It’s always tempting to gorge on soon-to-be-forbidden foods in the days before starting a diet. Similarly, as New Year’s Resolution time approaches, with its annual exhortation to be kinder, gentler, and more forgiving, I’m succumbing to the temptation to snark about Jane Austen misquotation.
Today’s regrettable example comes from an article by a British journalist named Emily Jupp, who identifies as a dyed-in-the-wool Janeite. Jupp’s Jane Austen is not mine—Jupp is heavy on dressing up and escapism, while I’m more into prose style and social satire—but never mind. I wrote a whole book about how every fan gets to have her own Jane Austen.
But.
If you call Austen “one of my favorite authors,” it is problematic to go on to portray your annual attendance at Bath’s Jane Austen Festival thusly: “I have picnics, fully costumed, chatting as though I was Emma, from Emma: ‘I may have lost my heart, but not my self-control,’ I say.”
I have no problem with the festival, the picnics, or the costumes. But if you are going to chat as though you were Emma from Emma, perhaps you could refrain from using a line written, not by Austen, but by Douglas McGrath, in his screenplay for the 1996 movie of Emma. Or at least you could describe yourself as “chatting as though I was Gwyneth Paltrow.”
OK, got that out of my system. I’ll try to be a better person in 2025. No promises, though.
people who quote adaptations as if they were penned by austen automatically identify themselves as not such ardent austen fans as they think they are. let's hope their interchanges with the readers of austen will encourage them to read her for themselves as well. it would be shame for these janeites to leave her writings like "many a flower ... to waste its sweetness on the desert air."😏
Sigh.....so many people--influenced by the movies---think of JA as purely a romance writer. I wish they would actually read her books.
Hahahaha!!! I vowed yesterday to be less like John Knightley regarding JA Non-Fiction books I dislike. Yeah....mentioning three or four books that belong in a country...oops, I did it again!