Mark Bostridge
AUSTENMANIA
Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World
By Claire Harman (Canongate 342pp £20)

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In 1797, Thomas Cadell made one of the greatest mistakes in publishing history. A Hampshire clergyman had written to him, offering a three-volume novel for publication by a first-time author. Without a word of encouragement, Cadell declined the book, manuscript unseen, by return of post.

Unfortunately for Cadell, the clergyman was the Revd George Austen, soliciting publication on his daughter Jane's behalf, and the novel in question was an early version of Pride and Prejudice, recently voted the one book that the British nation can't do without.

It would be another fourteen years before Jane Austen saw her first novel in print. But as Claire Harman astutely observes, her father's efforts to find a publisher for the book effectively give the lie to the old story that Jane Austen wrote in secret for her own amusement, and that she was constantly expected to place the demands of family life before any literary ambitions she nurtured. On the contrary, Jane Austen came from a family of inky-fingered scribblers - though, admittedly, one that had greater hopes for her brother James's lacklustre verses. Against this background, she developed from her early teens a highly precocious attitude to a life that centred on writing. She was fully aware of the shortcomings of other contemporary women writers, and engaged, with a marked degree of professionalism and extraordinary perseverance, in rewriting and honing her literary productions to perfection. In short, she had little doubt that one day she would be a published writer.

What Jane Austen could never have foreseen - and might have had some trouble comprehending - was her transformation, in the 190 years following her death at the age of forty-one in 1817, into a writer of mass popularity, a global phenomenon, whose six completed novels are among the best-known, best-loved works in the English language. This transformation into a brand name, as Harman wryly notes, doesn't always have much to do with reading. After all, for many people around the world, 'Jane Austen' may simply evoke an image of Colin Firth in a wet shirt.

Jane's Fame is an exhilarating look at the rise of the Divine Jane's worldwide influence. Harman charts its course with wit and style, as well as scholarly precision, making this a book that no Austen addict will want to resist. For a novelist so rarely given to dramatic incident, it's somehow appropriate that the development of her fame wasn't an overnight sensation. By 1817, her books certainly possessed a band of discerning admirers (among them the Prince Regent, to whom the first edition of Emma was dedicated by request), though Austen published her work anonymously, and sales of her novels during her lifetime were small. For most of the decade following her death, she was out of print, while the Victorians' response to her remained distinctly ambivalent. Macaulay may have compared her to Shakespeare, but Charlotte Brontë famously turned her nose up at Austen's small-scale ivory painting, and Carlyle dismissed the novels as 'dishwashings'.

Austen mania has enjoyed two remarkable bursts of energy. The first followed the publication of the family memoir by Jane's nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, in 1870. This solidified in print the picture of 'Dear Aunt Jane' whose 'delightful characters' were said to be merely a reflection of the novelist's 'sweet temper and loving heart', and became a cornerstone of the legend that Austen descendants were intent on preserving (unfortunately, Harman doesn't include a family tree, so the uninitiated may get lost in the thickets of Austen genealogy).

The second spur to Jane Austen's status as international treasure was the comparatively recent outbreak of film adaptations based on her work. A horribly smarmy Greer Garson played Elizabeth Bennet opposite Laurence Olivier's Darcy in a 1940 screen version of Pride and Prejudice, but it was not until the 1990s that film and television Austen adaptations, and other spin-offs, really became popular. One Hollywood magazine depicted Jane Austen poolside, reading scripts and taking calls from screen executives. And there is no sign of this interest coming to an end. As I write, plans for a film version of Lost in Austen, ITV's recent drama of a contemporary woman time-travelling back to Austen's day, have just been announced.

Significantly, Jane Austen's popularity has never been based on a biographical cult in the way, most obviously, that the myth of the Brontës has. Consequently, Claire Harman is less interested in pursuing biographical trails that lead to dead-ends than she is in demonstrating that Jane Austen is on a par with Shakespeare when it comes to the difficulty of confirming even the most basic biographical facts about her. Austen's family, for example, was never able to recall whether their famous forebear had been a blonde or a brunette, and Harman amusingly recounts the attempts of the Jane Austen Society to revive the colour of the lock of hair it owns with the help of the hair colouring firm Elida. Given this elusiveness, it seems appropriate that the only authentic portrait generally accepted as a good likeness of Jane Austen, still in a private collection, shows a back view of Jane seated outside on a warm day.

And when vital new biographical material has come to light, the overwhelming response has often been disappointment, revealing the different views of Jane Austen held by distinct groups of interested parties. In 1932, the publication of Austen's private correspondence introduced a new note of irritation to the critical debate. The letters were described as 'a desert of trivialities punctuated by occasional oases of clever malice', and the consensus was that Jane Austen 'emerges diminished'. There was a shocked, sharp intake of breath at Jane's gratuitously cruel remark about Mrs Hall's stillbirth resulting because she 'happened unawares to look at her husband'.

But then, as Claire Harman concludes, a major factor in Jane Austen's longevity as a novelist must be the apparent timelessness of her work. To a large extent, her books are unattached to specific times and places. 'She stopped the clock', writes Harman, and now is always her time.