Whither the Jane Austen Fandom?

The term "fandom" is probably most strongly associated with science fiction, where Hugo Gernsback did much to cultivate a self-aware, self-identifying, active, visible community among fans of such fiction in the earliest days of its history as a genre. However, science fiction was by no means the first scene of such a phenomenon. Certainly my impression reading Julian Symons is that Sherlock Holmes had a fandom decades before Gernsback (such that Holmes may be the first really great example of the phenomenon). At the same time one finds fandom outside the realm of what is ordinarily regarded as "popular culture," with the following Jane Austen enjoys perhaps the most striking such example.

The question on my mind recently was just how long that would go on being the case. Fandom itself generally seems to be in decline, certainly going by what many say of the science fiction fandom, and the factors behind that--a result not just of the decadence of science fiction as a genre about which I have written so many times, but of how people generally experience our entertainment-saturated era. The conventional wisdom has it that, enjoying what is at least superficially a superabundance of choices, and not exactly encouraged to develop their attention spans, people sample a great many enthusiasms rather than immersing themselves very deeply in any of them--and one might add, favor the "relatable" over the pleasures of the exotic and faraway--so that the conditions and outlook that gave rise to the old-fashioned "fan" are a thing of the past.

If anything, the Jane Austen fandom would seem much more vulnerable. After all, it is ultimately print-based--the media adaptations of Austen's work numerous, but essentially secondary (does anyone consider someone who never read the books a genuine "Jane Austen fan?") at a time in which the habit of reading, and especially reading long works of fiction for pleasure, is in sharp decline. It also does not take much imagination to see that if even the most commercially-oriented contemporary work for young adults is not commanding the audience that it did a decade ago anything such as what Austen wrote is that much less likely to speak to their passions, as she not only writes of another era, but does so from within that other era, with its perspective and conventions, and with which they can have little patience, and which they can scarcely seem able to wrap their minds around. So does it go with, for example, that stress on chastity, propriety, reputation that plunged the Bennet family into crisis when one of their daughters ran off with Mr. Wickham, such that, as seen in the 2005 film version of Pride and Prejudice, the movie's makers had little choice but to greatly compress that very large and important part of the book at the cost of not just faithfulness to the original but the fabric of the drama--all as given their intent of reaching a really wide audience it was, again, natural for them to reimagine Elizabeth Bennet as a far more lively character than the original (her having a little more sensibility and a little less sense, so to speak). Indeed, that cliché of the depiction of the Austen fandom, the young woman picking up Pride and Prejudice and identifying with Elizabeth and being swept up in her story and swept away by it is something I find very hard to picture as a phenomenon of the 2020s--the more in as we are told that Bridgerton is more the present generation's speed. Bridgerton, of course, would never have become the phenomenon that it is without Austen and her less celebrated imitators and successors creating a genre of love stories romanticizing the Regency era so popular that an identity politics-obsessed Hollywood would give it its "makeover," but that fact does not necessarily translate into interest in the antecedents, certainly in a different medium, as written in and for another time. Just as those who enjoy today's space opera and superhero tales generally do not go back and look at the old pulp tales in which those forms were born, let alone become devoted to them, it seems to me that only very rarely will those enjoying wokefied twenty-first century versions of Regency romance on streaming pick up Austen's old books.

Instead the declining interest would seem likely to translate to the withering away of the old cohort of enthusiasts as, like so many giants of English and world letters who have become merely "obscure" names to even those who pass themselves off as literate today, just something they get assigned in school and never bother with again. At least, for as long as schools continue to assign their students literary reading--a practice that may well be on its way out in an era in which the Untermenschen who hold power at every turn show themselves out to kill the humanities, and indeed, humanity itself, in their Apocalypse-like chase after the godhood they and the media endlessly stroking them believe they deserve.