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jsburbidgeJohn Scalzi's noted the current Jane-Austen-gets-rejected-today little newslet. This is an extreme form of the game which usually involves sending Casablanca out to agents with the title Everybody Comes To Rick's.
In terms of the rejections, I'll note that any market to which you could sell derivative-Jane-Austen books probably has editors who pretty well all recognize Jane Austen; or, at the very least, the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice, which is probably one of the ten or so most famous opening lines of a novel of all time. The fact that he was rejected politely proves nothing; it would have been more shocking if his novels had been accepted.
However, I disagree with Scalzi about general saleability. A writer with Austen's ear and general style would probably still be saleable -- but he/she wouldn't be writing Jane Austen novels, since Jane Austen novels are part of the foundation of the modern novel. The author would have absorbed them, as well as James, Hardy, Joyce, and probably Powell, and be working with a much deeper repertoire of purely novelistic techniques behind than Austen had, writing half a century after Fielding. (As Eliot said of Virgil, "We know more than the ancients, and they are what we know".) Susanna Clarke is good enough evidence, though, that using an early-nineteenth-century style (or one that sounds like it to most people: Jane Austen was the most frequent comparison I saw, although to my ears she read more like Thackeray) where the nature of the work requires or is enhanced by it will not hurt market exposure or sales.
One commenter in Scalzi's thread noted Heyer's continuing popularity. One thing which I'd note is that Heyer and Austen aren't at all similar at a nuts and bolts level, however much they look the same from 10,000 feet up (a couple falls in love in Regency England). As a minor example, just about every word Austen uses is still part of "standard" literary English; Heyer has her characters lard their speech with slang of the period. Heyer is taking the reader on a tour of a strange and amusing country, highlighting its exotic character; Austen is writing comedies designed to drive home a moral in (for her) familiar and conventional surroundings. Auten's tone is formal; Heyer's is formal as a narrator, but far more informal when providing characters' dialogue.
In terms of the rejections, I'll note that any market to which you could sell derivative-Jane-Austen books probably has editors who pretty well all recognize Jane Austen; or, at the very least, the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice, which is probably one of the ten or so most famous opening lines of a novel of all time. The fact that he was rejected politely proves nothing; it would have been more shocking if his novels had been accepted.
However, I disagree with Scalzi about general saleability. A writer with Austen's ear and general style would probably still be saleable -- but he/she wouldn't be writing Jane Austen novels, since Jane Austen novels are part of the foundation of the modern novel. The author would have absorbed them, as well as James, Hardy, Joyce, and probably Powell, and be working with a much deeper repertoire of purely novelistic techniques behind than Austen had, writing half a century after Fielding. (As Eliot said of Virgil, "We know more than the ancients, and they are what we know".) Susanna Clarke is good enough evidence, though, that using an early-nineteenth-century style (or one that sounds like it to most people: Jane Austen was the most frequent comparison I saw, although to my ears she read more like Thackeray) where the nature of the work requires or is enhanced by it will not hurt market exposure or sales.
One commenter in Scalzi's thread noted Heyer's continuing popularity. One thing which I'd note is that Heyer and Austen aren't at all similar at a nuts and bolts level, however much they look the same from 10,000 feet up (a couple falls in love in Regency England). As a minor example, just about every word Austen uses is still part of "standard" literary English; Heyer has her characters lard their speech with slang of the period. Heyer is taking the reader on a tour of a strange and amusing country, highlighting its exotic character; Austen is writing comedies designed to drive home a moral in (for her) familiar and conventional surroundings. Auten's tone is formal; Heyer's is formal as a narrator, but far more informal when providing characters' dialogue.
