Social media has transformed the way in which Jane Austen’s work is engaged with, both challenging and reinforcing traditional narratives.

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The 200th anniversary of Austen’s death in 2017 revealed the depth of sentiment the public holds for Austen – in an event marked by grand ceremonies, worldwide celebrations, museum exhibitions, and global headlines (Barchas & Looser, 2019). With the 250th anniversary of the birth approaching in 2025, it is fitting that her work is being given new life digitally – as the subject of adaptation and the center of online fan communities. Digital technology has transformed the way in which Austen’s work is engaged with, both challenging and reinforcing traditional narratives of race, heteronormativity and gender (Barker, 2010). For centuries, Jane Austen was almost undoubtedly overshadowed by her peers. During her life Austen received modest success, but little or no public fame. For nearly two centuries after Austen’s death, her contemporaries – such as pioneer of gothic literature Ann Radcliffe and medievalist Sir Walter Scott – eclipsed Austen’s contributions to the realm of Georgian literature. That does not dismiss the strength or depth of Austen’s work or the literary and critical work that surrounded it – but in both public spheres and academia, she was but one among her contemporaries. Social media has enabled the creation of new Austenian communities – and now leads the potential for a transformation of Austen’s readership, offering the opportunity for narratives that include people of colour, LGBTQ+ people, and other marginalized groups, traditionally left out of the narrative of classic literature (Barker, 2010; Sukhera, 2019).

One of the challenges which contributed to Austen’s slow (slower than her male peers) rise to literary credibility was the dismissal, both during her life and today, of her work as “simply a romance novelist whose only interests consisted of money, marriage, and love” (Powers, 2014). Austen, however, also struggled to find popular appeal – during much of Austen’s afterlife, her work was considered “highbrow literature” thought to be appreciated only by a small few (Kaplan, 2005, cited in Alisson, 2008) while simultaneously receiving intense scrutiny in search of perceived fault in the work of a female author writing about romance in a traditionally masculine literary field (Montz, 2020). Perhaps in a quest to lend greater weight and seriousness to Austen’s works, those who appreciated her work often relegated themselves to using terms such as aficionado, while avoiding the term fan (Allison, 2008). Despite this struggle, the development of Austen’s fan following (or “fandom”) has a long history, since the coining of the term “Janeite” to refer to fans of her work in 1894 (Alisson, 2008). In creating a unique term around which Austen’s readers could congregate, an early sense of identity unique to her fans began to develop. The early Janeites were primarily a masculine, academic community – and their interpretations of her work focused on creating for Austen a place as a “signifier of English national identity” in the wake of world War I (Peters, 2018). This interpretation of Austen favoured reinforcing traditional narratives of race and gender, but challenged heteronormative masculinity through interpretations of Austen that valued homoerotic male friendship (Peters, 2018). It was only after World War II that the modern conception of Austen fans began to take shape – shifting her readership primarily from men to women, and from academia to popular fiction. As a result of this transition, the position of Austen’s work as literary fiction deserving of intense critical examination was displaced and challenged – as her position as the literature of upper class men deteriorated, so did her reputation in academia. Today, Janeite refers to a group primarily made up of middle class white women (Peters, 2018).

As early Janeites avoided the term fan, an element of Austen’s digital transformation has been the transition to embracing the term fan by Jane Austen’s aficionados, who now use and pioneer digital and social media to build a community around Austen’s works, creating a modern fandom. Pearson (2007, cited in Allison, 2008) states that fans “often . . . build social networks on the basis of shared fandoms”, and this process is readily apparent in Austen’s fandom. Fandoms operate collectively, creating, discarding or reinforcing individual readings of a text through discussion with a wider community – and by using social media, they are able to interpret narratives in a way no individual can (Krueger, 2019). In a manner, Austen’s work is uniquely positioned as bridging popular genre fiction and the literary canon (Peters, 2018), creating a body of work that lends itself to reinterpretation and as a vehicle to challenge social norms in a way most other fiction cannot. As Peters (2018) states “If Austen can be easily classified as a “romance” author … what does that say about literary hierarchies, genre, and canonicity?” It is this liminal quality of her work that offers so much opportunity for online communities to express themselves through Austen. This is her digital afterlife, characterised by the many modern adaptations of her work, both professional ones and a startlingly wide range of fanworks, and the community around them.

