“Un Auteur” or “Une Héroïne”? Jane Austen in France in the Early Twenty‐First Century

Abstract

ten can fairly be said to be familiar to the French public. All six of her novels having been translated into French very early on, between 1815 and 1824, and since then retranslated many times, Austen is more accessible in French than in any other language than English. Yet her place in French popular culture seems difficult to ascertain. For instance, the first website in French dedicated to Austen, "Jane Austen is my Wonderland" by "Alice," was only set up in 2010, like two blogs, "Les Romans de Jane Austen" and "I Love Jane Austen", followed by "Jane Austen and her World," created in 2013, and by a few others, as well as several Facebook pages. Most, if not all of these websites, are maintained by young female readers. While all of these resources offer summaries of Austen's novels and a biography of the author, they also devote plenty of space to the rewritings of her works and to the films and TV series inspired by her novels or loosely based on them or on her life, all of them of British or American origin. Austen has thus not really been appropriated by French popular culture, as shown by the English titles of many of these pages. More generally, the perception of Austen in France, caught between that of "an author for the cognoscenti," as Isabelle Bour puts it in "Jane Austen Victorienne" (73), and the image of a writer specializing in sentimental romances for teenagers set in a more or less idealized version of the English countryside, 1 has given rise in the last decade or so to studies by Lucile Trunel, Isabelle Bour, and Val erie Cossy, which all underline to varying