Jane Austen would have trouble finding a publisher today, says Reuters, completely missing the fact that, actually, she has plenty of publishers, as her books have probably never been more easily available than they are today.
But you can see their logic. Struggling writer David Lassman sent copies of several Austen chapters to 18 different publishers, changing nothing but the book titles and character names. 17 of them rejected it out of hand. The 18th told him to try writing less like Jane Austen.
You can read what you want into the first 17 rejections, but they prove nothing beyond the fact that Austen just isn’t what publishers want these days. I’d guess that at least half of the rejections were on that basis alone, and the other half were probably thrown on the slush pile because the guardians of our nation’s literary output recognised them for what they were: poorly-disguised plagiarism.
18 out of 18 rejections, 17 of them out of hand, proves that our nation’s publishers are serving their employers – and us, the reading public – well. There was a time and a place for Austen. Roughly from the day she was born to the day she died.
Yet her body of written work lives on, as it teaches us as much about the social mores of the times during which it was written as it does about the kind of people who used to read it. But expecting a modern-day publisher to pick up and run with with Emma or Northanger Abbey is naive at the least, and could well show why Lassman’s own book remains unpublished.
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