The number of Austen adaptations, into film, television, theater and radio, among other mediums, is perhaps unparalleled by any other author (Freitas de Amorim, 2015). Her work then also invites transformation for the modern day, and inevitably, reinterpretation as a result. Barchas & Looser (2019) argue “new takes, new angles, and new ideas about Jane Austen are possible, now more than ever.” Austen’s work is no stranger to digital mediums. The successful web series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries adapted from Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, reimagined Elizabeth Bennett as a 21st century web blogger, and proved an early success story for online web series (Freitas de Amorim). The Lizzie Bennet Diaries was produced in the style of a video journal (vlog), reworking Elizabeth to the role of a modern Communications student whose mother was concerned about her marriage prospects, while integrating social media into its storytelling (Duval, 2014). The Lizzie Bennet Diaries marked an important stage in the use of social media platforms to engage with Austen’s work by integrating question and answer videos where viewers could engage with the actress playing Lizzie Bennet through social media platforms (primarily Twitter) in order to see the character answer their questions, and used social media profiles ostensibly run by the characters of the show to expand the narrative and promote the show itself. These methods of storytelling, combined with the accessibility of the show (available for free on YouTube globally) positioned The Lizzie Bennet Diaries in an at the time unusually close relationship with the audience, inspiring fanworks and intense engagement with the material on social media (Duval, 2014). However, the series also faced one of the challenges of a global community: the series’ use of live, real time engagement isolated fans who could not attend online in real time, whether due to commitments or timezone – hampering the community building they were attempting (Duval, 2014). The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, and subsequently the sequel Emma Approved, an adaption of Austen’s Emma, in many ways, also provided a “relative absence” of social critique, using this platform to reinforce existing readings (Russo, 2018). 

Beyond such professionally produced online adaptations Austen’s work has also been subject to a wide range of fanworks that now constitute a dedicated body of work almost exclusively found online (Mirmohamadi, 2014, cited in Duval, 2014). It is through this engagement of Austen’s fans with her work, and the fanwork consequently produced, that the traditional understandings of her work, and wider social narratives, have truly begun to be challenged. Originally organised via a Facebook page in 2015, the Jane Austen Society of Pakistan (JASP) is a literary group that brings together a diverse group of fans, but particularly women of Pakistani heritage. Originally utilising Facebook, and now also WhatsApp and Instagram, JASP members work at “rewriting an outdated narrative that claims to represent us” (Sukhera, 2019). In 2017, JASP released Austenistan, an anthology of short stories that reimagine Austen’s most iconic works as the contemporary stories of Pakistani women, utilising the regency trappings of Austen’s work to examine the traditions of Pakistan and the way Pakistani women navigation the expectations of marriage and social standing (Sukhera, 2019). Austenistan empowers this diverse group of women to create a network that would normally not be available to them.

Fanworks and interpretations of Austen’s work (and life) are not confined to the literary tradition, but through social media, have been able to take on a wide range of forms. These include memes and other humorous content, from text posts to comics, that either satirise or reference Austen’s work – while challenging traditional understandings of Austen’s work as a symbol of decorum, and exploring concepts of feminism. In 2017, a Twitter campaign successfully saw Jane Austen’s face put on the British £10 Note, scuttling plans to remove all women but the Queen of England from British currency (Krueger, 2019). Social media has also enabled the sharing of information and scholarship about Austen among both fan-readers and academic scholars in a new way. A “user-generated digital record of Austen” (Krueger, 2019) is created by the fandom, integrating a diverse range of sources and people. Feminist Austen and demure Jane are both created and interpreted simaltaneously (Kreuger). In interpreting Austen, this fandom embraces the contemporary nature of social media while drawing from nostalgia and traditional narratives, and while denying a perfect reassembly of these parts. In the YouTube video “Jane Austen’s Fight Club”, a fan trailer for a fake film that blends elements of Austen and the contemporary movie Fight Club, the gender roles of Austen’s regency setting are explored through faux-Regency fashion and subsequently examined, before being rejected as the characters embrace a traditionally masculine activity, and in the process, allowing the audience and fandom to explore modern expectations of womanhood (Barker, 2010). 

The journey of narratives around Austen’s work has been long, growing with her audience, and has entered a new period due to the embrace of social media by her fanbase and the ways in which her fandom has used social media to expand the horizon of engagement. Social media has given new shape to the way Austen is interpreted, and allows a global audience to engage with her work. These fans, through adaptations both professional and amateur, work to engage with the narrative themes of Austen, from femininity to English national identity. This is sometimes done by challenging them – as in Austenistan, by divorcing it from its setting to explore new cultural and social issues (Sukhera, 2019). Sometimes, it accepts traditional narratives, as in The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, without critique but still manages to use social media to reinterpret Austen’s work (Russo, 2018). The act of reinterpreting Austen from literary canon to romance literature, from so-called high brow to lowbrow, continues to challenge the core notions of genre lines (Peters, 2018) In either supporting or challenging these traditional narratives, or even by abstaining, a transformation of Austen continues to take place – turning the work of a Regency author into an object and anchor of community building in the modern, digital age. Austen’s work successfully connects readers from around the world through the act of interpretation and the medium of social media.

References

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Social media has transformed the way in which Jane Austen’s work is engaged with, both challenging and reinforcing traditional narratives (2022) by Isaac Walker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.