Aided by stage and screen, Jane Austen is fully democratized during the period 1925–75, marketed to young and old, rich and poor, scholars and general readers alike.
During World War II, Austen’s novels are again deemed fit for troop reading, while also abridged for children.
The success of Pride and Prejudice as a stage hit on both sides of the Atlantic leads to a star-studded Hollywood film in 1940. That film, in turn, boosts translations after the war in Europe and beyond.
In the 1950s and 1960s, her paperbacks are “pinked” to appeal to the newly empowered generation of female college students. The feminist message is so successful that it has the unintended consequence of shifting Austen’s audience almost exclusively to women.
THEATER
It is hard to overstate the influence of theatrical performance upon Austen’s reputation before film. Numerous pens dramatized new versions of her novels.
Squire, Eileen H. A., and J. C. Squire. Pride and Prejudice: A Play in Four Acts.Surrey: William Heinemann Ltd., 1929.
Playbills for Helen Jerome’s “Pride and Prejudice.”St. James’s Theatre, London, 1936.Illustrated by Rex Whistler.
Play Pictorial68, no. 408. (1938).
The monthly magazine reported on productions in London’s West End. This photo-filled issue is dedicated entirely to the production of Helen Jerome’s Pride and Prejudice at the St. James’s Theatre.
Brown, Helen. Jane Austen: A Play. London: Duckworth, 1939.
This theatrical work by Austen’s great-great-grandniece was inspired by A. A. Milne’s published remark that Jane Austen’s conversational style resembled that of Elizabeth Bennet.
Glennon, Gordon.Emma: A Play. London: Macmillan, 1945.
This three-act play was produced by the popular film star Robert Donat, who worked as a theatrical promoter during the Second World War. Opening on regional tour at Rugby Repertory Theatre on August 24, 1943, Emma debuted to West End audiences at the St. James’s Theatre in London on February 7, 1945.
Kendall, Jane. Pride and Prejudice: Dramatized from Jane Austen’s Novel. Chicago: Dramatic Publishing Company, 1967.
Copy of Mary Lindauer, who played Lady Catherine.
HOLLYWOOD
The screen adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier, took the world by storm, despite anachronistic hoop-skirted costumes that made the project’s location look more like the antebellum American South than Georgian England. The emphatic comedy of the film also belied its serious purpose as war propaganda. Released in 1940, at a time when Americans were hotly debating whether to join England in the fight against Hitler, the film upholds the idyll of an innocent and beloved England.
Pride and Prejudice. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, [ca. 1931].
This Universal Library edition is inscribed by the actress Greer Garson on the flyleaf: “To Barrett C. Kiesling— | in memory of ‘Elizabeth’ | of the film— | Greer Garson. | Feb. 1st 1940.” Kiesling was the director of publicity for MGM Studios.
Pride and Prejudice.Movie tie-in edition. London and Glasgow: Collins Clear-Type Press, [ca. 1940].
WARTIME JANE
Austen is sent to the front of yet another world war when Penguin includes two of her novels in the small number of paperbacks given to British troops fighting in remote areas. In 1946, during post-conflict reconstruction, a book about Austen was distributed for free to “The Fighting Forces of the Allied Nations” by the “Services Central Book Depot.”
Kaye-Smith, Sheila, and G. B. Stern. Talking of Jane Austen. London, Toronto, Melbourne, and Sydney: British Publishers Guild, 1946.
The torn sticker on the front cover of this Services Edition identifies the copy as government surplus acquired by W. H. Smith & Son. The back cover reads, “this book must not be resold.”
Souvenir postcards of “Jane Austen’s Bedroom, Chawton” and “The Austens’ Drawing Room, Chawton.” [ca. 1953-60].
Black-and-white photographic postcards of the cottage where Austen resided from 1809 to 1817. The London solicitor Thomas Edward Carpenter acquired the cottage in Chawton in 1947 for £3,000 and founded a museum there in honor of his son, Lieutenant Philip Carpenter, who had died in action in 1944. When the museum opened on 23 July 1949, only the drawing room was accessible to the public, the rest being occupied by tenants. Jane’s bedroom opened to the public in 1953.
PINKING AUSTEN
In the 1960s, as the number of women college students increased, publishers responded by appealing to female consumers with budget paperbacks of literary classics. Not only did Jane Austen become ubiquitous amongst paperback reprints on college campuses, but as publishers contrived to appeal to women, she was “pinked” as a pseudo-feminist badge of honor. These visual tactics were so successful in gendering her literary reputation that, unintentionally, they shifted an author who had hitherto been read by both men and women to one now often dismissed as “chick lit.”
SCHOLARSHIP
Apperson, G. L.A Jane Austen Dictionary. London: Cecil Palmer, 1932.
We selected this Janeite dictionary to stand in for the explosion of scholarly works and literary criticism published during this period. In addition, jampacked shelves in the peripheries of our Grolier exhibition room (unmarked top shelves and faux bookcases) demonstrate the plethora of works devoted exclusively to the study of Jane Austen.
TRANSLATING AUSTEN
Austen becomes a global brand once she becomes widely available in inexpensive translations. Often penned anonymously, cheap translations can embrace radical cuts and surprising packaging choices. For example, many European paperbacks repurpose Hollywood glamour so that even non-Austen movies can market Austen in translation. In the 1940s, Olivier-turned-Heathcliff in the film Wuthering Heights (1939) becomes, for example, the face of a Spanish Northanger Abbey. In the 1960s, an Italian teen edition of Pride and Prejudice sells Austen with Tolstoy. Its hand-drawn cover illustration joins familiar movie stills from the Italian-American film of War and Peace (1956), starring Audrey Hepburn, Mel Ferrer, and Henry Fonda. And in 1973, everyone in Europe would have recognized the pouty blond bombshell Brigitte Bardot as the celebrity inspiration for a Spanish translation by Costa Clavell of Pride and Prejudice,printed in Barcelona.
