First of all Deborah, welcome to our online
book club. I’m really glad you’re here today to introduce yourself and your new
book to our readers.
Thank you for inviting me!
Of course, my first question is: “How did it come that you decided to write about Austen
fans, the so – called Janeites” ?
I’ve
been an Austen fan since I was a child, and over the years I attended a couple
of the Jane Austen Society of North America’s annual conferences, which I
loved. About eight years ago, I read
Karen Joy Fowler’s novel The Jane Austen
Book Club and decided it would be fun to found a book club like that,
dedicated to reading all the novels in order. I roped several neighbors into
the group, and during our Pride and
Prejudice discussion, a question came up about the entail, that legal
device that’s so important to the inheritance issues in P&P. The next day, trying to research this question online, I
decided to drop in on the Republic of Pemberley, the largest online Austen fan site,
which I’d vaguely heard of but never visited.
I fell instantly in love with this community of fellow Austen obsessives
and started spending inordinate amounts
of time there, to the point that I would get embarrassed when my husband caught
me at it – after all, I was supposed to be hard at work on a book on a
completely different subject. One day, I
was telling him about this wonderful community and its many quirky
personalities, and he said, “You should write a book about that.” It took me a few years, but eventually I did.
Among the
Janeites: A Journey Through the World of Jane Austen Fandom-- will be published this Tuesday by Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt.
How would you invite our Janeite friend sto grab their copy and read it
in about 50 words?
The book tells
the stories of fascinating people who adore Jane Austen – among them a lawyer with a byzantine theory about hidden Austen subtexts
and a writer of fan fiction who found her own Mr. Darcy while reimagining Pride
and Prejudice. It’s partly a chronicle of a
vibrant literary community, and partly a memoir of my own lifelong Austen-love.
Can you tell us something more about the
journey through writing and finally get to publish your “Among Janeites”?
When I
began thinking seriously about writing the book, I became aware that Claire
Harman was soon going to publish her book Jane’s
Fame, the story of Austen’s literary reputation and reception through the
centuries. I wasn’t sure if Harman was writing the book I envisioned, in which
case there wasn’t much point in my doing so as well. But once I read Jane’s Fame, I found that it dealt only glancingly with
contemporary fandom, so the way seemed to be clear and I went ahead.
For a
Jane Austen fan, researching this book was about as much fun as you can have
without breaking the law. I got to attend the last four JASNA conferences and
go on JASNA’s tour of Austen sites in England – and write it all off as a
business expense! I got to read Jane Austen fan fiction – and call it work! I
got to fly all over the country – so I could talk about Austen novels with
smart people who were equally crazy about them! Life doesn’t get much better
than that.
Have you discovered what is the X-factor of
Janeites? Have they got any common trait?
I don’t
think you can point to a single factor that explains why Janeites love Jane
Austen. One of the things I came to feel
very strongly while writing the book is that we each tend to find in Jane
Austen some reflection of our own preoccupations; we all like to imagine her as
a version of our ideal selves. That
leads to some wildly divergent interpretatons -- you get people who are convinced she was a
staunch conservative, and other people who are equally convinced she was a
radical feminist. Sometimes you wonder
if they’re reading the same books.
Does your book mention the huge, enthusiastic Janeite community which is extremely active
and prolific online?
Absolutely
– I’ve got a whole chapter on the development of the online Janeite community,
and the importance of the Internet to the development of the fandom is a theme
throughout. Although there were certainly Jane Austen fans before there was an
Internet – I was one myself – I think the existence of Jane Austen fandom, an international community of
people united by their love for Austen, is a creation of the digital age.
As a reader, what’s your opinion on fan
fiction? Jane’s world is so down-to-earth, all sense and balance do you think
fan fiction mostly respect those
features?
“Austen
fan fiction” is a huge category, encompassing everything from staid sequels to
zombie mashups, so it’s hard to generalize. I had read only a few of these
books before I started my research; I just wasn’t that interested in other
people’s reimaginings of Austen’s world. But I have to say that I had a blast
reading dozens of these books as research for my own book. They vary hugely in
quality, of course, but I found plenty that were very well-written and a few
that I thought were fine novels in their own right.
