Jane Austen, still universally acknowledged at 250

By Rachel Lloyd, Deputy culture editor,The Economist

Few writers remain the height of fashion 250 years after they were born. No one talks about Charles Lamb as a must-read essayist, or Elizabeth Benger as a trendy poet. But two and a half centuries on from her birth (on December 16th 1775), Jane Austen stands unchallenged as the greatest romance novelist of all time. “Pride and Prejudice” alone has sold more than 20m copies. The coming year will be marked by declarations of admiration from her legions of fans around the world.

Many will don breeches or gowns in Austen’s honour. The English city of Bath, where she lived in 1801-06, will host several costume balls. Academic symposiums will take place in countries including Australia, France and Japan.

At Austen’s last residence, in Chawton, Hampshire, a permanent exhibition about her creative process will be unveiled. The museum is also staging a series of festivals—each dedicated to a different novel—and an eight-day birthday celebration in December. Several books about her life and times will be published. A television show, “Miss Austen”, examining Jane’s relationship with her sister, Cassandra, will air on PBS in America and the BBC in Britain.

Gen z is surprisingly keen. There have been hundreds of thousands of videos on TikTok about Austen and her work—many of them about her brooding romantic hero, Mr Darcy. To appeal to this younger crowd, Penguin will republish all six of Austen’s novels with colourful new covers.

“Pride and Prejudice” remains the most popular of Austen’s novels, with numerous film and tv adaptions. It has also inspired many other stories. Helen Fielding says she “pinched the plot” and the character of Mr Darcy for her blockbuster novel, “Bridget Jones’s Diary” (a fourth Bridget Jones film will be released in 2025). An adaptation of “Unmarriageable”, a novel by Soniah Kamal which transposes the story of “Pride and Prejudice” to Pakistan, is also due to start filming in 2025.

It is no coincidence that “Bridgerton”, Netflix’s hit Regency-era romance, opens in 1813, the year “Pride and Prejudice” was published. The show, based on a series of books by Julia Quinn, borrows Austen’s marriage plots and has a perspicacious, ironic narrator typical of Austen’s tales. In the latest season, a bookish character can even be seen toting a copy of “Emma”.

Given this astonishing cultural legacy, it is striking that Austen’s tombstone in Winchester Cathedral makes no mention of her writing. There will be some redress in 2025. A life-size statue is to be installed in the cathedral gardens, depicting the author beside her desk, with paper, quill and ink at the ready.  ■