Laura Miller’s piece in Salon last week touched upon our continued interest in reinventing Jane Austen into what most pleases ourselves. Given the ridiculous success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and multiple vampire books*, there’s been much talk about whether Jane Austen herself would be rolling in her grave, or perhaps amused to see her stories with “ultra violent zombie mayhem.”

I can’t help but wonder though, if we’ve unconsciously brought Jane Austen full-circle. Though Austen never wrote about zombies, her juvenilia is full of scandal — carriage chases, divorce, murder and other mayhem, without always punishing the offending character. (Though this may not sound very scandalous to us, but in Victorian England this was extremely shocking, and to protect her reputation, Austen’s juvenilia was not published by the family until over 100 years later.)

But much like the spirit behind Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Austen’s humor is tongue-in-cheek, and at 14 she’s already noticed the inordinate number of women who faint in the novels of her time. In Love and Freindship[sic], written when Austen was still a teenager, she writes,

“Never did I see such an affecting Scene as was the meeting of Edward and Augustus.

“My Life! My Soul!” (exclaimed the former) “My adorable angel!” (replied the latter) as they flew into each other’s arms. It was too pathetic for the feelings of Sophia and myself — We fainted alternately on a sofa.”

And later:

“To compleat[sic] such unparalleled Barbarity we were informed that an Execution in the House would shortly take place. Ah! What could we do but what we did! We sighed and fainted on the sofa.”

Though Northanger Abbey is not considered part of the juvenilia (Austen was 23 when she wrote it), her parody of her gothic novel-writing contemporaries contains the same irreverent wit that I feel might have appreciated an addition of a zombie or two after all. Yes, Austen’s protagonist, Catherine, finds nothing but laundry bills in the locked chest, but perhaps if Shelley’s Frankenstein had been published just a few years earlier, we would be reading about how General Tilney walks with an extremely stiff gait, and how Catherine swears that he touches his neck all too frequently. (No, I am not advocating Frankenhanger Abbey. Though that would be meta — a parody of a parody… hmm…)

Like Miller said, most people want to see Jane Austen as either the Queen of chicklit or a brilliant social commentator, but the truth is that these two things don’t have to be mutually exclusive.  She liked to gossip about the neighbors with her sister Cassandra (though her most revered protagonists were rarely gossips) and she probably had PMS just as badly as the rest of us, though she’s portrayed as “our dear Aunt Jane.”

Who knows — perhaps if Jane Austen was alive today, she’d be reading Steig Larsson during the commercial breaks of Jersey Shore, and eating a 100 calorie pack of Ritz Bits.

And if so, I’d still want to hang out of that version of Jane Austen. (Pass the Ritz!)

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*Full disclosure: I work for Curtis Brown, the proud home of Michael Thomas Ford’s own Jane Bites Back.