O, Tempora! O, Mores! Watch

Laura Thompson, writing in the UK Telegraph, has an excellent article on Jane Austen and the disappearance of the middle-brow into the maw of lumpen pop-culture. And guess who's fault it is, Kathy:

It all started in fine non-literary style: with Colin Firth. The scene in the 1995 television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in which Colin got his shirt wet was, almost certainly, the moment that opened the door and let the modern world in upon the quiet, oil-lit writing desk at Chawton Cottage. And when Firth played Mark Darcy in the film of Bridget Jones's Diary, the deal was sealed: Pride and Prejudice was on its way to fame and fortune.

The book was voted second in the BBC's The Big Read and first in the Woman's Hour Watershed Fiction poll, designed to find the novel that has most changed the lives of women. Last year it was turned into a blockbuster film. What on earth would Jane Austen have made of it all?

Well, she would certainly have laughed - "I dearly love a laugh," says Elizabeth Bennet, in the voice of her creator - and she would have enjoyed all the money, because nobody was more aware of its importance. Elizabeth and her sister Jane might have charm to spare, plus wit and good temper to keep fear of the future at bay, but their genteel poverty means that the men who marry them are not just lovers; they are personal relief missions from lives beyond contemplation.

And this acute alertness to the significance of money - to the humiliating gulf between the shillings that buy Elizabeth's hair ribbons and Darcy's £30,000 a year - is just one of the many aspects of Jane Austen that has been lost to a contemporary audience. Nowadays Darcy's money simply adds to his all-round desirability: it's really great for Elizabeth that she has fallen for a rich guy, and it's great that he's so into her too.

Jane Austen might not mind about this. She might shrug and write a new book, about people who read novels without understanding a word of them. But she would surely think that her work - so finely wrought, so literary - was drowning in the swamp of so much love.

Jane Austen as chick-lit. Insert shudder here.

Mind you, this isn't all the fault of Hollywood and Madison Avenue. The high-brows are also to blame for not keeping up the side. Walk into the average English Department at most liberal arts schools and you won't get a grounding in Austen's style, structure and substance. Instead, you'll get bombarded with deconstructionist interpretations of Mr. Knightly as cultural imperialist or crypto-feminist screeds about how Austen was really a closet lesbian. Buh-lieve me, I've been there.

The mob is never going to know or care about Austen's writing. But nobody's really teaching those who can and should know better why they should appreciate her work for what it is and not be seduced by the kind of shallow treatment Ms. Thompson bewails. To me, this is the real issue.

Yips! to Basil Seal.