The year 2025 has been devoted to the novelist Jane Austen because of her quarter-of-a-millennium birthday anniversary on December 16. Academics have been rushing to get crossover books in print, museums have been assembling exhibitions, publishers have been releasing handsome matched sets of the six novels, Austen societies have been organizing conferences, teas, or Regency balls, and newspapers and magazines have been flooding the Internet with articles on why we all still read Jane Austen.
She has achieved a status not unlike Shakespeare’s. Her house in the village of Chawton and gravesite in Winchester Cathedral are places of pilgrimage and were very busy this summer. The house in which she died was restored by its owner, Winchester College; every slot was booked before the first day of opening in June. Those faithful who could not visit England could see sacred items on tour: her portable writing slope, entrusted to the British Library in London, visited the HOTA Gallery in Queensland, Australia, for four months; Jane’s turquoise ring and a lock of her hair, normally on display in Chawton, spent the summer in the Morgan Library in New York. And relics were for sale at many price points. Sotheby’s auctioned a manuscript letter, poem, and several first editions in October. For those less affluent, the British Library released a facsimile of the 1813 Pride and Prejudice. At least two different versions of the turquoise ring were on offer as well as copies of the topaz crosses owned by Jane and sister Cassandra, gifts from their brother Charles in 1801.
Why does everyone want a piece of Jane? Why has she been so enduring? Probably because she can be whatever we want her to be. It is easy to see ourselves and our desires in her books. To one, she shows a fairy-tale ideal—characters who dress well when travelling, address each other courteously, and who find true love. To another, her characters are sassy revolutionaries, pushing against the limits placed on women, willing to speak truth to power, and determined to receive the respect they deserve. To the conservative, Austen is conservative; to the radical, she is radical; to romantics, she is a romantic; to writers, she is a role model. We see our faces and desires reflected in her person and her stories.
How did this love of Austen become so widespread? Her status does not depend solely on the novels. The turn came in 1995, when a cluster of screen adaptations converged: the BBC Persuasion, Paramount’s Clueless, the BBC’s miniseries Pride and Prejudice, and, finally, Sense and Sensibility from Columbia Pictures. The surge of interest might have remained limited had it not coincided with the rise of VHS tape ownership. For the first time, viewers could watch—and rewatch—adaptations at home without a visit to Blockbuster. The BBC capitalized on this by releasing 12,000 six-tape sets of Pride and Prejudice a few days before the final episode of its celebrated miniseries aired, and they sold out in two hours. Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle’s courtship was replayed endlessly on televisions throughout Britain and, the following year, in the United States. Austen ceased to be an occasional viewing experience.
Nearly thirty years later, women watching Darcy/Firth on a loop diving into that Derbyshire pond remains a comic cultural reference point (evoked most recently in the 2023 film Barbie). A decade after the BBC series, the 2005 feature film Pride & Prejudice also benefited from private viewing at home: more than 780,000 DVDs were sold in the first week that it was available and Matthew MacFadyen’s hand flex became a meme joining Darcy’s Dive.
The move of Austen into wider name recognition was also aided by the Internet. Before 1995, for most people, “going online” meant dialing into the computer of a content provider—CompuServe, Prodigy, or America Online—and participating in their proprietary forums, all the while paying by the hour for connection time. The Internet was out there, but it was the concern of universities and research centers. Then, in 1993, Tim Berners-Lee released software into the public domain that made it possible for anyone with the technical skills and server space to create and host web pages containing hyperlink, text, and image.
Popular computer rag PC Magazine devoted much of its October 11, 1994, issue to explaining to the public what the Internet was, how to get on it, and what to do once there. In 1995, internet browsers started to be packaged with new computers and made access to multimedia pages accumulating on the World Wide Web possible for anyone with a computer, dial-up modem, and internet service through a university or college—or America Online, the first ISP to give its subscribers easy Internet access. In the October 10, 1995, issue, one year after its first cover story on the subject, PC Magazine wrote “The Internet’s the thing.”
Four days later, BBC television in the UK broadcast Episode 4 of Pride and Prejudice, the episode containing the scene where Mr. Darcy dives into a pond to cool his ardor for Elizabeth Bennet. It was not long before Austen sites started popping up on the Internet, and fans of the films and the novels could form online communities that shared text and image. The Republic of Pemberley’s header graphic featured an animated gif watercolor of Darcy’s Dive, suggesting that it knew what had attracted its audience. Writers of Austen-themed (well, Colin-Firth-themed) fan fiction were able to find audiences at this site, and some of those authors also found mainstream publishers.
