Jane Austen fans, it's time to widen your horizons. Austen's novels and her life story have inspired almost 30 movies and miniseries in the past two decades, and many readers think of her books as cherished old friends, revisiting them again and again.
Still, Austen wrote just six novels in her too-short life (she died at 41 in 1817), and it's possible that screenwriters — not to mention avid readers — have finally exhausted the material she left behind.
Even the once-thriving genre of Austen pastiche (including "sequels" that picked up where her novels left off as well as homages such as Bridget Jones's Diary) appears to have played itself out. The recent miniseries Lost in Austen, for example, aired to disappointing ratings in Britain and hardly registered with North American audiences.
So where can devotees turn to find other clever books about love and courtship set in a pre-Victorian milieu of balls, bankruptcies and social stratification?
They can look to the writers whose books were beloved by Jane Austen herself, the early women novelists who laid the groundwork, both stylistically and socially, for Austen's achievement. These 18th-century authors were blending satire and sentiment before Austen ever put pen to paper, and their personal lives — invariably more dramatic than Austen's — would appear positively racy if given the Hollywood treatment.
Austen paid homage to some of these writers in her own novels, borrowing character names, plot contrivances and (in the case of Northanger Abbey) the entire premise of her book. And who are we to argue with Jane Austen's literary opinions?
Here, then, is a short list of nominees for the role of "the next Jane Austen," chosen for their influence on Austen, their availability in recent editions and their chances of appealing to modern readers.
Eliza Haywood (1693-1756): There's no actual proof that Austen read Eliza Haywood's novels, but then Haywood's association with erotic fiction meant that woman of good reputation rarely admitted to enjoying her books. Haywood wrote dozens of novels and plays and pamphlets, and her political activism was almost as controversial as her sexual frankness. Haywood's steamy love scenes are notable for their descriptions of female desire — indeed, many a Haywood character actually gives way to illicit passion, though this lapse is typically followed by misery and regret.
Haywood's first novel, Love in Excess (1719), features the rakish hero Count D'Elmont, whose path to redemption is littered with a series of seductions and attempted rapes. Love in Excess was an immediate success, as were subsequent explorations of love and lust.
By the mid-18th century, however, Haywood's brand of sensational fiction had been overtaken by the sentimental novel, a genre focused on virtue and emotions. Haywood responded with her own sentimental tome, The Adventures of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751). The heroine learns to value virtue and propriety without having any serious lapses herself, but the titillating affairs of a secondary character are related with particular relish.
Therein, perhaps, lies Haywood's influence on Austen. Austen's heroines are perfectly virtuous, but each of her novels is enlivened by a spicy subplot about another woman's lust, seduction or ruin.
Charlotte Lennox (ca. 1727-1804): A failed actress and one of the first female journalists, Lennox was a relentless self-promoter who used her first novel, Harriot Stuart (1750), to win entrée into polite society. (She gave Harriot a fictionalized — and more upscale — version of her own backstory, then tacitly encouraged readers to view the book as a memoir.) Writing to support her deadbeat husband and their children, Lennox won the admiration of literary giant Samuel Johnson. Her female contemporaries, however, were less enthused: As Frances Burney put it, "though her books are generally approved nobody likes her."
Lennox's most successful novel, The Female Quixote (1752), was praised by Austen in her letters and became the model for Northanger Abbey. In The Female Quixote, the isolated heroine Arabella grows up believing that the 17th-century romances on her dead mother's bookshelf reflect contemporary mores and behaviour. This leads to foolish assumptions and comic faux pas, capped by Arabella's reckless leap into the Thames to avoid "ravishment."
