200 Years of Austen: The (After) Life of a Literary Icon
“Why do you like Miss Austen so very much?” Charlotte Brontë asked the critic George Henry Lewes in 1847. While Lewis found Jane Austen to be one of the great English novelists, Brontë found her work to be lacking in imagination, noting that she “should hardly like to live with [Austen’s] ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.” How surprised Brontë would be, then, to learn that Austen remains a consistent--and pervasive--presence in all aspects of popular culture, nearly 200 years after her death.