Readers of Austen were now no longer limited to the six complete novels and fragments. A number of these new books were continuations or prequels. Many retold Austen’s stories from other points of view, like Jo Baker’s Longbourn, which shows the action of the novel through the eyes of a servant in the Bennett household, or Janice Hadlow’s The Other Bennet Sister, centered on middle daughter Mary. Others were variations that significantly changed the plotlines, settings, or genres, like Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, to choose a celebrated example. Many novelists did a Clueless and resituated Austen’s stories in the present day.
In recent years, a significant number of these novelistic updates have centered on immigrant and minority cultures in the UK, Canada, and the USA. Writers such as Sonali Dev, Sayantani DasGupta, and Uzma Jalaluddin use Austen as a palimpsest for exploring family life and romance in South Asian communities. Ibi Zoboi and Nikki Payne recast Austen with African American, Latin American, and Native American characters. And the sheer volume of such Austen-inflected literature shows that Austen is not a writer just for genteel Anglophiles; she really does allow all of us to see ourselves and our desires in her stories. And many readers of these books will find their way to Austen, so it’s all good.
Film adaptations have also been crucial to Austen’s international reach. She has always had readers beyond the English-speaking world, but video dramatically expanded that audience. Brazil offers a particularly clear case study. Shortly after 1940, following the South-American distribution of MGM’s feature film Pride and Prejudice, the first translation of Austen into Brazilian Portuguese appeared, with the film’s stars (Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson) prominently featured on the book cover. Later Austen media adaptations reinforced that foothold. For example, a 1965 photo novel of Pride and Prejudice published by Capricho reached at least 350,000 Brazilian readers. Likewise, subtitled releases of Sense and Sensibility (1995) and Pride & Prejudice (2005) paved the way for TV Globo’s Orgulho e Paixão (2018), a 162-episode telenovela set in 1910 on a coffee plantation. Drawing characters and plotlines from multiple Austen novels, it merged Austen and the national culture and was hugely popular. As a result, membership in the Jane Austen Society of Brazil—founded shortly after the 2005 film—spiked and is now nearly as large as that of the United States society. The Facebook Group, Jane Austen Brasil, has 4700 members.
Austen’s novels are now widely available in Brazil in translation and bilingual editions, most of them featuring film stills on their covers, visually linking the reading experience to the viewing one. And it is not just Brazil. Streaming platforms have given Austen a global reach. Over the past two decades, Amazon Prime Video and Netflix have served as international film libraries for Austen adaptations. Amazon offers six different versions each of Emma and Pride and Prejudice, plus some Austen-themed Bollywood films, stage musicals, and contemporary updates. The classic 1940 Pride and Prejudice is available with subtitles in “English [CC], Español (España), Español (Latinoamérica), Français, Italiano, Nederlands, Polski, Português (Portugal), [and] Suomi.” That alone says something about the international market Amazon Prime expects to reach with an 85-year-old film.
Netflix grasps even more of the planet than Amazon. Its own 2022 adaptation of Persuasion offers subtitles in more than thirty languages and dubbing in eighteen. As a result, the snarky adaptation spent three weeks in Netflix’s overall Global Top Ten and reached the Top Ten in ninety-one countries the company tracks. In Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Ukraine, and Serbia, among others, the film was in the top ten for five weeks in a row. Unsurprisingly, stills from that production appear on the covers of recent translations of the novel. Netflix has already announced its own Pride and Prejudice for 2026, ensuring that yet more viewers will get to meet Austen on a screen and eventually in a book.
*****
In 1783, Jane Austen’s brother Edward was formally adopted by the Knights, relations on his father’s side, and he eventually inherited three Knight estates—Godmersham, Chawton, and Steventon. As a result of his good fortune, he was able to provide a house in the village of Chawton for his two sisters and mother. With financial contributions from her other brothers, Jane finally acquired, if not a room of her own and five hundred pounds a year, something close enough. The stability she achieved allowed her to revise and publish the books she had been working on and to write several more. In a way, it was Edward’s adoption by the Knights that made those novels possible.
Similarly, Austen’s adoption by modern media has made her current superstardom possible. We would not be globally celebrating her birthday in 2025 with such verve if it had not been for the films, television serials, and fan fiction, both amateur and professional. Austen has shifted from just being a writer of words to an author associated with both words and images. (By the way, Austen has also been adapted into manga in Japan and by Marvel Comics in the US; she also has two graphic biographies, both published this year.) She has also been remade into a woman for the 21st century. She has been shifted from the staid to the sexy, from the classic to the cool: witness the success of Devoney’s Looser’s Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane or the film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
That does not mean that the films and novelistic updates are necessarily Austen “dumbed down” for the present age. As the 1995 serial that jump-started it all has shown, the subtlety and complexity of images can be moving and meaningful. Austen’s work has thriven because it could adapt to new circumstances created by the Internet and an image-driven culture, making it possible to touch new audiences that otherwise might not give her 19th-century novels a look.
