What makes
"Pride and Prejudice"
such a success?
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE POPULARITY OF JANE AUSTEN’S ‘PRIDE AND PREJUDICE’ IN AND OUT OF ACADEMIA
Literature review resented to the discipline of Research and Context
English and History
Plymouth University
December 2018
Few literary works seem to have please both scholars and popular taste, and even fewer had the admiration given to them increased throughout the years and were used for the most different purposes in and out of academia. ‘Pride and Prejudice’ (from now on referred simply as P&P) fulfils all these criteria. A pertinent question arises then – what makes this early 19th-century romantic story between a witty, lower-class young lady and a rich but aloof young man so passionately explored from classrooms to drawing rooms?
Aiming to answer this question, relevant and up-to-date sources were searched using the traditional ways via libraries’ archives and databases, but especially using a refining feature in the Google search engine – “site:.ac.uk”. This method proved reliable and much more fruitful, especially considering the innovative nature of the subject, as most of the newest sources were available only in some university’s digital media, most of them, theses and dissertations. Core.ac.uk proved to be one of the best websites to search such documents.
Once a considerable amount of material was retrieved, an interesting fact about Jane Austen’s P&P success emerged; first, its different academic uses beyond those of language and literature (here called academic approach); and, second, and most surprisingly, its impact on the public, mainly expressed in the production of ‘amateur’ literature (specified on the non-academic approach).
Academic Approach
The sources evidenced that the depth of admiration for Jane Austen’s works by scholars is a well-settled subject. A good example is the textbook "The Cambridge Companion to Pride and Prejudice", published to celebrate the bicentenary anniversary of P&P’s first publication. As pointed out in the Preface by its editor, Janet Todd (2013), the main objective of this publication was to investigate “some of the sources of the novel’s power through the ages” (p. xi). About this ‘power’, Skinner (2008) says, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a new scholarly edition of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ has to be ‘an indispensable resource for all scholars…’” (p. 612). The University of Southampton even created an exclusive Master of Arts degree in Jane Austen’s life and work.
The sources also revealed that P&P became an important teaching ‘tool’ in universities in the most distinctive ways, transcending its traditional use; P&P is now used to help students understand time and space in texts through the study of different places (Butt, 2016), regency gentlemen’s behaviour (Tamrin, 2018), architecture (Nixon, 2015), and even philosophy, by exploring what “make readers, especially women, perceive Darcy as a figure of desire” (Zaballos, 2014), to mention some.
Non-Academic Approach
This second approach ended up being more complicated, with fewer sources. "The Cambridge Companion" seemed to be one of the best and more relevant textbooks. Todd (2013) says that P&P is not just “named in many surveys as Britain’s best-loved work of fiction” but “is now a global brand, with film and television adaptations” (p. xi). Chapters like “The Cult of Pride and Prejudice and its Author”, “Film and Television”, and “Pride and Proliferation” cover extensively the public interest.
However, the question remained: Why does the public love P&P so much?
In her PhD thesis, White (2010) mentions that the answer might be found in the miniseries “Pride and Prejudice” broadcasted by BBC in 1995, which seems to have “initiated a wave of ‘Austenmania’” (p. 29). After the miniseries, the great public appreciation seemed to have evolved into something beyond reading and re-reading the novel; with the improvement of social media, but especially writing platforms, fans began to produce their own texts, or ‘variations’, from the heart of this beloved story, filling, for example, ‘gaps’ in the storyline (what was said between Mr Darcy and Lady Catherine after she visited Elizabeth to give him hope?). Thomas (2007) had not only identified this event as a new phenomenon called fanfiction – with an exclusive website, Fanfiction.net, created in 1998 (Buecher, 2002) – but also said that “many contributors [fan variations] also openly acknowledge their debt to television adaptations of the novel, most notably the 1995 BBC production”.
Unfortunately, there is no data about Fanfiction.net from that time, but today this website is one of the leading social writing platforms, with around 2,500 canons (books like P&P) whose fan’s variations are uploaded and read with no cost. P&P ranks in 24th position, with 4,600 variations (for comparison, on 7th December 2018, Harry Potter’s was in first place with over 790,000 uploads, while Jane Eyre, in 126th, had 411 variations). Each variation can vary from hundreds of words to a complete novel’s length. From an academic point of view, Herzing (2005) says that “the genre of fanfiction exists as a legitimate form of poststructuralist deconstruction” (p. 17) and for being “considered entertainment, a creative hobby, it might be an interest of educators to capitalize on its value” (p. 66).
