The Revival of Jane Austen by N. Zeynep Yelce

The Revival of Jane Austen by N. Zeynep Yelce "Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort and to have done with all the rest." Jane Austen

Jane Austen has returned to bring the world back to its senses. Hollywood's honest heroine for 1996 proved to be Jane Austen with Sense and Sensibility nominated for Oscar in seven categories and Emma nominated for Costume Design and selected for Music Original Musical or Comedy Category. Sense and Sensibility brought Emma Thompson an Oscar for Best Screenplay based on materials previously produced or published, making her the first woman to be nominated for both Best Actress and screenwriter in the same year.

It was in 1796 when Jane Austen started writing Pride and Prejudice in her small house in Chawton, Hampshire. Could she ever imagine in her wildest dreams that 200 years later her stories would interest millions of people from all over the world? Could she have believed that Sense and Sensibility would become the 160th most popular of all films made between 1900 and 1997? Could we, when studying Jane Austen in school and/or university, foresee that we would rush to the cinemas to see the latest Austen film? Hollywood could...

My reasons for writing this paper are not to discover whether Jane Austen adaptations are successful or not; but rather to find out why they have become so popular in a cinematic context dominated by action films. How could stories from the late 18th and early 19th centuries find an audience in an era dominated by disaster films?
Jane Austen's popularity can be traced back to the second decade of the 19th century. Although she started writing in her early twenties, her first book was published in 1811. At 36, Austen published Sense and Sensibility on her own expense. She had thought that sales of the book would not repay the expenses, therefore she had put aside some of her limited income. However, Sense and Sensibility not only covered its expenses, but made a profit of about £150. It was an immediate success; and encouraged Austen to write further novels. Pride and Prejudice followed in 1814 in three volumes; later the first edition of Mansfield Park, though it was badly printed and full of mistakes, sold out in six months.