Summer 2026. A new film adaptation is making headlines across the globe. In the UK, Kevin Maher in The Times gives it a five-star review, with only one negative comment: “No jokes.” Charlotte Higgins’s opinion piece in The Guardian has a tagline recognizing “the power of the film on the big screen” and asking, “how far should modern moral sensibilities influence adaptations of classics?” On the other side of the Atlantic, a New York Times piece by B. D. McClay argues that modernizing to suit contemporary sensibilities is not the issue; adaptations, by definition, reflect the era in which they are written and produced. For McClay, flattening the central character’s complexities to create a conventional hero is the greatest sin. There are vigorous online debates about colorblind casting, and about individual performances’ being too “woke.” Elon Musk promises/threatens a new anti-woke version himself, created by Grok.
We write not of the new adaptation of one of Austen’s novels, but of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, showing to record audiences in the summer of 2026. The film takes Homer’s epic poem and reworks it as a cinematic experience for the twenty-first century. Despite the strikingly different source material, debates about “faithfulness” and preserving what matters most from canonical works can be read in remarkably similar ways for Homer and Austen. We often see adaptation treated as stewardship. With works that occupy such central places in world literature, reviewers and commentators sometimes write as though there are “correct” versions that must be preserved at all costs. But adaptation is not preservation; it is continual reinvention. Asking whether Homer would have recognized Nolan’s Odysseus is as futile as asking whether Austen would have approved of the forthcoming Netflix Pride and Prejudice. Authenticity is itself an interpretation, and it means quite different things to different readers and viewers. Austen’s novels speak to experiences far beyond eighteenth-century England, and authenticity may be observed by preserving her irony, wit, and dialogue as much as by ensuring period-accurate locations. Authenticity for Homer might focus on Odysseus’s character, or on finding ways to represent the gods, or on the rhythms of Greek poetry. There is no way of knowing. Great classics survive precisely because they can be reinterpreted.
There are crucial differences in reception histories for Austen and Homer, most obviously in the sheer temporal and national range of appropriations of Greek myth. In the more than two thousand years since the writing of the work, The Odyssey has been retold in Roman epic, medieval allegory, French classical tragedy, poems for children in the eighteenth century, dramatic monologues in blank verse in the nineteenth, and a range of female-authored fiction in the twentieth and twenty-first. Most readers today engage with Homer in translation. Experts have been deployed to critique Nolan’s film: French specialist in Greek history Olivier Battistini was interviewed in Le Figaro, and classicist Jonas Grethlein in the Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel; a piece by Emily Wilson, translator of The Odyssey and The Iliad, in the London Review of Books was picked up by news media across Europe and beyond.
Austen, on the other hand, published her first novel in 1811 and has had only 225 years to become a global phenomenon—although in those years she has certainly done pretty well, becoming for many the paradigmatic writer of what are now termed “literary classics” in booksellers’ categorizations. Nobody could argue, of course, that in Austen’s works there are “no jokes,” and perhaps her success is at least partially due to the comedy that keeps us laughing. Thus Austen does not lend herself to epic poetry, classic tragedy, or blank verse; instead adaptations of her work have mainly appeared either on stage or screen, although it is also true that there are more than 400 continuations, sequels, prequels and spin-offs of Austen’s works in print as well as hundreds, if not thousands, more on the internet. And Austen (possibly because of her own subversive parodic impulses) tends to inspire creative works that play with, parody, and/or subvert the original material, often through a mashup that works via generic incongruity. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Lost in Austen, The Jane Austen Fight Club, Bride and Prejudice, Clueless, and Fire Island are all works of this kind.
The success of these Austenian mashups depends—at least in part—on a familiarity with Austen’s original material, something that does not apply to the success of adaptations of Homeric epic. Very few readers will know Pride and Prejudice from an adaptation that imagines a space setting (although one, Sybil Nelson’s three-book series Jane Austen in Space, certainly exists). An entire generation of French viewers (Gen X), however, is conversant with the tales of The Odyssey and Greek Myth more generally because of the Franco-Japanese-Luxembourgian television series Ulysse 31, set in space in the thirty-first century, and has never encountered Homer’s original Greek, even in French translation.1 Because Austen’s works exist in English, the language now spoken by approximately 20% of the global population either as a first or additional language (Melchers et al. 12), readers do not need the interventions of scholars. It is, however, certainly true that translations of Austen’s works have made them accessible to readerships around the globe, and that such translations may well serve as a gateway to subsequent readings of the original English.
