Professor Annika Bautz

Studies of the reception of a literary work have traditionally relied mainly on the evidence of printed reviews. However, reviewing is a public activity, and does not represent readers' private opinions, especially in the case of novels because of their low status. Also, reviewing was a male-dominated field, so that it does not give conclusions to women's reactions to Austen's novels. This survey of informal comments made by early nineteenth-century male and female readers in diaries and letters reveals ways in which readers responded to Austen's texts. Among the social classes that could comment in writing, the remarks are by those readers who were driven to record their thoughts. Whether a passing observation, sincere criticism, a recommendation to get hold of and read a novel, a request to a publisher to send another Austen novel as soon as possible or instructions as to where to send it to, these comments show the active nature of private readers' physical and textual engagement with Austen's novels.

Of all the great novelists of the Romantic period, only two, Jane Austen and Walter Scott, have been continuously reprinted, admired, argued about, and read, from the moment their works first appeared until the present day. In a pioneering study, Annika Bautz traces how Scott’s nineteenth-century success among all classes of readers made him the most admired and most widely read novelist in history, only for his readership to plummet sharply downwards in the twentieth century. Austen’s popularity, by contrast, has risen inexorably, overtaking Scott’s, and bringing about a reversal in reputation that would have been unthinkable in the authors’ own time. To assess the reactions of readers belonging to diverse interpretative communities, Bautz draws on a wide range of indicators, including editions, publisher’s relaunches, sales, reviews, library catalogues and lending figures, private comments in diaries and letters, popularisations. She maps out the long-run changes in the reception of each author over two centuries, explaining literary tastes and their determinants, and illuminating the broader culture of the successive reading audiences who gave both authors their uninterrupted loyalty. The first ever comparative longitudinal study, firmly based on empirical and archival evidence, this book will be of interest to scholars in Romanticism, Victorianism, book history, reading and reception studies, and cultural history.

“An engaging collection of voices commemorate the first two centuries of Austen’s reception in this volume. These essays share a commitment to level academic and public discourse on Austen and to embrace Austen’s multimedia legacy.” – Inger S. B. Brody, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA Austen After 200 explores our contemporary relationship with Jane Austen in the wake of the bicentenaries of her death and the first publication of her novels. The volume begins by looking at Austen’s popular appeal and at how she is consumed today in diverse cultural venues such the digisphere, blogosphere, festivals and book clubs. It then offers new approaches to the novels within various critical contexts, including adaptation studies, fan fiction, intertextuality, and more. Collecting these new essays in one volume enables a unique view of the crossovers and divergences in engagements with Austen in different settings, and will help a comparative approach between the popular and the academic to emerge more fully in Austen studies. The book gathers insights from a range of contributors invested in new reading spaces in order to show the creative ways in which we are all adapting as we continue to read Austen’s works. Kerry Sinanan is Assistant Professor of Transatlantic Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio, USA. She has published on Jane Austen and Barbara Pym, and many articles on Black Atlantic texts, including The Woman of Colour (1808). Annika Bautz is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Plymouth, UK. Her publications include books and essays on Jane Austen, Walter Scott and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and on the history of the book in the Romantic and Victorian periods. Daniel Cook is Reader in English at the University of Dundee, UK. He is the author of Thomas Chatterton and Neglected Genius, 1760-1830 (2013), Reading Swift's Poetry (2020), and Walter Scott and Short Fiction (2021).

This essay focuses on introductions to editions of Austen's texts published in the 1890s. By the late nineteenth century, Austen's popularity and status as an author of canonical texts was beyond doubt. While illustrations to the various competing editions have received critical attention in recent decades, the other main paratext, introductions, have largely gone unacknowledged, yet deserve attention both because of their cultural significance and in their own right as critical engagements with the novels. The introduction writers were men of some standing whose contributions added weight to Austen's texts. Their emphases on realism and humour in particular, as well as the predominant view of the author as a female genius whose art - especially her satire - had a masculine quality, but without ever seeing her as overstepping female boundaries, would have influenced many thousands of readers' engagement with Austen's texts.