Austenmania Revisited:
How Janeites Keep Making and Remaking Jane Austen
13 November 2025
By Silvia Gerlsbeck Premet
In 2025, we mark the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth – an occasion not only to celebrate her literary genius but also to reconsider the identities and myths that have formed around her. Few authors have inspired such enduring fascination: even her death on 18 July 1817 in Winchester has become part of the Austen legend. Experiencing a variety of perplexing symptoms before her death – recurring fevers, fatigue, bouts of rheumatism and stomach issues and describing herself in a letter to her niece as “black and white and every wrong colour” – speculation as to what caused the author’s untimely death at only 41 years old are ripe, ranging from lupus to breast cancer to poisoning. And while she only completed six novels in her life, Jane Austen nevertheless left behind an impactful legacy. Her novels – Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), Northanger Abbey (1818), Persuasion (1816), and the unfinished Sanditon (1817) – as well as her literary innovations altered the landscape of English literature. Yet beyond that, her legacy continues to generate new cultural identities – from the devoted nineteenth-century Janeite to today’s digital-era fans who inhabit her world anew.
Having been downplayed through the centuries as “Aunt Jane”, “greatest woman writer” or “female Shakespeare”, Austen’s acute and witty observation of class, gender, and manners within the narrow confines of Regency society in her works is unparalleled and still attracts readers today. In the 21st century, however, Austen has become more than a novelist but has turned into a brand. Through countless film adaptations, festivals, and a whole heritage industry that draws on the fictional worlds created in her novels, her legacy continues to shape British popular culture. Not only that – it brings about new identities as well: Already in the 19th century the ‘Janeite’ emerges – a devoted Jane Austen fan who admired her work at a time when it was still considered minor and domestic. Claiming a Janeite identity meant claiming and performing the codes of gentility: refined taste, education, a sense of irony and moral restraint. In the twentieth century, critics reinterpreted the Janeite sensibility, shifting attention away from what had been dismissed as middlebrow sentiment to the proto-feminist aspects of her work. Today, a Janeite does not simply read Austen, but inhabit her – from rereading her work annually and memorising dialogue, to quoting witticisms, to ‘living’ Jane Austen in full Regency dress at the various Austen festivals to writing Austen fanfiction. In an age defined by individualism, consumer culture, and the performance of self on digital platforms, such practices demonstrate how identity has become a form of creative self-branding and is on brand with our contemporary culture of feeling. Detractors claim that Janeites blur the line between fiction and reality, treating, for instance, Darcy and Elizabeth as living acquaintances. Yet a cultural studies perspective reads this not as naïveté but as cultural practice – as evidence of how Austen’s world still offers a language and imaginary repository through which readers can articulate their identities. To remember Austen in 2025, then, is to recognise not only the endurance of her literary legacy but also the evolving identities her work has spawned.
Sources
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/jane-austen-death-causes
Looser, Devoney. The Making of Jane Austen. Johns Hopkins UP, 2017.
Wells, Juliette. Everybody’s Jane: Austen in the Popular Imagination. Continuum, 2011.