One further very notable difference, of course, is that Homer does not have the loyal fan community that Austen has. Specialists differ on whether Homer even existed, and so little is known about him that one certainly cannot visit the places connected to him. Not so with Austen. Studies of Austenian fandom now constitute a significant percentage of all critical work in general Austen studies. This fact is perhaps reflective both of a broader interest within and outside the academy in fandom as a concept and of Austen’s peculiar (perhaps unique) status as a writer who appeals equally to scholars and the general public. Although there were pioneers in the field of fan studies as early as the 1970s, the publication in 2014 of the Fan Fiction Studies Reader, edited by Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, marked a key moment of assimilation into scholarly culture; the volume brought together essays that outlined the parameters of the field and defined key terms and debates within that scholarly domain. Since then, the University of Iowa Press has led the way in publishing works on fandom and fan communities—including, in our own field of study, the excellent Austentatious: The Evolving World of Jane Austen Fans (2019)—and the topic has gained wide currency not just in its original disciplinary home of media studies, but across sociology, literary studies, anthropology, and computer science. Fan communities have also been the subjects of considerable journalistic interest and of television documentaries, including—but of course not limited to—the BBC’s The Many Lovers of Miss Jane Austen (2011).
When first planning Austen’s celebratory 250th birthday conference, organized around the theme The Global Jane Austen, we wanted to ensure that this particular dimension of her global fame would be represented, both in the topics of the papers delivered and in the persons of those delivering them.2 It was important to us, in other words, that both scholars and fans—two categories denoted, respectively, “Austenites” and “Janeites” in Nicola Pritchard-Pink’s essay in this special issue—should feel welcome and heard at the conference, as we believed in the fundamental value of conversations between these two linked communities. As we noted in the Call for Papers for the conference, “The ever-expanding corpus of adaptations, sequels and prequels has proven fruitful territory for a consideration of Austen’s reception, in its broadest sense. Austen’s transformations into other languages and into other cultures make her a Global author.”
Many of the speakers chose to address these themes. Several translators of Austen’s fiction and letters attended the conference. Asha Parekh, student helper at the conference, then going into her final year of an English literature degree at the University of Southampton, worked on a research project compiling a database of translations—still incomplete, but more comprehensive than any such bibliography published to date.3 The focus on fan cultures also proved to be a fruitful strand, as the essays selected for this special issue clearly demonstrate. As the editors note, twelve (of the forty-three) panels of the conference were dedicated to adaptation, tourism, translation, or fandom in its many and various manifestations.
Several themes arise from the essays collected here, as well as from the conference more broadly. Of these, the nature and significance of immersion and participation in Austen’s fictional worlds, and the sense of investment and ownership that such immersion creates—of key importance to both fan communities and Austen scholars—emerged particularly strongly. Sarah C. Hurley presents active participation as a necessary condition of readership and reading itself as a form of co-production of the novels. Strong ideological commitments and gatekeeping, of course, go hand in hand with such feelings, and Camilla Wallin Lämsä and Hannah Moss bring these ideas out very powerfully, although they are also implicit in the essays by Juliette Cousin, Katie MacLean, and Nicola Pritchard-Pink. A second thematic strand that appears is the playful, funny, and adventurous side of Austenian fandom, in which fans are attracted both to Austen’s own subversive humor and, as Pritchard-Pink explores, to the ways in which being part of a fan community provides opportunities to explore fun and adventure in their own lives. Inger Brodey and Sarah Schaeffer Walton’s discussion of the Jane Austen’s Desk website also points out the value, worth, and importance of play in our interactions with Austen’s world.4 Third, the significance of mediation in the experience of reading Austen’s works is encapsulated in Jane Austen’s Desk and discussed in Gong Qiangwei and Liu Shuang’s essay on Chinese translations of Emma. Powerfully materializing not just from Gong and Liu’s essay, but from all those collected here, is a sense that it is impossible to read Austen in a media vacuum; Darcy’s wet shirt is as important to the collective Austen community as anything Austen ever actually wrote. Fans’ first and subsequent experiences of the original novels are now inevitably colored—literally, sometimes, as Sayre Greenfield and Linda Troost so ably demonstrate—by subsequent interpretations, translations, and mediations of the works.
