by Kate McLachlan
Hey, have you heard the news? Jane
Austen has a Facebook page!
As soon
as I found out, I immediately ‘Liked’ her because I love her and it makes me feel closer to her now that we’re
“Friends.” Can one ever get close enough to Jane? Real intimacy has been
difficult, though, because, well, she’s been dead for nearly 200 years. Besides
that, nearly all her private letters were destroyed after her death, and nobody
even really knows what she looked like. Out of her very large family, she’s the
only one who never had a portrait done, except for one brother who was
apparently ‘developmentally delayed’, to use a modern term. Rumor has it Jane
may have been (gulp) ugly, and the
family didn’t want to waste good money on a portrait to memorialize that.
In any
case, Jane probably preferred the anonymity. She was a very private lady. But
that’s all right, because now she has a Facebook page!
You know what else? When I found
out Jane had a Facebook page, I checked to see if one of my other long-dead
favorite authors might have one too, and she did. Georgette Heyer, the icon of
Regency romances, who refused to give interviews and once famously said, “My
private life concerns no one but myself and my family,” now has a Facebook
page. Guess what, Georgette? Your private life concerns all of us now.
