250 Years After Her Birth, Why Is Jane Austen Still So Popular?

The English Department’s very own Professor Aia Yousef was recently featured on Georgetown’s main news page discussing what makes Jane Austen still resonate to this day. Check out the excerpt below:

This year marks the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth.

To celebrate the occasion, thousands are flocking to Bath, England, in bonnets and top hats this month for the Jane Austen Festival.

Several new adaptations and reimaginings are also in the works during her birthday year: Netflix is producing a new Pride and Prejudice series written by Dolly Alderton; Focus Features announced an adaptation of Sense and Sensibility with Daisy Edgar-Jones; and earlier this year, PBS debuted Miss Austen, a series about Jane Austen’s sister.

What continues to spur Austenmania two centuries after her birth? It’s a question Aia Yousef asks her students.

“I don’t know if we’ve settled on an answer,” Yousef said. “She was writing two centuries ago about a small region in southeastern England. And yet somehow, she is still so popular.”

Yousef, an advising dean in the College of Arts & Sciences and adjunct lecturer in the Department of English, teaches an undergraduate course on Austen. In the class, students read Austen’s six novels, her unfinished seventh and her writing as a young adult, assessing the historical context of the time, her literary style and contributions to the development of the novel. They also examine Austen’s enduring popularity, adaptations like Clueless and what she can teach us today.

“I think students are looking for that space where they can explore some of these questions — what it’s like to be a young woman in society, how to make a good decision, how to be a good person, how to grow — and Austen allows them to do that,” she said. “Her characters are still relevant. The stories they tell are still relevant.”

Be sure to check out Georgetown’s full piece online and read along with Prof. Yousef!