| In this week’s New Yorker, the staff writer Margaret Talbot examines the legacy of the Bluestockings, a coterie of upper-class English women who blazed an intellectual trail in the eighteenth century. Among those they inspired was Jane Austen, whose short, spectacular career—six classic works published in less than seven years—in many ways created the template for the modern novel. In 1996, the writer Martin Amis explored Austen’s enduring appeal. Readers were living, he remarked, at a moment of “Austen fever, or more particularly Darcymania,” with an array of new and upcoming adaptations hitting movie theatres and TV screens. This was the era of Gwyneth Paltrow and Alicia Silverstone playing different versions of the same Austen protagonist, in “Emma” and “Clueless,” respectively, while Colin Firth inflamed the ardor for Mr. Darcy in a BBC production of “Pride and Prejudice.” Amid the largely well-made deluge, Amis aims to set the record straight about what Austen’s fiction was not, lambasting the hit movie “Four Weddings and a Funeral” as a low-grade knockoff—“Jane Austen, in a vile new outfit.” (The rest of his take on the movie, with cameos by Salman Rushdie and the Ayatollah Khomeini, is apt to make you laugh and wince simultaneously.) Despite Austen’s death, as a “spinster,” at age forty-one, “she has now survived for nearly two hundred years,” Amis observes—an especially remarkable achievement given what he argues is a striking sameness across her œuvre. But he shares a compelling theory for Austen’s staying power—the reason that, as he puts it, “for every generation of critics, and readers, her fiction effortlessly renews itself.” | 
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