This month marks the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth, and across the country and the world, Austen fans are promenading forth to mark the occasion with balls, tours, and fetes. There is no denying that Austen’s influence, even all these years later, is immense. But, on the surface, it’s hard to fathom why.
Austen’s novels present a world of rigid social etiquette and constraining courtship rituals that seem about as far from the modern dating scene as it’s possible to get. But maybe that’s the answer. Perhaps there’s something in an Austen romance that is actually more desirable than the dating apps and casual hookups of today.
In a way, Jane Austen is an odd spokeswoman for the joys of romance. The details of her personal life are scanty (due to the fact that her sister Cassandra probably destroyed all the juicy bits of her letters), and we have no authenticated image of her face. She never married, she died young, and she wrote only six complete novels. But those novels do what all classic novels must: They speak to us across the centuries about the things that matter.
Regardless of Austen’s own personal experience — or lack thereof — her books offer us a world of men and women acting petty, owning up, getting confused, feeling flustered, and ultimately stumbling into each other’s arms in spectacularly satisfying resolutions to all their mishaps and mistakes. In essence, these are the first rom-coms.
If this seems far-fetched, remember that, in the heyday of the modern rom-com (the ’90s and early 2000s), movie makers were mining Jane Austen novels for plots. Clueless, for example, is a modern retelling of Emma, and Bridget Jones’ Diary is Pride and Prejudice. But even beyond that, the tropes in those movies — such as enemies who become lovers or people who fall for the big personality only to find that the quiet, unassuming friend was their true love all along — come straight out of Austen.
But the age of the modern rom-com is basically over. Ten or 20 years ago, rom-coms were a dime a dozen. But times have changed, and the messy, sometimes cringey, often dorky stories of men and women in love have largely fallen by the wayside. “There’s been like the past 10 years … this decline in like the making of romcoms,” said actress Reese Witherspoon on a recent episode of the podcast Armchair Expert. “We started kind of going, ‘rom-coms are cringey,’ but it was actually where we learned social dynamics.” Rom-coms, Witherspoon says, help us “imagine and visualize dating skills.”
But it’s even more than that. A rom-com — like an Austen novel — gives us characters who must interact with each other socially in order to get together. In fact, it’s the social dynamics — the missed connections, the garbled messages, the nervous flubs — that create the drama of these narratives. It’s the fact that these characters must interact, in-person, over and over and over again that creates the tension and the drama and grows these initial flirtations into true love.
Recently, the small town of St. Albans in Hertfordshire, England, put on a Regency-themed ball to celebrate Jane Austen’s 250th birthday. Guests came in costume and learned the elaborate dances and social customs that feature so prominently in Austen’s novels. Libby Curzon, a dancing instructor from a local dance studio called Mrs. Bennet’s Ballroom, was at the ball to teach these dances to the modern attendees (actual Regency guests would have known these steps by heart).
“It’s not like taking a look at them and swiping left or right,” Curzon said of the dances couples did at these balls. “You’ve actually got to move with them, hold hands, work out how to do the dance and … give eye contact.” This, she believes, “helps those little Cupid’s arrows.” Here, 250 years later, is a startling fact: For many, the constricted world of the Regency ballroom feels more intimate than the uninhibited world of the modern dance floor.
NETFLIX’S PERSUASION SWAPS AUSTEN’S PIERCING SOCIAL INSIGHTS FOR MODERN MESSAGING
Austen is beloved for many reasons, but one of them is actually the rigid social etiquette that we, as a society, purport to have thrown off. As Curzon says, the constraints of Austen’s social world forced people to interact in ways that we — with our apps and our sexual openness — automatically skip. Austen’s characters know each other in a way that really resonates, even all these years later. And being known is, after all, what we all want.
Lizzie Dunford, the director of the Jane Austen House Museum in Chawton, England, puts it like this: Austen “explores feelings, conflict, small things, but the small things that make and shape our lives.”
Faith Moore is the host of Storytime for Grownups, a podcast that helps people learn to love classic literature. She is also the author of the novel Christmas Karol, available on Amazon.