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Image Credit: The Independent

While Caroline Bingley enumerates the accomplishments of elegant females in Pride and Prejudice, Mr. Darcy makes one significant addition: “to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.” This pivotal scene, in which Darcy hints at the attraction to Elizabeth Bennet that blindsides her later, may charm audiences in part because Jane Austen, like her readers, cares about the written word. Austen parodied the sentimental and the gothic novels respectively in Love and Freindship and Northanger Abbey, defended the novel as a genre in Northanger Abbey, and showed her characters equally interested in reading. Fanny Price rhapsodizes as she joins a circulating library and becomes “a chooser of books” in Mansfield Park, Anne Elliot discusses poetry and prose with Captain Benwick in Persuasion, and Sanditon’s proto-villain Sir Edward Denham fancies himself “quite in the line of the Lovelaces.” Yet reading practices today are not the same as they were ten years ago, let alone as they were when Pride and Prejudice was first published on 28 January 1813. I’d like to take the opportunity of this 200th anniversary to examine how we read Pride and Prejudice in the twenty-first century, and how changes in the reading practices surrounding the book help us answer the questions we have about the future of reading and the book as a physical object.

Image Credit: Digital Writing and Research Lab

Several possible answers arose for me while listening to the DWRL’s Zeugma Podcast. In the recent Reading episode, group members Eric Detweiler, Lisa Gulesserian, Hala Herbly, and Michael Roberts think through the relationship between technology and reading by discussing “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” interviewing Bob Stein from the Institute for the Future of the Book, and describing virtual reading and writing processes. While at first questions like “Is print dying? and if so, what will happen to reading? How does toggling between Internet tabs change the way we think about reading? How does crowdsourcing?” might not seem related to Austen’s extremely popular text, Pride and Prejudice demonstrates how technology has affected reading practices, as well as how technology has changed the reception of Austen’s “darling child.”

Image Credit: The Atlantic Wire

While we might not think of the printed book as a technology, it evolved to store texts. Likewise, its forms and design have changed significantly. One example of this is the binding: during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, books were commonly sold in temporary boards, and were bound by owners later for decorative purposes. The Atlantic’s article on 200 years of Pride and Prejudice covers suggests that we can we read something of the work’s reception in the ways the text has been packaged. For example, the peacocks in Hugh Thomson’s design, repeated over the next century, first serve to visually represent the theme of “pride,” but then become self-reflexive and incorporated into the text’s iconography, similar now to Darcy’s wet shirt. Likewise, C.E. Brock’s illustrations, produced for an 1895 edition of the text, now appear on postcards distributed by the Jane Austen Centre of Bath. These pictures, with their pastel colors and delicate-featured figures, reinforce readings of Pride and Prejudice that highlight the book’s romantic relationships over its more satirical underpinnings.

Image Credit: The Republic of Pemberley

Electronic technology has allowed for individual readers to share their experiences more widely than before. During the period in which Austen wrote, as described eloquently by Heather Jackson, marginalia written in texts began to record emotional reactions to texts as well as noting interesting passages. Individual readers might write in their copy of the book, then share it with another friend who could not only read the marginalia but also add to it. Now websites like Rap Genius, plugins like the Institute for the Future of the Book’s CommentPress, and e-readers like the Kindle or the Nook allow readers to store and share marginal commentary with a broad, unknown audience. These experiences not only allow readers to share affective experiences, but offer critics the opportunity to learn more about how texts are consumed and interpreted.

Image Credit: Screenshot from Kindle website

Visiting the Kindle website allows people to browse through the numerous highlights and comments left by readers of this edition of Pride and Prejudice. While many of these seem to reflect personal responses, as J. Keime notes that “I am loving this even more than I remember!”, others like love me hate me, who writes that “I love this book it is so well detailed. I love this book and I am only 9,” seem to be about constructing and sharing an identity with a reading community. This can also be seen in video book reviews on YouTube. E-readers both allow for this greater shared experience of text, but also enable new kinds of private reading—for example, no one except the person next to you can see what exactly it is you are reading.

Image Credit: Gathering Bones

Readings can also be enacted through visual texts that readers can create and share with others online. This includes fan-created works like comics, music videos, GIFs, memes, and other visual tributes that comment on other interpretations. While the BBC’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice itself presents an interpretation of Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, readers of that text can comment on it with pictures like the one above, which offers a reading of Darcy’s character. While probably no man in 1813 referred to himself as “Cucumber McCool,” the language situates Darcy’s motivations and feelings within contemporary discourse. It also connects back to the eighteenth-century novel’s own rich practices of mediation: Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa contains not only decorative frontispieces but also mad letters and music sheets, whereas Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy contains black, marbled, and blank pages, each of which encourage different kinds of textual engagement. Pride and Prejudice’s third-person narrative is interrupted by Mr. Darcy’s “two sheets of letter paper, written quite through, in a very close hand,” which he gives Elizabeth to read in order so she might understand his motivations through the novel’s first half.

These early attempts at combining media are thus reduplicated today in transmedia projects like The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which embeds a 24-year old communications major named Lizzie Bennet in a world of Twitter, Tumblr, and William Darcys. Her video blogs, like the one above, involve not just her interactions with her fellow characters, but also Q&As with her audience. Readers can not only follow her tweets, but tweet at her, leaving comments on her videos and Facebook posts. What this suggests is that while active engagement in reading has remained constant over the centuries, technology shapes how the reading experience directs that attention.

The LA Review of Books recently posted several thoughtful reviews of critical works on Pride and Prejudice and Austen's oeuvre to honor her most famous novel’s anniversary.  In one of the reviews, Audrey Bilger and Susan Celia Greenfield note how central interpretive acts are to Pride and Prejudice:

Austen encourages us to read people the way we ought to read books: wary of our first impressions, ready to search for the good in others, willing to recognize our own lack of self-knowledge.

The sheer number of reviews alone suggests the power of Austen's hold on our contemporary imagination: we read and re-read Austen to find the truths she may offer us, whether those truths are about eighteenth or twenty-first century culture. Perhaps the best tribute any of us can offer her is to always keep reading in this way, no matter through what medium.