Burke, an American collector and self-confessed Janeite who Wells argues can be thought of as a direct forerunner to modern fans.
After introducing the book in chapter 1, Wells begins her study by looking back to the early twentieth-century to introduce Alberta H. Wells offers through her new book what could arguably be thought of as a tribute to the tributes, a critical examination of Austen-mania that acknowledges the important role it has played in keeping Jane Austen culturally relevant.Įverybody’s Jane, released this month by Continuum, takes into account scholarly work on fan cultures and fictions to explore Austen appreciation and appropriation, particularly its appreciation and appropriation in the United States. In the last couple of decades, Wells, an Associate Professor of English at Manhattanville College and features editor for the Penguin Classics enhanced e-book edition of Pride and Prejudice (2008), has noted the rise in Austen tributes – the countless fiction, nonfiction, biographies, films, merchandise, and so forth, inspired by Austen’s novels.
The closest I have ever come for myself is amateur, in all the original best sense of the word: a lover a devotee a person drive by passion and obsession to do it – to explore the imaginary world – oneself.Īdmittedly, the word amateur has negative connotations but not so in Wells’ book.Īn amateur is simply someone who is passionate about books and pursues that passion as a hobby rather than a scholarly profession, she argues. Perhaps there is no perfect word for the kind of people I have raised my children to be: a word that encompasses obsessive scholarship, passionate curiosity, curatorial tenderness, and an irrepressible desire to join in the game, to inhabit in some manner – through writing, drawing, dressing up, or endless conversational trifling and Talmudic debate – the world for the endlessly inviting, endlessly inhabitable work of popular art. The epigraph to chapter 3 of Juliette Wells’ new book Everybody’s Jane: Austen in the Popular Imagination is taken from Michael Chabon’s “The Amateur Family” in Manhood for Amateurs (2010) and is one of the most interesting, almost poetic, descriptions of amateurs that I have ever read (it is quite long but worth reproducing in its entirety):
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