To
answer the second part of your question: it’s definitely true that much Austen
fan fiction contains a lot more melodramatic incident than Austen’s novels do
(although casual readers of Austen tend to forget how much melodrama occurs
offstage – adultery, elopement, even a duel). The truth is that it’s very, very
hard to do what Austen does with such apparent effortlessness – tell stories in
which hardly anything happens, and yet make them utterly compelling. It’s not
surprising that lesser writers have to use plot twists to provide the narrative
momentum that Austen manages to create with character and language alone.
If you could write a sequel or spin-off, what novel/character would you
choose?
The one
thing I know for sure is that I would never dare to write an Austen sequel or
spinoff. My hat is off to those authors who are brave – or foolish – enough to
try.
What is the appeal of Jane Austen and her
world to nowadays readers? What’s the secret of her huge global success ?
I
generally try to avoid answering that question, because all the answers I’ve
seen leave me pretty dissatisfied. It’s easy to point to things like her happy
endings, her strong heroines, her orderly 19th-century world, etc. – but plenty
of other novels have those same qualities and yet haven’t spawned the global
phenomenon that is Jane Austen today. I think her appeal is different for
different readers, but her worldwide popularity owes a lot to the movies,
especially the three or four excellent ones that came out around 1995 and 1996.
Those films – the Colin Firth-Jennifer Ehle Pride
and Prejudice especially – brought a lot of readers to Austen, or back to
Austen, just at the moment that the Internet was taking off, which gave all
these new fans a way to share their enthusiasm with other people. The chance to
build community around Austen propelled her popularity, I think.
If Jane had
lived nowadays what kind of novels would she have written?
It’s so
hard to say; even though she feels intensely modern to us in her brilliant
observations of family life and individual psychology, she’s also a product of
her time, and if she were instead a product of ours, she’d be someone else
entirely. If she were the same Jane Austen, transplanted to 2013? I think she’d
still find plenty of material for funny, ironic domestic dramas.
What is it that you best love in her world and
in her work?
The
list is too long! I love her characters passionately; they sometimes feel more
real to me than most of the people I meet in real life. And, as a writer myself,
I find that every re-read increases my admiration for her brilliant use of
language – how she constructs these delicious sentences that lead you happily
along in one direction and then bring you up short with a sting in the tail.
What is your favorite Austen novel, hero and
heroine?
Novel:
I usually tell people that if I were stranded on a desert island and could only
bring one, it would be Persuasion,
but that I’d spend most of my time on the island lamenting that I’d had to
leave Emma and Pride and Prejudice behind.
Hero:
I’m a Wentworth girl to the core. Anyone who can write a letter like that gets
me at “You pierce my soul.”
Heroine:
Oh, Elizabeth Bennet, of course. Sorry to be boring, but there’s a reason we
all love her.
Let’s talk men, Deborah. In a Wentworth /Darcy
challenge, who do you see as your champion?
See
above: Wentworth girl. To the core.
Well, same here. Wentworth forever! And what Austen heroine are you more alike?
I
identify very strongly with Elinor Dashwood, the cautious, sensible older
sister with the emotive younger sister.
But in bad moments I worry that I have way too much pushy, interfering Emma
Woodhouse in me.
As a lover of the Regency and a Janeite what
are you next projects to spread more Austen passion?
No more
Janeite projects on tap at the moment – after several years of whipping out a
notebook whenever I met other Janeites, I think it will be lovely to go back to
just being a fan.
That's all Deborah! Thanks a lot for taking the time to answer my questions. It was a great pleasure to talk Jane Austen with you!
About Debora Yaffe
Freelance writer Deborah Yaffe has been a passionate Jane Austen fan
since childhood. During thirteen years
as a newspaper reporter in New Jersey and California, she covered education,
the law, and state government. Her
award-winning first book, Other People’s
Children: The Battle for Justice and Equality in New Jersey’s Schools,
tells the story of the state’s efforts to provide equal educational
opportunities to rich and poor schoolchildren.
Yaffe holds a
bachelor’s degree in humanities from Yale University and a master’s degree in
politics, philosophy, and economics from Oxford University in England. She lives in central New Jersey with her
husband, her two children, and her Jane Austen Action Figure.
Find her on Twitter
(@DeborahYaffe), Facebook (www.facebook.com/amongthejaneites), and the web (www.deborahyaffe.com).