Credit: Dangerous Minds / National Portrait Gallery)

Human behaviour really hasn’t changed all that much in the last few centuries, and one of the clearest illustrations of this is how people still adore the work of Jane Austen.

We live in something of an Austenaissance (patent pending, NO COPYING). The most famous of her seven novels, Pride & Prejudice, Sense & Sensibility and Emma have enjoyed multiple, enormously successful adaptations. With the tale of Elizabeth Bennet’s tumultuous courtship by Fitzwilliam Darcy is by a mile the most beloved. These stories may have been published in the early 1800s, but there is something eternal about them.

People relate to them no matter their circumstances, location or time of their birth. If proof be needed, look further than the incredible video of an American college film club watching the final scene of Joe Wright’s gorgeous 2005 adaptation, wooping and weeping like it’s the Regency Avengers: Endgame. A film I must now devote the rest of my days to making. No matter what year it is, Lizzie’s tale of two people learning to understand and grow beyond their faults is one that anyone can relate to.

It’s not the only one, either. Who among us hasn’t had to mediate a conflict between their emotions and their sense of reason? Who hasn’t had to wonder whether people doing good things for others is a selfless or selfish act?

These are all things that don’t just emphasise how much we have in common today, but also how much we have in common with people throughout history. While people loved them just as much back then.

How did Jane Austen inspire the first fandom?

Shockingly enough, however, while they were beloved with the same intensity at the time, Austen’s novels weren’t as huge as they are today. Austen’s works were decently successful at the time of their publication in the 1810s, but they were cult hits, beloved by the people in the know but not more than that. Even the Prince Regent was reported to own Austen’s novels in his private collection.

Austen was able to make a modest living off her work but would die shortly after the publication of Emma. No, the magic of Austen’s work wouldn’t become public knowledge until they were published as a set in 1933. That’s when they started flying off the shelves and into the public conscience, where they were so beloved they established the first example of what we would know today as a fandom. Interestingly, this was a completely different kind of fandom than the kind that would take over Tumblr in the 2000s.

In fact, it was the opposite. Exclusionary rather than inclusive. Analytic and dry, where fandoms are all about emotions and most of all, male. The “Janeites”, as they called themselves, were a movement inspired by the publication of 1870s A Memoir of Jane Austen. They sought to prove themselves as a higher class of Austen fan who appreciated her work deeper than the average reader.

Over time, the term “Janeite” was continuously used for specifically male superfans of Austen’s work, even becoming the title of a short story by Rudyard Kipling about a group of soldiers in the First World War who are secretly Austen fans. Over time, Austen’s works began to lose their reputation as fizzy, proto-chick-lit and became celebrated as the milestones of English literature that they are. The term began to change meaning in a way that would have sent the original “Janeites” totally spare.

It began to mean a real, passionate fan of the great author’s work, and there’s no shortage of avid Janeites running around in 2025.