Jane Austen is hip

A watercolour and pencil sketch of Jane Austen

It's remarkable the Mark Twain continues to draw the crowds 100 years after his death, but here's another infatuation with a long-gone writer.


Jane Austen, the English novelist best known for Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, has been dead since 1817, yet she is drawing a cultish pack of young people, especially young women, known as "Janeites" who are dedicated to celebrating all things Austen.

The appeal? Ms. Austen's tales of courtship and manners resonate with dating-obsessed and social-media-savvy 21st-century youths, says Nili Olay, regional coordinator for the New York Metro chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America, or JASNA. Ms. Austen counts roughly 89,000 fans on Facebook, compared with 45,000 for Charles Dickens, and just 9,000 for the Brontë sisters.

Young women, in particular, find meaning in Ms. Austen's work, according to Joan Klingel Ray, author of Jane Austen for Dummies. They may be "trying to figure out how to find Mr. Right," says Ms. Ray, an English professor at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. "You can almost vicariously experience this through her heroines."