Review of John Wiltshire: 'Recreating Jane Austen' Cambridge University Press, 2001 ISBN 0 521 00282 6 $42.95

This book deals with 'Jane Austen', cultural icon, focusing in particular on the varying ways she has been recreated in biographies, literary criticism and film. A related theme is the nature of the re-creational impulse itself - what is the nature of the fascination with Jane Austen that writers and film makers have had, and why has her work been so frequently appropriated and transformed? Wiltshire identifies two types of re-creation: that which simply attempts to re-present the original text with the priority of being 'faithful' to it, a sort of homage (such as early BBC versions of the novels); and that which attempts to create a new text out of the old, which confronts and sometimes contests the assumptions of the original and by so doing establishes itself as new, a work of art in its own right (such as 'Clueless' and Patrick Rozeme's 1995 film of 'Mansfield Park').