becoming Jane Winslet

So, Jane Austen isn't pretty enough. Who knew?

A publisher has decided that, sad as it is, ya gotta play the game if you're trying to move books in today's world, that's just how it is baby, and they've photoshopped the great novelist for the cover of her novels. Rouged her up (so she looks like a badly coloured Victorian print); lost what they strangely seem to think was a "nightcap"; and added some pretty little curls running in rivulets down her pretty little neck. She doesn't look at all scary now. She could have any boy she wanted, I bet!










Why, she even looks like Kate Winslet! What a clever job.*

But, I hear you say, it's just one picture, it's just one publisher, who cares. And Miss Austen maybe did look rosy sometimes, after sitting too near the fire. No doubt took her cap off at odd moments, and no doubt wore her curls down on occasion. Things like this have been done in the past, I'm sure.

No, the thing that is so alarming about this is context. We live in the age of movies. We only respect Jane Austen for being a bunch of film adaptations and mini-series. Books are "units" now, and "tie-in" units at that. We can make anything how we want it to be, we live in the image, and somehow it matters that an ordinary-looking girl wrote those books instead of a glamourpuss. It's only a makeover, right? A celebrity makeover?

The heritage industry is thriving in Britain - well, everywhere - more and more, it seems, as pure erstaz. The heritage industry is the reason we can't see The Haywain when we see it. Even standing in front of Constable's paintings last summer I could barely see them, so overlaid were they with decades of sentimentality and complacency. "Heritage" makes it hard to read a Jane Austen novel, and each movie makes it harder still. "Heritage" is the reason people can't read poetry. "Heritage" is a negativity - an absence of thought, or imagination - which mimics entropy and forms a black hole around the great art we grew from.

Interestingly, if you stop to think about it, the great writers of the past were just people. They didn't sit down and say "I'm a great writer, look at me writing a great novel!" Nothing was certain. They sat down trembling in front of a blank page, just like we do now. To be great, to write something that lasts, is a surprise, it's a miracle. Jane Austen has a right, even after death, to that miracle, to remain herself, not to "become Jane". Doesn't she??

Isn't it our job to come to terms with our literature and the people who made it, rather than the other way round? Isn't each work of art something that was forced out of crisis, and shouldn't we remember the crisis as our route to understanding the art?

(Great anecdote, previously unknown in Baroque Mansions, over at Flat Out Norwich: a German soldier sees the giant canvas of Guernica in Picasso's studio, during the occupation, and says to the artist: "Are you responsible for this painting?" "No," Picasso replies. "You are.")

In the wake of the treacly & nostalgic "Miss Potter" film (which I saw, being fair, with some kids, and thought that for the budding misunderstood writer among them it had some great stuff about the creative instinct), and the even more ridiculous "Becoming Jane" (surely she was Jane already?) (and after the marriage refusal she only wrote one more book and it was Mansfield Park; this means she was not only "Jane," she was already "Jane Austen"), it betrays a terribly scary way in which we as a society are thinking about the people and the works that (yes: to some extent; to a great extent) made us. We think we can just go photoshopping for the kind we want.

We, you and I, the thinking public, are right now allowing something (warning: huge long self-indulgent list of adjectives) nasty, anti-intellectual, lowest-common-denominator, dishonest, ersatz, money-spinning, pointless, anti-historical and very stupid to be done to us. And to those we love. Don't we love our writers?

The publisher that's doing this? Wordsworth editions.**

Don't buy them.***

* Look at her eyes. They're incisive and intelligent in the top picture, sleepy and anodyne in the bastardised one. Could Jane Winslet have written Emma?

** Now there was a pretty boy! Maybe he should, though, have looked a little more like, say, Iggy Pop... (news flash: Helen Traynor of Wordsworth editions has this to say: “Virginia Woolf wasn’t much of a looker. I’m also considering making over George Eliot, who was frumpy, and William Wordsworth, who was pretty hideous. Most poets were really unattractive, with the one exception being Tennyson, who has wonderful bone structure.”)















***Anyway, cheap as they are, they're terrible, unreadable, badly printed on worse paper.