novels did not enjoy such commercial luck. As Nick Turner notes, Tennant has never been nominated for any of the main prizes for fiction in the UK (the Booker, Orange or Whitbread Prizes). Other signs of commercial attention, such as film and television adaptations of her works, have similarly eluded her. Nick Turner, Post-War British Women Novelists and the Canon (London: Continuum, 2010), Chapter 5. (Turner 2010)
- 42.
DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending, xi. (DuPlessis 1985)
- 43.
Aiken, Eliza’s Daughter, 313. (Aiken 1994)
- 44.
Tennant, Emma in Love: Jane Austen’s Emma Continued (London: Fourth Estate, 1996), 204. (Tennant 1996)
- 45.
For a fuller account of Austen’s disabled relatives, see Paula Byrne’s The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things (London: HarperPress, 2013), 17–20, 44–46 (Byrne 2013). Byrne defends the Austens’ decision to lodge George with a family as a way of saving him from the workhouse (p. 18).
- 46.
Rich, “When We Dead Awaken”, 18–19. (Rich 1972)
- 47.
Aiken, Eliza’s Daughter, 256. (Aiken 1994)
- 48.
Plate, Transforming Memories, 42–43. (Plate 2011)
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Cano, M. (2017). Women’s Rewritings. In: Jane Austen and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43988-4_7
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