Jane Austen For Dummies (67 page)

In Alexander McCall Smith's novel,
The Sunday Philosophy Club
(Knopf Publishing Group), the philosopher and heroine philosophizes that “It is a great honor as a philosopher or as a writer to become an adjective” (166). (McCall Smith, himself, is called Austen-like in his writing.) Readers can be Austenesque through books that enable them to have tea with Jane Austen and to cook foods mentioned in her novels (like the white soup Bingley promises to serve at the Netherfield Ball in
Pride and Prejudice
) and letters using
The Jane Austen Cookbook
(McClelland and Stewart, Ltd.).

Novelists can also write Austenesque books.

The aristocratic Dame Emily Eden (1797–1869) wrote two novels, now published in one volume,
The Semi-Attached Couple
and
The Semi-Detached House
(Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Virago Modern Classics Series), that are social comedies like Austen's novels. Both of these books are concerned with love, money, and manners. Indeed, novels that focus on these themes or that are social comedies tend to be viewed as Austenesque.

The New Yorker
's review of Ian McEwan's
Atonement
(2002) called it “semi-Austenesque.” In fact,
Atonement
(Knopf Publishing Group) quotes a few lines from
Northanger Abbey
as its epigraph.

The cover of the U.S. paperback edition of Susanna Clarke's international bestseller,
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
(publisher Bloomsbury USA), quotes a review from
Time
magazine saying the book “combines the dark mythology of fantasy with the delicious social comedy of Jane Austen. . . .”

For readers interested in going back, imaginatively, to the Regency period in which Austen lived and about which she wrote, the most Austenesque novelist is Georgette Heyer (1902–1974), queen of the Regency Romances, a style that she created. The Regency Romance is a sub-genre of the genre “romance,” in which a man and woman find romantic love and live happily ever after. Regency romances subscribe to the mores and conventions of the Regency period (1811–1820), as seen in such Heyer titles as
Regency Buck
and
Sprig Muslin
. (For information on the Regency/Georgian period relevant to Regency romances, see Chapters 2 and 12.)

Jane Austen is so popular today that even people who've never read her novels (gasp!) know her name and recognize at least the title of
Pride and Prejudice,
her most famous book. People may even recognize who Darcy is — or at least know that Colin Firth played Darcy in the televised miniseries of the novel. Because Austen's books are “courtship novels,” dealing with how men and women relate to each other and connect, they've been used as source material for advice manuals on the contemporary dating scene:

Anything to do with Jane Austen is an eye-catcher nowadays because she's extremely popular. So some books use Austen's name in the title just to gain attention:

Other titles focus on issues other than dating. For example, Karen Joy Fowler's
The Jane Austen Book Club
is a charming novel set in contemporary California about six readers who form the reading group of the title. Given that Austen writes about human nature, which is always the same, Fowler's characters experience events similar to those experienced by several of Austen's characters. The reader also attends the book club's six meetings — one for each Austen novel — and listens to Fowler's characters discuss the novels. (For info on forming a book club — on Jane Austen, of course — go to Chapter 15.)

Other writers sometimes give Austen a little tip of the hat, acknowledging their delight in her work. In the Harry Potter books, J. K. Rowling calls the cat at Harry's school Mrs. Norris after the nasty, controlling Mrs. Norris (Aunt Norris) in
Mansfield Park
. And in
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone,
when Dumbledore first appears in Chapter 1, his eyes are “light, bright, and sparkling” — the phrase (minus Austen's “&” between “light” and “bright”) Austen used in her letter to Cassandra when she joked about needing to make
Pride and Prejudice
a darker novel (Letter, February 4, 1813).