Eternally Yours: Jane Austen as Vampire

Abstract

This chapter discusses Austen fan fiction that reimagines Jane Austen herself as a vampire. On one hand, the gesture can be read to give corporeal form to Austen’s undying fame. On the other, the vampiric incarnation of Austen can also betray deep anxieties about her place in twenty-first-century literary and popular culture. The mashups of the two authors discussed here—Janet Mullany and Michael Thomas Ford—are shown to exemplify this paradox, but they do so in very different ways. While Mullany’s vampire Austen fleetingly enjoys a hedonistic life in an alternate Georgian England, she is ultimately restored to a conservative image of Austen: Christian, English, an author, and above all, dead. Ford instead relocates Austen as a fish-out-of-water living in upstate New York, and an uneasy witness to her posthumous literary fame. Ford’s Jane Bites Back (2010) is highly ironic, critical of both the modern Austen industry to which it belongs and the literary taste for Byronic romantic fantasy to which it contributes. Together, these authors look to preserve and reaffirm the Austen they know and love despite modernising forces, but also point to infinite creative possibilities and a potential multiverse of immortal Austens.