Jane Austen Made Me Do It

Jane Austen Made Me Do It is a 2011 anthology of short stories inspired by Jane Austen’s novels, edited by Laurel Ann Nattress. While Adriana Trigiani is one of the contributors and has often been associated with the volume in promotional materials, the book is actually a collection featuring more than twenty different writers, each contributing a story that takes the Austen world as a starting point and runs in their own direction with it.

The contributors include Stephanie Barron, who writes the long running Jane Austen detective mystery series. Margaret C. Sullivan, a noted Austen scholar and blogger. Diana Birchall, Lauren Willig, Jane Odiwe, Carrie Bebris, and many others working in various corners of the Jane Austen industry that has flourished online and in print over the past several decades. The stories range across genres. Some are direct sequels to Austen’s novels, picking up the story of Anne Elliot or Elizabeth Bennet years after the original endings. Some are contemporary reimaginings that put modern characters into Austen style situations. Some are mysteries, some are romances, some are letters, and a few play with format in ways that show off the contributors’ individual strengths.

The Austen industry is a remarkable phenomenon. Two centuries after her death, Jane Austen remains one of the most adapted, parodied, continued, and reimagined novelists in the English language. Anthologies like Jane Austen Made Me Do It give working writers a chance to play in her world without having to commit to a full novel, and the result is a book that reads like a cocktail party at which everyone is enthusiastic about the same thing for slightly different reasons.

For longtime Austen fans, this is a fun grab bag with reliable pleasures. For new readers, it works well as a sampler of contemporary writers operating in the Austen inflected fiction space. Most of the stories are short enough to read in a single sitting.