Devoney Looser, _The Making of Jane Austen_

A PROMISING PREMISE--Looser is looking at the reputation of Jane Austen over the last two hundred years as reflected in phenomena beyond the critical or academic tradition: book illustrations, travel guides to Austen country, theatrical adaptations both amateur and professional, the 1940 film with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier. The Idea of Jane as bricolage, with thousands of contributors.

She turns up some interesting finds. The 1935 stage version (not Colin Firth) probably inaugurates the tradition of a sexy Darcy; both suffragists and anti-suffragists claimed Austen as ally. William Henry George Pellew wrote the first dissertation on Austen in 1883 and sent a copy to Henry James.

The book never gets airborne, though, somehow, It puts one in mind of the Old Historicism, the pre-Greenblatt kind. An extraordinary amount of time in the archives has been logged, but nothing very audacious is asserted, and the picture of how Jane Austen became Jane Austen is left little more illuminated than it was.

What is clear from Looser's account is that devotion to Jane has been around for quite a while. The process began fairly early--1870, the date of Austen-Leigh's memoir, is sometimes cited as Year One of the Austen renaissance, but Looser demonstrates it was well established by then--and people were surprised by its extent and robustness from as early as the 1890s. This generation's boom of film and television adaptations was preceded by an earlier generation's boom of stage adaptations.

But why Austen rather than, I don't know, Frances Burney? Maria Edgeworth? Or even George Sand? What would Charlotte Brontë think if she knew that Austen was much more widely read, even in France, than George Sand? (On the French Amazon, Orgueil et prejugés has 376 reviews, La mare au diable 47.)