MARK TWAIN was not Jane Austen’s biggest fan. Twain found her writing tedious, her characters dull and her stories offensively sentimental, complaints he also lobbed at the novels of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper.

“I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and, therefore, I have to stop every time I begin,” he wrote in a letter to Hartford minister Joseph Twichell in 1898. “Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shinbone.”

And in Following the Equator:

“Jane Austen’s books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.”

Rarely, with the possible exception of his ill-fated investment in the Paige Compositor typesetting machine, did the Sage of Farmington Avenue exhibit worse literary judgment. For Austen’s works continue to grace libraries, and though she died at age 41 in 1817, her novels are more popular than ever. And although it was surely not her intent, the English author’s exquisite comedies of manners are widely cited as the progenitor of today’s popular genre with the inelegant moniker, “chick lit.”

Born in 1775, Austen never married but did enjoy a flirtation with an Irish lawyer and briefly accepted a marriage proposal from another man. She wrote six novels: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.

Her Regency-era romances are notable for their early and deft use of irony and dialogue and are solidly underpinned by her sharp observations about women’s prospects at a time when they could not inherit family assets and depended on marriage to stave off poverty.

In Elizabeth Bennett and Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pride and Prejudice, Austen created wittily battling lovers not unlike Kate and Petruchio or Beatrice and Benedick in Shakespearean comedy, and her characters still serve as models for couples in novels and films. Their sharp repartee belies the fact that they are made for one another and will unite once they overcome the pride and prejudices keeping them apart. Now, a film about Austen’s life, Becoming Jane, starring Anne Hathaway and James McEvoy, is in North American theaters. It plays up—and overplay—her flirtation with the lawyer, Tom Lefroy. James Cromwell, Julie Walters and Maggie Smith also are in the cast.

In September The Jane Austen Book Club, a movie based on Karen Joy Fowler’s 2004 novel about six Californians who meet to discuss Austen and find their lives intertwining in unexpected ways, starring Maria Bello, Jimmy Smits, Hugh Dancy, Lynn Redgrave and Kathy Baker, will be released.

In January a PBS Masterpiece Theater series will begin presenting adaptations of Austen’s six novels, including Emma with Kate Beckinsale and the Emmy-winning mini-series version of Pride and Prejudice, with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. The four-month-long series also will include the drama Miss Austen Regrets, based on the author’s letters and diaries. Austen devotees also have connected in cyberspace, on web sites and blogs. Among them are www.austen.com, www.austenblog.com; the discussion and information group called The Republic of Pemberley at www.pemberley.com, the Janeites discussion group at homepages.ihug.com.nz/~awoodley/janeites.html, The Jane Austen Society of North America at www.jasna.org, and the Jane Austen homepage at www.geocities.com/Athens/8563.

Spurred by the movies, some new books are out that deal with Austen’s work, or apply her sense and sensibility to contemporary times, or use her stories as the springboard for novels. Here is a look at some of the latest additions to the Austen shelf: the 784-page The Annotated Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (Anchor/Knopf), annotated and edited by David M. Shapard of the University of California, Berkeley, which contains the complete text of the novel and, on facing pages, more than 2,300 notes, along with maps, illustrations, a chronology of the book’s events and a bibliography; a spinoff from the film titled Becoming Jane: The Wit and Wisdom of Jane Austen (Miramax Books) by Anne Newgarden, a compendium of Austen’s most quotable observations from her six novels, grouped by topics such as “Men” and “Marriage”; and Dear Jane Austen: A Heroine’s Guide to Life and Love (Plume) by Austen scholar Patrice Hannon, written in the form of letters to Austen, on topics focusing on character, family, friends, beauty and “s-x [a short chapter].”

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All Things Austen

MARK TWAIN was not Jane Austen’s biggest fan. Twain found her writing tedious, her characters dull and her stories offensively sentimental, complaints he also lobbed at the novels of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper.