Before you turned to Jane Austen, you'd written biographies of Fanny Burney and Robert Louis Stevenson, among others. What drew you to Austen now?
I wanted to write a straight biography of Austen some years ago, but then two major biographies came out. So I left Austen aside and concentrated on Burney for the moment. But I kept coming back to Austen. She was a fascinating person, with such a powerful analytical mind. Though she didn't write essays, all that intellectual energy is in the books and letters.
How did that “little bit of ivory” (Austen's description of her own work) become to be such a dominant force?
I do hate that “little bit of ivory” idea, but that's also what made her genuinely popular, She knew what readers wanted and she gave it to them. But the way she gave it to them always had this extra inflection, which delights readers as well.
Your book makes it clear how alert she was to her reputation, not a naive, untutored genius toiling away in a kitchen.
That's what I hope is original and interesting. When you look at the letters, it's obvious there's a great ardour about literature. She was also in a circle of people very conscious about writing. She was in no way that slightly obstructed, daffy writer we expect to find in that generation of women writers. We are told that women's education then was second-rate, but I think a lot of them got a better education at home than the sons who were sent off to not very good schools. She was bright and ambitious and didn't have those obstacles. And of course, we know she did get published in the end.
How was she seen in her world once she acquired a measure of fame?
It must have been peculiar to be in the public eye. I do love the story of friends reporting that at tea parties, she would sit and say nothing. They thought of her as a piece of furniture, like a poker. But once they found out she was Miss Jane Austen, author of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice, they wanted to stare at her.
Jane Austen has a huge afterlife: sequels, spin-off series featuring Mr. Darcy, movies and TV series, blogs galore.
It's amazing how you can go from a real person, with real books, to icon. There was an explosion that happened at a certain point. I tried a bit to see where the viral element begins with Austen and I think that's when people stopped making the connection between the person and the work. But it does seem that there's a cultural space that people need to fill with Jane Austen.
Sometimes without reading the novels themselves?
I'm thinking of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Author Sean Graham-Smith and his publisher sat down with a list of classic novels and another of genres and just drew parallel lines between them, looking for titles such as Great Expectations and Vampires. But the fact that they hit on the instantly recognizable Austen is significant. The book sold far better than Austen's books do; there's much more money in the mutilation and exploitation of Austen than in Austen herself. That book is 85 per cent Austen, and the rest is zombie mayhem. I looked at it in a bookshop, but found the cover too upsetting to have it in my house. The young people who read it do so for reasons that have nothing to do with Austen.
How do serious Janeites take all this attention?
They're so difficult to please. I went to see the Gwyneth Paltrow film of Emma with a load of Oxford Austen scholars, and they blotted out the soundtrack with criticisms and comments. They spent much of the film picking it apart, took no joy in it.
