Happy Birthday Jane!

As I came to Jane Austen late, I didn’t have the experience of living past her age of 41 and reflecting on mortality and legacies and Holmes of course never dies, he just putters away with his bees on the Sussex Downs taking on those occasional cases of national import. Both Austen and Holmes, of course, have never been more alive than at present, with perhaps Holmes having the slight edge with the new Holmes movie and the second season of Sherlock on the BBC.

Although I don’t know of a Jane Austen movie or series in the works — even Pride and Prejudice and Zombies seems to be stalled — the 200th anniversary of Sense and Sensibility brought that novel to the fore and I’m sure 2013 and the similar anniversary of Pride and Prejudice will see something new on the small or large screen. (Of course I stupidly forgot that Austen adaptations are being filmed constantly by relatively low budget production companies, witness Scents and Sensibility, which I saw at the AGM.)

But in the case of both Jane Austen and Arthur Conan Doyle (who some scurrilously suggest is the author of the Holmes stories), the most enjoyable pastime is still reading the original works, sometimes forgotten in the adaptations, pastiches, continuations and sometimes outright fantasy. At the recent Austen birthday tea in Denver, I was babbling, as I am wont to do, of the various adaptations, pastiches, etc., and so many of my companions had no idea what I was talking about. No, they were not being as hard to believe as P.D. James who said she had no idea of the cottage industry surrounding Jane. My companions had simply never read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or Jane and the Damned or Death Comes to Pemberley.

Instead my companions are content, probably every five to 10 years I would guess, to re-read the six novels and maybe Lady Susan and other Austen Juvenilia. And that is it, with exceptions made for an Andrew Davies series or movie. It’s akin to my rereading every five to 10 years The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, long before Peter Jackson’s magnificent films. I was content with that and did not need to visit theonering.net (OK, it didn’t exist until long past my first blush of youth) or watch the movies or the deleted scenes or the making of documentaries (again, they didn’t exist).

Of course this is all rather disingenuous as I write two, three or is it four? Austen-related or inspired stories and write a blog about Holmes and Austen. But it is a reminder to crack into the Baring-Gould or start that annotated Persuasion and read the sources of the world that has grown up around them.