Jane’s Addiction It’s Been 178 Years Since Her Death, But Author Jane Austen Is One Of Hollywood’s Hottest Talents

What better way to close out one century than to harken back to another?

What better antidote to the numbing craziness of urban America in the late 20th century than the comforting sameness of rural England in the early 19th?

And who better to guide us through the depths and shoals of living than the woman who made a literary career observing the manners and morals of life?

Jane Austen is back. Jane Austen is hot. People magazine named her one of the 25 most intriguing people of the year “a hot Hollywood property 178 years after her death.” If you’ve never read any of her six novels, don’t despair. You can watch the movie, or the television mini-series, or connect with her on the World Wide Web’s Jane Austen home page.

“I think people are tired of sensationalism, and we want people who behave admirably and with some respect,” says writer Ruth Moose, who is starting a Charlotte, N.C., chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America.

The latest Austen incarnation is actress Emma Thompson’s movie adaptation of “Sense and Sensibility,” also starring Hugh Grant. (The movie is scheduled to open in Spokane on Jan. 19.)

Also, the A&E television network will present “Pride and Prejudice” Jan. 14-16. The summer cult hit movie “Clueless” was loosely based on Austen’s novel “Emma.” Meanwhile, a new, more faithful television version is in the works. “Persuasion,” which hit the big screen this fall, is scheduled for broadcast as part of PBS’s “Masterpiece Theater” in 1996-97.

And if you actually want to read Austen in all her quiet glory, Random House’s Modern Library has just reissued all six of her novels in hardcover editions, with a tie-in edition of “Sense and Sensibility” from Knopf’s Everyman’s Library.

“I started reading Jane Austen when I was in the seventh grade,” says Garnet Bass of Raleigh, president of the Jane Austen Society of North America.

“I bought ‘Pride and Prejudice’ from the Scholastic Book Club. I read it monthly for two or three years. I moved from the story to the characters to appreciating her style of writing. Gradually I started reading her other books. I think Jane Austen has so much to say for us today. We hear a lot about the decline of civility in society now, and that is a great deal of what Jane Austen has to do with. How you treat other people. What is your place in society.”

Bass, a free-lance writer, discovered the society on a trip to England in 1982. It holds an annual meeting in October, and it publishes a literary journal and a newsletter. It has 47 chapters.

“It’s like finding a whole new family,” says Bass, 43. “I always felt a kinship with Jane Austen. She was from rural England. I was from rural North Carolina.”

What is this current fascination with all things Austen?

The short answer is: the movies.

“Generally when a book becomes a movie, the book makes it onto the best-seller list,” says Richard Vallejo, assistant manager of Barnes and Noble’s Sharon Corners store.

The store is selling a new “Sense and Sensibility” paperback and “The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries,” which contains Thompson’s diaries about making the movie and glossy pictures of Thompson and Hugh Grant.

The long answer is that Austen seems to fulfill a need for order in disorderly times.

Bass, who has read “Pride and Prejudice” at least 50 times, thinks there are many similarities between Austen’s day and today.

Austen was born in 1775 at Steventon Parsonage in Hampshire, England, the seventh of eight children. She was educated mainly by her father, who was a minister. She never married. She began publishing her work - trenchant observations on the manner of her time and class - under the anonymous “A Lady.” In 1817, she died at 41.

Austen’s world was one of rigid class distinctions, of landed gentry and feudal aristocracy. But by the time she died, the Industrial Revolution and capitalism had taken hold.

“Society is going through turmoil now as it was in Jane’s day,” Bass says. “In Jane’s day, they saw a leveling out of classes. Now we’re seeing the classes coming apart.”

UNC-Chapel Hill English professor Laurie Langbauer believes Austen is darker than most people think, that she is more than just an observer of high society, that her message is more than “if you know how to behave at a party, you’re going to have a good life.”

Langbauer believes that “Persuasion” and “Sense and Sensibility,” in particular, are complex works in which heroines come to terms with an imperfect world.

“People present her novels as if they’re an escape, an escape from some kind of a harsh world. But I think she offers a way of coming to terms with a harsh world,” Langbauer says. “It’s a 19th century version of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’ In the everyday world, in ordinary existence, there is something redeeming, if they can only learn to see it.”