Like Austen’s own works, which subtly criticize and sometimes outright mock the world that she knew, Austen’s fans are frequently subversive, rewriting and reinterpreting Austen’s work for their own purposes. Austen herself considered such subversive rewritings to be complimentary—as she notes in Sense and Sensibility, “rational opposition” is indeed a “compliment” (286)—and her own writings frequently ironize, parody, and subvert the literary works she read. Such fan interactions thus remain true to the spirit of the author, however differently this spirit may manifest itself. Unlike Cassandra, who in 1844 found it “remarkable” that Jane’s works should have “risen so much in celebrity after so many years” (qtd. in Gilson 483), it does not seem astonishing to us that her work should continue to generate fresh, enthusiastic engagement more than 250 years after her birth. We are happy to celebrate all manifestations of her global reach in this special issue, and in a forthcoming collection of essays we are co-editing. In that volume, our focus is specifically on the role of mediation and transformation in the creation of Austen’s global reputation, and it thus picks up on a number of the themes articulated in this special issue. Globalising Jane Austen: Mediations and Transformations will be published by Bloomsbury in 2028.
The Global Jane Austen in Southampton, July 2025
When we first started discussing hosting a conference to mark the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth, Southampton was a logical destination. This was not only because Gillian’s position at the University of Southampton provided institutional support. We both felt that the city had been somewhat neglected in the story of Austen’s life and writing career and that it was certainly neglected as a destination for Austen scholars and fans. The conference fed into the Austen 250 programming that the city put on in 2025—from the exhibits in In Training for a Heroine: An Exhibition of Jane Austen’s Travelling Writing Desk and No Notion of Loving by Halves, by Jocelyn McGregor, in God’s House Tower, and A Very Respectable Company: Jane Austen & Her Southampton Circle in the Sea City Museum, to a range of theatrical, musical, and creative events coordinated by Southampton Forward.5
Southampton is not a location that often appears in Austen’s works, either the published novels or the manuscripts. Only one sentence, in “Love and Freindship,” refers to it, jokingly and in passing: “Beware of the insipid Vanities and idle Dissipations of the Metropolis of England; Beware of the unmeaning Luxuries of Bath and of the Stinking fish of Southampton” (Juvenilia 105). None of Austen’s major fictions is set in the city. Yet Austen lived in Southampton for extended periods, including as an adult, post-Bath and pre-Chawton, from 1806 to 1809. Much is known about her time in the city and about the people she met there. We were struck, too, by the extent to which “global” influences would have reached her while in residence.
Mrs. George Austen, Cassandra, Jane, and their friend Martha Lloyd moved to Southampton with brother Frank (Francis) and his wife Mary (née Gibson) on 10 October 1806 (Le Faye, Chronology). The location was selected because of its proximity to Portsmouth, where Frank could expect to be stationed while on leave from the Navy. This period was particularly active for Austen-family hatches, matches, and dispatches. Mary Jane, the eldest daughter of Frank and Mary, was born in Southampton in April 1807; when Edward’s wife, Elizabeth, died suddenly after giving birth to her eleventh child in October 1808, her two eldest boys, Edward and George—then at school in Winchester—joined Aunt Jane and their grandmother in Southampton. The global dimension of other family events is striking. While Frank’s wife recovered from childbirth in Southampton in May 1807, another sister-in-law joined the family when Charles married Frances (Fanny) Fitzwilliam Palmer in Bermuda. The very next month, Frank was aboard HMS St. Albans, bound for South Africa.
While in Southampton, the Austen women also “traveled” abroad, albeit mentally rather than physically. Jane may not have enjoyed their reading of the French writer Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis’s Alphonsine (1806), but she was nevertheless able to obtain a copy of the translation in Southampton in January 1807. Later that same month, at Godmersham Park in Kent, Cassandra gave her niece Fanny Knight copies of the Magasin des Enfans and Magasin de l’Adolescence. In September 1807, while visiting Southampton, Fanny records reading Caroline de Lichtfield and thinking it “beautiful” (Le Faye 344). She does not note whether she was reading the novel in French, but the “de” might be revealing. Isabelle de Montolieu’s Caroline of Lichtfield was published in English translation in 1786—the same year as the French original. The family could not have known that the author of this popular sentimental novel would be one of the first to translate Austen’s fiction, but the cross-Channel exchange of fiction was extensive in this period; it is not surprising that Fanny’s reading in Southampton had this global dimension.
Global influences hit provincial theatres, too. On the very same day that Fanny read Caroline de Lichtfield, she records a visit to the Theatre Royal in French Street with her aunts and her brother William. The performance was for the actor John Bannister’s benefit. On the surface, the plays sound English: The Way to Keep Him (1760) and Of Age Tomorrow (1805). In fact, the former, by Irish playwright Arthur Murphy, was based in part on Alexandre-Guillaume Mouslier de Moissy’s Nouvelle Ecole de Femmes; the latter was a musical adaptation of August von Kotzebue’s German Der Wildfang—Kotzebue being familiar to readers of Austen as the author of Das Kind der Liebe, which Elizabeth Inchbald translated as Lovers’ Vows, the play rehearsed at Mansfield Park in central scenes in Austen’s third published novel. Clearly, global art formed part of the entertainments for the Austens in Southampton.
