Lots of fun with Jane Austen's novels is had in Helen Fielding's two volumes of Bridget Jones's Diary. The man of Bridget's dreams, as is now well known, is called Mark Darcy. She and Mark are introduced at a New Year's Day Turkey Curry Buffet, arranged by friends of Bridget's parents. When she first meets him, Mark (a ‘top human rights lawyer’) is standing aloof, scrutinising the contents of their bookshelves. Bridget, prejudiced against Darcy from the first, thinks him a snob, and her new boyfriend, the rake, Daniel, confirms this opinion when he tells her that he's known Mark since Cambridge and he's a nerdish old maid. Bridget and Mark continue to bump into each other at parties and cross swords, in a series of conversations, though Bridget gradually comes to see that Mark might really care for her. When Darcy goes to great lengths to rescue the family from the financial disaster that Bridget's insufferable mother's romantic escapade has plunged them into, she is ready to fall into his arms – or rather to climb the stairs to his bedroom.

Chapter 3 argues that Jane Austen revisited themes from her juvenilia in her published novels, especially Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Mansfield Park (1814), both of which were also lightly revised after initial publication in response to readers and reviewers.They display Austen’s concern with improving her texts and using accurate technical language.Austen’s cautionary stance on “sensibility,” especially female sensibility, within Sense and Sensibility was first developed within her juvenilia and functions as a critique of late eighteenth-century sentimental tropes.Austen’s ambiguous stance regarding the wild women of Mansfield Park, especially when interpreted through the lens of her earlier writings, can be read as an implicit criticism of the systems of female education and marriage that produce their immoral behavior.The chapter’s conclusion shows the culmination of Austen’s masterful revision practices in The Watsons (c.1803) and Persuasion (1817), which are linked to clear stylistic improvements and keen social commentary on the condition of women.

Two decades of intense experimentation and revision preceded the publication of Jane Austen's six major novels: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), Northanger Abbey (1818), and Persuasion (1818). Constantly playing off the tradition, she merges the dramatic interiority of Samuel Richardson with the authorial voice of Henry Fielding to expose characters' minds while prompting the judgement of readers. That flexible narrative voice would catch the attention of Henry James and Virginia Woolf, among others. Even in her last unfinished fragment, Sanditon, Austen was still evolving new techniques and subjects. But her affection for irony, satire, and parody derives just as clearly from Restoration and eighteenth-century drama. Thus Austen, poised between two centuries, writes novels that are as compact, witty, and incisive as plays. Austen's relation to predecessors and contemporaries may be traced through the books she owned, says she has read, alludes to, or seems to echo. Even that may represent a mere fraction of what she knew, for as F. R. Leavis remarks, 'she read all there was to read, and took all that was useful to her - which wasn't only lessons'. Like most authors, Austen made books out of other books as well as out of life. If readers are active rather than passive consumers of texts, so too writers poach freely from other writers. Thus Austen's appropriations signify not lack of imagination, not plagiarism, not submission to 'influence', but sheer competitiveness. Her rewriting of fellow novelists particularly implies critique, for comparisons reveal her irresistible literary-critical impulse to improve upon them.

It is common to speak of Jane Austen's novels as a miracle; the accepted attitude to them is conveniently summarized by Professor Caroline Spurgeon in her address on Jane Austen to the British Academy:

The business of literary criticism is surely not to say ‘ Inspiration’ and fall down and worship, and in the case of Jane Austen it is certainly not entitled to take up such an unprofitable attitude. For in Jane Austen literary criticism has, I believe, a uniquely documented case of the origin and development of artistic expression, and an enquiry into the nature of her genius and the process by which it developed can go very far indeed on sure ground. Thanks to Dr Chapman's labours we have for some time had at our disposal a properly edited text of nearly all her surviving writings, and scholarship, in his person chiefly, has brilliantly made out a number of interesting facts which have not yet, however, been translated into the language of literary criticism.

As a founding member of the Jane Austen Society in the 1940s, Bowen helped spearhead the arrangements that, as a world war raged and hundreds of thousands of other homes were destroyed, saved for the nation the Hampshire house where the Regency novelist had written her books. Through the society’s efforts, Chawton Cottage, in its new guise as Jane Austen’s House Museum, became, as it remains, a mainstay of the English heritage industry. In Bowen’s fiction and critical writing, evidence suggests that, despite the norms of periodisation, the later novelist valued her predecessor’s work not as an emblem of tradition and repository of heritage values, but for the way it supplied the formal resources for a modern or modernist future of fiction. More than a practitioner of domestic fiction and marriage plotting, the Austen to whom Bowen pays homage is a figure notable for her surgical precision and mastery of form. The restraint and ironic detachment that Bowen ascribes to Austen is not alien to Bowen’s commitment to human passion. As some of Bowen’s essays on Austen argue, the novelist made passion her study – a study that, Bowen found, could renew the novel form.

‘Re-vision’ – ‘the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction’ – has been the name of the game in literary and cultural criticism for the last three decades. Meanwhile ‘revision’, in the sense of borrowing from an original to further one's own artistic purposes, has been pursued even more vigorously within the novel, the theatre and film. Inevitably, perhaps, it has been Shakespeare who has served as the cultural hero against whom most artists have wanted to measure themselves, playfully or angrily rewriting the plays from radical, postcolonial, feminist, lesbian or gay points of view, or borrowing from his plots to give added resonance to their own enterprises. There is an immense range and variety of such ‘appropriations’. From the disconcerting eruption into Gus Van Sant's tale of Seattle rentboys, My Own Private Idaho (1991) of lines and even whole scenes of Henry IV, to the incestuous Lear of Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres (1991) Shakespeare has been ‘plundered’ to serve purposes as diverse as diligent modernisation and outright burlesque.

