She had the write stuff!
Jane Austen was the most influential writer of the 19th century — inspiring more copycats than such contemporary literary greats as the Brontë sisters, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Joseph Conrad, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain and even Charles Dickens, arguably the era’s best-read author.
So say University of Nebraska researchers, who used a high-tech computer system to scan 3,500 books written between 1780 and 1900 for theme, style, grammar, word patterns and frequency to ferret out innovators and their imitators.
Austen’s “linguistic fingerprint” is modern literature’s strongest, said head researcher Matthew Jockers, 46, in part because “her style survived” but also because she was the first to focus on social status, manners, household domesticity, romantic realism, money and gossip as literary grist.
The findings come as Austen’s best-known love-and-society novel, “Pride and Prejudice,” celebrates its 200th birthday. Those subjects may have become popular post-Austen because few women writers were published and popular back then, Jockers noted.
Austen is also beloved for the novel “Emma,” which even inspired the 1995 film “Clueless,” and the classic “Sense and Sensibility,” which she wrote using the pseudonym “A Lady.”
Jockers co-launched the “Lit Lab” research in 2005 to dig through US, English and Irish literature.