As a senior in college, I took a class on Jane Austen—a great class with, it must be said, a weird vibe. Almost all of the students were women (out of around a hundred people, only five or ten were men), and it was a hothouse of Jane Austen obsession. In the first lecture, the professor identified herself as a Janeite—a member of “the curious American cult of Jane Austen,” according to the BBC—and, when she asked if we were Janeites, too, scores of people raised their hands. The class, she reassured us, wouldn’t be wasted on Austen fanatics. Even if you’d read “Pride and Prejudice” a dozen times (starting, presumably, at the age of ten), there still was room to grow, if not in devotion then in discernment. Knowledge could complement ardor, sense enrich sensibility. Even “Clueless” might reveal layers of sophistication.
At the time, I found this off-putting. But—as Austen could tell you—first impressions are often simplistic. Soon enough, I learned that all sorts of people are obsessed with Austen. (The philosopher Gilbert Ryle, asked if he read novels, replied, “Yes—all six, every year.”) I also discovered that almost every truly famous writer has his or her own cult of personality. Austen’s cult has been rivalled by the cults of Dickens, Tolstoy, Eliot, Joyce, Hemingway, Lawrence, and Fitzgerald, among others. Today, readers worship Karl Ove Knausgaard or Elena Ferrante. Janeites may be the Trekkies of the literary world, but their passion is really just a more intensified version of ordinary bookishness.
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