In the words of her biographer and nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen was ‘successful with everything that she attempted with her fingers’. Whether she was playing ‘spilikins’ with her siblings’ children, tidily ‘folding and sealing’ correspondence, transcribing fair copies of her novels for publishers, or working so finely at her needle that she would ‘almost have put a sewing machine to shame’, her ‘handiwork’ always showed itself to be of a ‘superior’ cast (Austen-Leigh 2002, 77). We do not need to take Austen-Leigh at his word. Extant manuscripts attest to the neatness of Austen’s hand, while the survival of a range of material objects amply demonstrates her skills across various craft forms. Jane Austen was a prodigious maker and commentator on others’ making. The index entry for ‘handicrafts’ in the fourth edition of Deidre Le Faye’s Jane Austen’s Letters (2011) has some thirty-eight subentries devoted to activities from patchwork to making transparencies, many of which cross-reference multiple letters. Crafts – useful and decorative needlecrafts, netting, filigree work, screen painting and paper flower making – also feature in Austen’s fiction. These material practices and objects give texture to the fictional households the novels conjure, but their significance goes beyond a commitment to domestic realism. The (in)ability to execute or to appreciate such activities and the objects in which they result is an important mode of characterisation across the six completed novels. Scenes of making and the gifting of handmade crafts also provide entry points to characters’ – particularly heroines’ – emotional and psychological states, for instance when we see Mrs Weston, in Emma (1816) ‘sighing and moralising over her broad hems’ (E, 422) or Catherine Morland so ‘at a loss of spirits’ that she neglects making her brother’s cravats (NA, 249).

In ‘The Jane Austen Syndrome’, Marjorie Garber – a Shakespeare scholar and self-confessed sufferer from the syndrome her 2003 essay describes – contributes to a long tradition of criticism asserting Jane Austen's kinship with the Bard. It is not only the case that this pair represent English literature's most masterful creators of character and dialogue. Nor for Garber do the similarities end when we acknowledge that Austen and Shakespeare are cultural icons, possessed of, and perhaps cursed by, a celebrity independent of their perceived value as writers. ‘More than any other authors I know’, she asserts, ‘Austen and Shakespeare provoke outpourings of love.’ That last remark registers the contribution Garber's essay makes to a second venerable strain in Austen's reception history, a tradition of commentary on the ardent identifications that the novels inspire. Jane Austen fosters in her readers, as most other literary giants do not, the devotion and fantasies of personal access that are the hallmarks of the fan. For a century, therefore, many a commentator has accompanied his interest in the novels with an interest in the extravagancy of audiences’ responses to them – an interest, particularly, in how that heady enthusiasm diverges from the level-headed dispassion that is supposed to define a proper aesthetic response. Thus Henry James in 1905 remarks on the rising ‘tide’ of Austenian ‘appreciation’ and finds it, he observes waspishly, to have risen, thanks to the ‘stiff breeze of the commercial’, ‘rather higher … than the high-water mark, the highest, of her intrinsic merit’. John Bailey (1864–1931) notes while introducing his 1927 ‘Georgian Edition’ of her fiction ‘the extraordinary spread of the cult of Jane Austen’ and explains the cult's recruitment successes with a paradox: the passage of time, though putting more distance between her era and readers’, has increased the intimacy of the author–reader relation. ‘She has ceased to be the ‘Miss Austen’ of our parents and become our own ‘Jane Austen’ or even ‘Jane’.’

As Bailey implies when he contrasts his parents’ generation and his own, the late Victorian period is when readers began thinking of Austen as an author with whom they might be on an intimate, first-name footing – whom they could love rather than merely esteem.

Walter Scott’s unsigned review of Emma in the Quarterly Review of March 1816 has long been regarded as the first serious review to identify Austen’s novels with a new kind of fiction. Praising Austen’s fiction as drawn ‘more immediately from the current of ordinary life than was permitted by the former rules of the novel’ (Scott 1968a, 59), Scott celebrates what came to be known as the realist novel, which had ‘arisen, within the last fifteen or twenty years’ (63). In an intriguing gesture, Scott observes that Austen’s ‘knowledge of the world, and the peculiar tact with which she presents the characters’ recalls ‘the merits of the Flemish school of painting’ (67).

It is intriguing partly because the ‘Flemish’ association contains a world of ambivalence. As Claudia L. Johnson has astutely pointed out, Scott’s review of Austen is ‘warmly appreciative but at the same time foundationally diminishing’ (Johnson 2001, 177). For with the ‘merits’ of the Flemish school of painting came manifold f laws, which had been articulated in a highly gendered tradition of commentary since the seventeenth century. Scott’s comparison intrigues, then, for its interimplicating ambivalence towards Flemish painting and the English novel, and also for its subtly self-canonising impulse in relation to the novel genre – a fraught, highly contested and undervalued genre at the time.

Nevertheless, as this chapter argues, the ‘Flemish’ analogy is an illuminating lens through which to engage changing conceptions of realism and situate Austen in relation to later forms of British and French realism. Scott’s comparison links to a rich hinterland of aesthetic theory, art and literature that informed Austen’s nineteenth century reception and continues to illuminate her place in the history of the novel.