Jane Austen, Mortal Immortal (and Other Contrarieties of Fame)

This essay considers the modern cultural forces behind Jane Austen’s fame by re-examining the commonplace hierarchical binaries that exist within the long history of Jane Austen’s reception – such as the tensions between scholarship and fandom, or elite and popular culture. It replaces the vertical axis upon which we commonly hang these binaries with a horizontal one, and reframes these competing forces as both centrifugal and centripetal in trajectory: centrifugal in one sense, owing to the passing of time, globalisation, the proliferation of genre and media, generating a myriad of afterlives; centripetal in another sense, as a counteracting desire to retain or recover the original, mortal figure of Austen the author (whether achievable or not). This reconceptualisation helps to reveal the ways in which this tension – so often negatively portrayed as a source of division and rancour in Austen scholarship and fandom – is actually the driving energy sustaining Austen’s seemingly endless fame. It does so by briefly considering Austen’s apotheosis in relation to Romantic notions of fame; the heteroglossic nature of Austen’s novels and their central role in generating diversifying cultural forces; and, how these contrasting cultural forces operate to sustain her modern iconic status. Centripetal and centrifugal forces are revealed to operate at key stages of Austen’s reception, but not always in balance. This suggestive discussion, then, is an examination of how this balance came to be.