We embraced this involvement as part of the conference planning. Our colleagues Jeanice Brooks and Mary-Jannet Leith put together a concert entitled “Jane Austen: Home and Away.” Music from the Austen Family Music Books, digitized by the University of Southampton, was mined for Scottish and Continental repertoire and for depictions of and viewpoints on Continental events, and performed by Ensemble Hesperi, an early music chamber ensemble.6 As Brooks wrote in the concert program, “colonial and imperial threads are woven through the Austen family’s music,” and Austen’s own global outlook was created in part by copying, listening to, and performing music at home.7 All these influences must surely have informed Austen’s writing.
The two-and-a-half-year residence in Southampton has not, however, been thought of as a period in which Austen wrote extensively. The narrative for fans and literary tourists who visit Jane Austen’s House in Chawton is that it was not until her arrival in Chawton that “her genius flourished,” and that she wrote and revised her novels and had them published.8 What is certain is that the Southampton years were a time of writing letters, many of which have survived, preserved by Cassandra. These survivors are often lengthy pieces, in which Austen imparts family news and seeks information in return. They are clearly designed to amuse, too: the juxtaposition between banal and dry news and supremely witty phrases must have been intentional. Certainly, similar bathos is found in Austen’s published fiction. Take, for example, Austen’s account of visiting Mrs. Lance, and her comments on the opportunities for increasing acquaintance in Southampton thus afforded:
We found only Mrs. Lance at home, and whether she boasts any offspring besides a grand pianoforte did not appear. She was civil and chatty enough, and offered to introduce us to some acquaintance in Southampton, which we gratefully declined. I suppose they must be acting by the orders of Mr. Lance of Netherton in this civility, as there seems no other reason for their coming near us. They will not come often, I dare say. They live in a handsome style and are rich, and she seemed to like to be rich, and we gave her to understand that we were far from being so; she will soon feel therefore that we are not worth her acquaintance. (7–8 January 1807)
Ladies Middleton and Catherine de Bourgh were very much in draft at this stage, but it is not beyond the realm of possibility that the final published versions of the characters owed something to Mrs. Lance and to others met in the Southampton years.
In a later letter that Austen sent to Cassandra at Godmersham Park, the character sketch is closer to home. She gives an account of domestic details, notably the preparations for the family move to Castle Square. It ends with a comment on their eldest brother, James, and his visits to Southampton:
I am sorry & angry that his Visits should not give one more pleasure; the company of so good & so clever a Man ought to be gratifying in itself;—but his Chat seems all forced, his Opinions on many points too much copied from his Wife’s, & his time here is spent I think in walking about the House & banging the Doors, or ringing the Bell for a glass of Water.— (8–9 February 1807)
We cannot fail to recognize Austen’s acerbic wit. Many have done so. This very passage has been the subject of extensive commentary for what it reveals of Austen’s feelings about her brother and, indeed, her sister-in-law. Biographer Claire Tomalin notes Austen’s eye for detail and points out that the lines would “grace a novel” (201).
This observation seems somewhat at odds with Tomalin’s own claim that Austen did not work on her fiction while in Southampton, waiting until her arrival in Chawton to pick up the manuscripts that had been drafted in the 1790s. In the absence of precise and detailed information from the manuscripts themselves, it is impossible to know whether Austen had really set aside her writing in this period, as so many have claimed. What is clear is that Austen’s letters from Southampton see her practicing the rhythms she will use in her published prose. She herself notes in concluding this letter to Cassandra, and with reference to “dear Dr Johnson,” that she has “dealt more in Notions than Facts.”
One fact we can be sure of is that in April 1809 Austen wrote from Southampton to the publisher Benjamin Crosby, using the pseudonym “Mrs. Ashton Dennis.” In this letter, she inquired after the manuscript novel Susan, which had been sold to Crosby for the sum of £10 in the spring of 1803. She asserted her right to seek publication elsewhere if Crosby & Co. was not interested in publishing it (8 April 1809). It was to be eight more years before the work that became Northanger Abbey appeared in print, and Austen was not to see its publication. But this letter to Crosby attests that Austen was thinking carefully about the future for the novels she had already drafted and that a career as a published author was very much on her mind while she was still living in Southampton. As Sophie Coulombeau has put it, in an article on Austen’s reading raising the possibility that Persuasion was in embryo as early as 1813, novelists know that the composition process is rarely a tidy chronological affair:
One acquires bits and pieces—anecdotes, metaphors, snippets of dialogue—all over the place and puts them on a sort of mental pinboard, which one then keeps for months, years, even decades. The pinning process underlies the planning of a novel, a process that generally precedes beginning to write it.
