Plots, pills and prisons: Jane Austen therapy as adaptation

Abstract Jane Austen and her novels have been adapted ad infinitum, and continue to be so as we move beyond the celebrations of the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth in 2025. This essay examines an atypical form of adaptation that has largely gone under the scholarly radar: modern Austen appropriations for sociological, rehabilitative, and healing purposes. These include engagements with Austen in the hospital ward, the prison ward and other charitable endeavours—such as Jennifer Ehle’s public reading of Pride and Prejudice at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic (2020), and several Austen reading groups in North American prisons (2014–9). I argue that, whereas in the first half of the twentieth century Austen’s oeuvre was put to consolatory uses due to the supposed stability and emollient qualities of her texts, in the twenty-first century such uses are more to do with the author’s accumulated cultural kudos than any intrinsic textual properties. This is evidenced by frequent recourse to her most iconic novels (Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility), by uses of the stories and even the Austen name detached from the texts, and by the frequent conjuring up of previous adaptation histories. Ultimately, what modern restorative adaptations teach us is the way Austen functions at present—as a celebrity and brand—and the power of audiences to determine the nature and uses of an adaptation. Austen fans, in other words, become collaborators, if not co-authors, in the adaptation process, especially in sociologically orientated variations that directly address them.