Jane Austen was a woman who liked to shop. “I am getting very extravagant & spending all my Money,” she wrote to her sister Cassandra during an 1811 London sejour. “What is worse for you,” she added, “I have been spending yours too.”
Muslin, trimmings, and silk were her chosen indulgences, but there were limits to her taste for luxury. Opulence, in her fiction, signals artifice. Sir Walter Elliot’s reckless spending in Persuasion or Augusta Elton’s glittering pearls in Emma mark vanity and pretension. Jane adorns the £10 note, not the £20, and certainly not the £50. What, then, would she have made of a new fragrance “inspired” by her novels now on the market at £295 a bottle?
It was in the dark, ornate and inevitably fragrant breakfast room of a swanky Kensington hotel on Tuesday that French-Italian parfumier D’Ootto launched its new “Romantic Collection” of extrait de parfums inspired by 19th-century novels. The tender intrigue of Pride and Prejudice is evoked by cashmere and white musk, while Emma Woodhouse’s “elegance and intelligence” are summoned with nutmeg, violet leaf and Sicilian mandarin. Unobjectionable choices, to my untrained nose anyway, though I can imagine some dissent from the claim that Austen’s artistry “finds its most poetic expression” in the medium of eau de toilette.
The event was more Instagram brunch than Georgian tea party. Soft electronic music played as lifestyle journalists milled around in exchange for a free poached egg. Bare surfaces were piled with antique hardbacks, pink flowers and perfume boxes wrapped in branded silk scarves. Two company founders, wafting about in pristine outfits, told us they had been inspired by Austen’s “strength” and “bravery”… when they studied her in school.
But this latest collection only cashes in on a known truth: reading is a status symbol now. The brand Minor Canon ignited an online firestorm by selling baseball caps bearing the names of women writers like “Sheila Heti”, “Rachel Cusk” and “Joyce Carol Oates”. Dua Lipa has a book club. Italian fashion darling Miu Miu hosted a literary club during Milan Design Week, with panellists discussing topics like “The Power of Girlhood”. Zadie Smith, meanwhile, can be found posing in a leather suit jacket in Bottega Veneta’s latest ad campaign, and Dior’s upcoming autumn winter collection takes inspiration – always “inspiration” – from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. The cool girls read now, and by a marketer’s logic, that means that you can use books to sell things to girls who want to be cool.
As far as cultural power goes, though, Jane is not like other girls. Joan Didion might be the avatar du jour of impending Substackers, but she doesn’t have a bobble-head Funko Pop doll made in her honour. Charlotte and Emily Brontë (alas, poor Anne) also got fragrances from D’Otto, but Greta Gerwig’s Barbie did not show “depression Barbie” bingeing the 1995 BBC adaptation of their novels. And what is smash hit Bridgerton, if not Jane Austen fan fiction? Many female writers are products. Austen alone is an industry. Her books have sold over 200 million copies; Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy shirt sold for £25,000 at auction.
And this year, with the 250th anniversary of her birth scheduled for December, Austen-mania is running especially wild. This week the “Brick Fanatics” forum was set alight by rumours, then confirmation, of an Austen LEGO set. Yesterday, Ruth Jones and Richard E Grant were named for the cast of The Other Bennet Sister. 2025 also sees French romcom Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, a BBC drama Miss Austen, and a West End play, Austentatious. Now more than ever, we are witnessing the Jane Austen-ification of everything.
With which, sadly, there also comes an everything-ification of Jane Austen. She is certainly many things to many people. Her characters have joined Harry Potter and Sherlock Holmes in the line-up of “Britain as theme park for Americans”. Interpretations of her as a feminist icon can be equally shallow; the D’Otto founders lauded her, basically, as a girlboss. Descriptions of an “‘activist” whose “rule breaking” helped a “silent revolution” would have been ripe stuff for Austen’s satirical pen.
Austen did not write to inspire a revolution, silent or scented. Gimmicks that simplify her miss the whole point: she wrote to cast light on complication. Her sweetest, swooniest scenes exist in works that challenge your ideas of love. Her English twee sits beside fierce and precise observations about class dynamics. Her so-called Strong Female Characters flounder, at times shrewd but at times oblivious, hurting people and getting things wrong. I first encountered Austen, like many, in the classroom, and my adolescent annotations – “sucks to be Charlotte” – have followed me through every rereading. I opened those pages wanting to pass a test, but I closed them with a better sense of how to move through the world.
Whatever you seek in Austen – romance, family, escapism – she’ll always give you more than you asked for. That’s why it’s hard to be too upset by her ubiquity. Gimmicks bring readers, and anyone who reads her will feel her. And however much we try to cheapen her, she will always enrich us. The Romantic Collection is only available at Harrods, but the six novels can be found in any bookshop. If a new perfume is of dubious value, they are not. So when we see the next Austen innovation – whether it be a LizzieGPT girlfriend simulator or a Bonnet Girl Summer – we should feel as Anne Elliot feels on reading Captain Wentworth’s letter in Persuasion: “half agony, half hope”.
[See also: How 4chan became the home of the elite reader]
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