Alongside this fanfiction world, a profitable market also emerged, finding a new niche in the historical romance genre; in a quick search on Amazon UK for ‘P&P variations’, the result surpassed 1,000 books. Unfortunately, there are very few studies on this subject. Nedregård (2014) and Strong (2018) analysed some of those published P&P variations; Hateley (2013) explored modern adaptations, while Mulvey-Roberts (2014) and Koballa (2013) discussed the gothic version “Pride, Prejudice and Zombies”, recently adapted to cinema.
Conclusion
As shown in this review, the academic interest in P&P is both settled and extended to other fields of knowledge. On the other hand, few studies explore the reasons behind the increasingly widespread interest in reading and writing about P&P or even the quality of those works. Some explanations have emerged, but further investigation is required. If Austen’s texts are regarded as “perfectly constructed and perfectly plotted” (Halsey, no date) and that every event described in her books contribute to make everything relevant and more interesting, perhaps a further investigation of how these Austen’s features appear in fanfiction or variation books would be a new and exciting frontier to be explored.
References
Buecher, M. (2002) ‘Families: learning corner: pop fiction’, Time, 159 (9). Available at: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1001950,00.html (Accessed: 12 December 2018)
Butt, E. (2016) Locating pride and prejudice. Available at: http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/dighum/2016/12/14/locating-pride-and-prejudice/ (Accessed: 07 December 2018).
Halsey, K. (no date) Austen: pride and prejudice. [Online lecture in Massolit], Introduction. Stirling University. 07 December. Available at: https://www.massolit.io/courses/austen-pride-and-prejudice (Accessed: 07 December 2018)
Hateley, E. (2013) ‘What a fine thing for our girls!’: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in Contemporary Young Adult Literature. Available at: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/63296/1/Hateley_-_Austen_PandP_in_YA_Literature.pdf (Accessed 07 December 2018).
Herzing, M. (2005) The internet world of fan fiction. Master thesis. Virginia Commonwealth University. Available at: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/51291784.pdf (Accessed: 08 December 2018).
Koballa, K. (2013) The waltzing dead: the merit of pride, prejudice and zombies. End-of-course dissertation. East Carolina University. Available at: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/71975916.pdf (Accessed: 07 December 2018).
Mulvey-Roberts, M. (2014) ‘Mashing-up Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and the limits of adaptation’, The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, 13. pp. 17-37. Available at: http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/26586 (Accessed 07 December 2018).
Nedregård, M. (2014) Shades of Darcy - an analysis of three novelistic responses to pride and prejudice. Master thesis. University of Oslo. Available at: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/30829987.pdf (Accessed: 07 December 2018).
Nixon, L. (2015) Literature of the English country house: finding the home of Mr Darcy. Available at: http://soeblog.group.shef.ac.uk/literature-of-the-english-country-house-finding-the-home-of-mr-darcy/ (Accessed: 07 December 2018).
Skinner, G. (2008) ‘The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen – General Editor Janet Todd Pride and Prejudice – Edited by Pat Rogers’. Review of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 31 (4), pp. 612-614. doi: https://doi-org.plymouth.idm.oclc.org/10.1111/j.1754-0208.2008.00042.x
Strong, J. (2018) 'Pride and Prejudice and Permutations', in: Adapting the Canon: Translation, Visualisation, Interpretation. Cambridge: Legenda. Available at: https://repository.uwl.ac.uk/id/eprint/4318/ (Accessed 07 December 2018.
Tamrin, A. (2018) ‘The Reflection of Regency Gentleman in Pride and Prejudice and Emma by Jane Austen’, Journal of Language Teaching and Literature, 5(2), pp. 212-218. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.30605/ethicallingua.v5i2.1033
Thomas, B. (2007) ‘Canons and fanons: literary fanfiction online’, Digitial Dichtung, 37. Available at: https://staffprofiles.bournemouth.ac.uk/display/journal-article/5006 (Accessed 07 December 2018).
Todd, J. (ed.) (2013) The Cambridge Companion to 'Pride and Prejudice'. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Companions to Literature). doi: 10.1017/CCO9780511844591.
White, R. (2010) The Classic-Novel Adaptation from 1995 to 2009. PhD thesis. Durham University. Available at: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/443/1/THESIS_PDF.pdf?DDD11 (Accessed: 07 December 2018).
Zaballos, B. (2014) Darcy as a Cultural Icon: Deconstructing Desire. End-of-course dissertation. Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona. Available at: https://ddd.uab.cat/pub/tfg/2014/123363/TFG_begonasanchez.pdf (Accessed: 07 December 2018).