The British press, bewildered by the current onslaught of Jane Austen-related films battering their shores, is still hashing it out publicly.

First, we must welcome readers of The Times, which quoted AustenBlog in the context of Don’t Mess With The Janeites, a sentiment we can get behind.

Austen inspires devotion like no other author and the internet has allowed her fans a voice that travels far faster and further than the quill-driven letters of the 19th century. If anything, it has intensified their adoration of Austen and their eagerness to defenestrate anyone who offends her.

“The amount of activity on the web is absolutely crazy,” said one Austen expert. “There is a whole cult out there and it’s not something that happens to other authors.”

Antagonise the Janeites, as the most fervent fans are known, and their response is merciless.

Take James McAvoy, who stars as Lefroy in Becoming Jane and has garnered laudatory reviews for his performance. McAvoy ventured to one interviewer that Austen’s Northanger Abbey was “one of the worst books I’ve ever read in my life, full of badly written giggly girls”.

The horror was palpable at the website Austenblog.com, which riposted: “So unfortunate. One never knows what to do in these situations. Buy flowers? Bake a cake? Beat him senseless with the Cluebat of Janeite Righteousness?”

(A cluebat, in case you did not know, is slang for an implement used to hammer “some sense into someone who is blatantly stupid”.)

We couldn’t have said it better. And speaking of The Times, look who got her own column to whinge about Jane–our old friend Celia Brayfield, who displayed her razor-sharp knowledge of the Austen oeuvre in the BBC magazine the other day.

Artistically, the Austen brand is as restrictive as her heroines’ stays but it is precisely because of their intimate scale that her stories have such a hold on us. Her tiny novels are a producer’s dream. To film an Austen classic you need just a handful of actors, the cheaper and more British the better, plus a stately home; hire a fine pair of hackneys, dust off the last curricle in Ireland and you’re away. In contrast, to film Vanity Fair or Les Misérables means lashing out for battlefields, barricades and two armies of extras.

She’s got a point there. Don’t think that Jane’s work being out of copyright and yet popular has nothing to do with this latest spate of films. It’s relatively cheap with an almost guaranteed ROI (return on investment for you non-MBA types). That being said, Vanity Fair has been adapted for the screen twice in the past ten years or so.

Had Jane ever looked out of the window, she would have seen her starving country neighbours herding into slums. Had she read of the molecular theory that preoccupied scientists, or joined the philosophical fight to the death between reason and romanticism? Reformers debated A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the feminist polemic by Mary Wollstonecraft, a weaver’s daughter who was politicised by all the horrors of unwed poverty that Austen’s heroines are so frantic to avoid.

Jane Austen wrote about much of the same themes as Mary Wollstonecraft. She just chose not to beat her readers over the head with them, and to give them a laugh along the way.

Fast-forward two hundred years. and there I was, in my very first editorial conference at an immaculately feminist publishing house, being firmly told to cut the Second World War scenes in my novel because they didn’t belong in “books like this”.

Oh, now we get down to it. That is, of course, all Jane Austen’s fault, and not the fault of, perhaps, oh, we don’t know, poor plotting? No, of course not! She’s being kept down by The Man and the patriarchy! DOWN WITH THIS SORT OF THING!

The Daily Express has a general sort of article about Jane On Film; nothing really new in it, but we thought you might like to read it.

We were amused by a bit of fluff in The Telegraph, about the Lost E-Mails of Jane Austen.

The Jane Austen boom continues with the new film Becoming Jane, about her supposed love affair with a young Irish lawyer. Now there is a sensational new twist. Recently discovered emails from the author reveal that she was at the heart of the long drawn out cash-for-honours affair. In one email she refers to “a big P”, thought to be a peerage, or possibly a large pianoforte which she had ordered.

Could she have been involved in a cover-up? There are suspicions that some of her incriminating samplers may have been destroyed. A mobile phone has been discovered which almost certainly belonged to Miss Austen. It is slim and neat, covered in lime green satin with two becoming bows.

Finally, Germaine Greer (!!!) says in The Guardian, not Why Jane? but Of Course Jane!

One version of the Austen scenario holds that it is all about stalking and bringing down your man, but Jane Austen is not the editor of Cosmopolitan. The point is not to achieve the man at any cost. He is not the prey or the prize but the symbol of merit. The possibility that there may be no such man is always present. Part of our gratified surprise at the Austen happy ending is that there was a man around with the good sense to see that a woman without rich and powerful connections might be a pearl beyond price, a woman whose company was reward in itself. We know that she is good company because we have been seeing the world through her disabused eyes. We go on reading and watching Jane Austen because she is good for us.

Take that, Celia Brayfield!

Thanks to Alert Janeites Kathleen, Julie P., and Julia for sending us links!