Recreating Jane Austen

Recreating Jane Austen is a book for readers who know and love Austen’s work. Stimulated by the recent crop of film and television versions of Austen’s novels, John Wiltshire examines how they have been transposed and ‘recreated’ in another age and medium. Wiltshire illuminates the process of ‘recreation’ through the work of the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, and offers Jane Austen’s own relation to Shakespeare as a suggestive parallel. Exploring the romantic impulse in Austenian biography, ‘Jane Austen’ as a commodity, and offering a re-interpretation of Pride and Prejudice, this book approaches the central question of the role Jane Austen plays in the contemporary cultural imagination.

• Written by a well-known commentator on the novels • Written in a clear, jargon-free style • Covers a wide range of issues, including recent biographies of Jane Austen, a wide range of recent Austen movies, and ‘Jane Austen’ as a commodity

Preface and acknowledgements; A note on texts; Introduction: ‘Jane Austen’ and Jane Austen; 1. Imagining Jane Austen’s life; 2. Recreating Jane Austen: Jane Austen in Manhattan, Metropolitan, Clueless; 3. An Englishwoman’s constitution: Jane Austen and Shakespeare; 4. From drama, to novel, to film: inwardness in Mansfield Park and Persuasion; 5. Pride and Prejudice, love and recognition; 6. The genius and the facilitating environment; Notes; A note on films cited; Bibliography; Index.

‘John Wiltshire turns to psychoanalysis and notions of love, art and creativity to make a psychologically rooted contribution to the theory of adaptation. His interest is in the complexities - psychic and emotional as much as practical - of what it means to adapt, rewrite, appropriate or recreate a work, and he argues, rightly, that these terms need to be broken down and analysed.’ Sight and Sound