This story is everywhere!
The story of Jane Austen’s Shocking Publishing Rejection, which we blogged about last week, has been picked up by every news outlet in the known universe. We are a little astonished at how few of them looked beneath the surface to ask why all those agents and publishers rejected slightly reworked Jane Austen novels. Among those reasons could be, as we said last week: the plagiarized work was recognized and rejected without comment; the query letter was so bad the readers never got to the plagiarized work; the submission did not conform to the recipient’s submission guidelines, so was automatically rejected without comment. The exercise was silly in our opinion. Anyone who knows anything about publishing immediately recognized that it was an invalid argument to say “Jane Austen couldn’t get published today.” If Jane Austen were writing today, her work would be very different–because she wasn’t around 200 years ago to shape modern literature. It’s sort of like in the film “It’s a Wonderful Life” when Clarence says to George that Harry Bailey wasn’t a war hero who saved a transport full of soldiers; every man on the transport died because Harry wasn’t there to save them, because George wasn’t there in childhood to save Harry from drowning when he broke through an icy pond. Taking Jane Austen’s work out of its contemporary context invalidates the whole “experiment.” But as a publicity stunt, it worked a treat. 
Andrew Franklin, the publisher and managing director of Profile Books, responded in the Independent, saying pretty much everything we’ve been saying about this all along.
No one can be surprised to learn that not every manuscript gets the careful attention it deserves. It should not come as a shock that many manuscripts are returned unread to the sender. We need to clear our desks in order to look after the authors whom we do sign up, and the unsolicited manuscripts are often a chore to be dealt with at the end of the day by an overworked intern.
Apparently GPs give their patients an average of six minutes before they are shown the door of the surgery. The average author sending an unsolicited script certainly gets much less. Publishers now rely on specialists - agents, in fact (think of them as the consultants of the publishing profession) - to supply them with novels, though we all still buy some non-fiction directly from authors. To plagiarise, it is a truth universally acknowledged, that the most celebrated fiction houses now only buy fiction from agents. All serious aspiring authors know this and seek out an agent as an essential stage in the process of finding the right publisher, and of course the best contract too.
That means the unsolicited fiction is now the leftovers. A terrifying proportion of these manuscripts come from people writing in green ink on scraps of Basildon Bond - surely its only use now. And if they aren’t in green ink, the manuscripts arrive handwritten in capital letters, or from prison, or from a secure mental hospital. Of course there may be lost masterpieces lurking in the mad rantings of the sad, the bad and the dangerous to know (to plagiarise again), but publishers are not social workers.
One of the first things every editor is taught is that the rejection letter should be final, that is, it should not give any opportunity for a response. When you return the manuscript you never want to have to think about it again. So it is fatal to suggest that, for example, the plot is quite good but needs work in the closing chapters, or that there are too many characters, or that the dialogue needs work. Send these suggestions to the writer you don’t want and you are entering the long-term relationship from hell, because in three weeks the manuscript will come straight back at you with the changes you have recommended. So publishers use euphemistic - all right, let’s be honest, weaselly - phrases when rejecting manuscripts, like “not quite right for our list” or “would not fit our publishing programme”. The clear subtext is that the manuscript is unpublishable and the writer should consign it to their bottom drawer. For ever.
Read the whole commentary, it’s very good, if a bit brutal. (And we disagree slightly with his final conclusion.)
July 23rd, 2007 at 2:55 am
Our lecturer mentioned this in my course on the novel today and then gave out this article with the cover letter and extracts. I’m sorry, but Kizzy Barnett is the stupidest name ever for a Regency fiction. And the cover letter was so terrible, I had no interest in reading ‘Susan’ or ‘First Impressions’.
July 23rd, 2007 at 4:36 am
Hear, hear!
Btw, the link to the whole comment doesn’t work.
July 23rd, 2007 at 7:47 am
Gah. Fixed. Thanks!
July 23rd, 2007 at 11:05 am
Andrew Franklin’s brutal honesty is the reality of the situation in the publishing industry. Frankly, he doesn’t address one important issue: The system is designed to support those books that sell to the general public, not necessarily the better writer or the best novel. These days the lowest common denominator rules. That’s why so many novels in print are mere fluff. After you finish these popular pieces of trite, you forget them. A modern day Jane Austen would have to pound the pavement seeking out an agent who is willing to represent her. Then she would have to hope that this agent has great contacts with the editors who make the final judgment.
July 24th, 2007 at 7:15 am
All good points. We must also acknowledge that if Jane Austen were writing today she would not be using words like “disapprobation.” Does not one agree?
July 24th, 2007 at 8:02 am
I totally agree, Elizabeth.
If Jane Austen lived today she would definitely write in a modern style, as she was a woman of her time then and would be now.
July 25th, 2007 at 10:38 pm
Accepting all that the publisher and Mags said to be true, I still find it hard to believe that Jane Austen would be able to get published; and if she did, she would not have the influence she had in the 19th century. Not having a deep educational background in 19th century English Literature, I’m not sure exactly what that influence was; I certainly can’t see Austen influence on American literature, unless you want to count romance novels, and that would be demeaning to Jane.
What really made Jane Austen who she was was the gentle irony and satire, without a malicious bite (at least in her novels); her eloquent, precise use of language; her expectation that her readers are intelligent and can fill in the missing details of an account (like what Darcy said during his first and immediately after his second proposal); an acute sense of propriety or of “right and wrong”; her limited use of profanity (only used by the more unlikeable characters, and even then not often); and the pure elegance of expression. (A man-on-the-street even of the 19th century would not likely talk like her characters did; and that is not a bad thing at all.)
Conventional English, laced with intelligence and wit, an acute sense of right and wrong, with little use for vulgarity, is a rare commodity in the fiction publishing world today. If Jane Austen appeared today and conformed to modern practice, wrote “in a modern style”, she would no longer be what made her justly praised; if she came across in the 21st century with the same qualities she had then, I firmly believe that her work would be almost universally rejected, or at best ignored by all but a few connoisseurs.
Whether the guy really proved his hypothesis or not, I really do think he was right.
July 27th, 2007 at 6:14 am
Curt, I still think taking Jane Austen out of her historical context and saying “She couldn’t get published today” is not a valid comparison. If she were writing today, she would be writing something different. She would be a different person operating on a different set of influences, both social and literary.
July 27th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
Actually, Mags, I think I agree with you. This is getting too metaphysical for me. If she were living today, she would write different things, with different cultural influences. If Mark Twain had been born later and adopted into the family of Joseph Kennedy, he would not have been floating down the Mississippi acquiring his unique cultural influences. If he wrote at all, he would have written differently about different things.
The point I was trying to make is that there were things about Jane Austen’s style that made her “Jane Austen”, namely, the things I mentioned already. Her subject matter would not need to be Regency romances for her style to show through. But wit, intelligence, a strong sense of propriety and right vs. wrong could still show themselves, along with her perceptiveness about human nature and respect for the intelligence of her readers.
But if she had some of those qualities but was influenced to write in the style of Ernest Hemingway, spewed profanity on every other page and was afflicted with moral ambivalence, she would no longer “be” Jane Austen, even if that were her name. She might be publishable, but she would no longer reflect the values and personality of “Jane Austen”. (Of course, if she never was in the 18th century, we wouldn’t have known the difference, I suppose.)
But if she happened to have and favor the same core values of the woman of the 18th century we call Jane Austen, I feel that she likely would not be publishable, or at best would interest only a small, intelligent minority. Those values are not in favor today in the world of literature.