Austen seems to have been “pinning” throughout her time in Southampton. And letters sent to Cassandra in this period ended up with both sisters in their cottage in Chawton—a tangible and physical pinboard, perhaps.
For many decades, the stories told of Southampton focused on the maritime heritage: both RMS Titanic and the Mayflower set sail from the city. Stretches of the medieval city walls are still extant—and would of course have been known to the Austens—but one must look quite hard for the vestiges of the Regency spa and for locations relating specifically to the Austen family. The house in Castle Square has long gone. Nothing remains of the Marquis of Lansdowne’s nearby mock-Gothic castle; it was taken down in 1822. The Theatre Royal on French Street burned down in November 1884. The seafront the Austens would have seen from their garden was moved to create new docks and port facilities in the early twentieth century. All Saints’ Church, where the Austens worshiped and where baby Mary Jane was baptized, was damaged by a German bombing raid in 1940. One can stand outside the former Dolphin Hotel—the location for winter assembly balls—and follow the Jane Austen Heritage Walking Trail to visit the sites of buildings that no longer stand.9 Many delegates did just that on the evening before the first day of the conference and after the conference ended, both slots being dedicated to these excursions. But in a hierarchy of must-visit places on the Austen tourist trail, Southampton loses out to Bath, to Chawton, to Winchester, and even to Lyme Regis. Indeed, the city loses out to many more Georgian-period locations that Jane Austen never once visited or wrote about—although later film and television crews did. If the conference played—and this publication plays—a very small part in making sure that Southampton is more firmly on Austen-related maps for fans and scholars alike, we will be delighted. We can assure you that the welcome from specialist Austen guides is a warm one.
We end with an anecdote. In this special issue, Nicola Pritchard-Pink comments on the fact that wearing period dress is imagined as ubiquitous for Austen fans. She quotes Lizzie Dunford, Director of Jane Austen’s House, whose experience with journalists is that they invariably want to see “dressed-up events.” As organizers, we shared this experience as the University of Southampton’s Press Office tried to engage interest in the conference. Local journalists expressed mild enthusiasm for covering the concert if there were to be people in period costume in attendance. Knowing that neither our delegates nor the musicians would be in Regency dress, we engaged the support of the Sarah Siddons Fan Club—named after another local girl, the superstar actress, who had a home in the town and frequently performed there. The club’s members were invited to attend in costume, in return for complimentary tickets to the concert. The resulting press coverage in the Daily Echo gives no insight at all into the conference and very little insight into Austen’s musical world (Wiggs). But it tells us a great deal about what journalists think Austen’s fans enjoy doing—and, indeed, something about the importance of publicizing humanities projects for universities that increasingly must define themselves in relation to “knowledge exchange” and “public benefit” agendas.
We know that a great many Austen fans enjoy reading Persuasions On-Line, and we applaud the JASNA community for keeping access to it free for anyone who has access to the internet, no matter where they are across the globe. We want to express our grateful thanks to Katie MacLean and Susan Allen Ford, both for responding so enthusiastically to the suggestion of this special issue on both sides of the Atlantic, and for bringing it to completion with their usual efficiency and expertise.
Global collaboration at its best!
NOTES
1Ulysse 31,see https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0131190/. It loomed larger in France than its 1981–82 dates suggest, playing on a loop through the 1980s, when French tv for children had very little programming other than cartoons.
2To see the program for the conference, go to https://www.southampton.ac.uk/leaf_content/uploads/global_jane_austen_final_programme_.pdf.
3For Translating Jane Austen, see https://research.soton.ac.uk/translating-austen/.
4For Jane Austen’s Desk, see https://janeaustensdesk.org/welcome.
5For more on the exhibits, see Delve and Butler’s “In Training for a Heroine” and Butler’s “A Very Respectable Company”; for a listing of the events coordinated by Southampton Forward, see https://southamptonforward.org.uk/jane-austen-250-3/.
6For The Austen Family Music Books, go to https://archive.org/details/austenfamilymusicbooks.
7For, the program for “Jane Austen: Home and Away,” see https://southampton.ac.uk/leaf_content/uploads/austen_concert_programme.pdf.
8See https://janeaustens.house/visit/visitor-info/.
9For Southampton’s Jane Austen Heritage Walking Trail, see https://assets.simpleviewinc.com/simpleview/image/upload/v1/clients/southampton/Jane_Austen_Walking_Trail_Map_2025_ac4d3c78-e580-4c97-94a5-876ccca5b937.pdf.
