Okay, okay, don’t worry, I know the answer to this question. But in five hundred or a thousand years, will people be so certain?
We question the true authorship of Shakespeare’s works. Some of us even question whether Jesus Christ was a real human being, or just a fiction that some religious group invented. Five hundred years from now, what’s not to say that people will be questioning whether Jane Austen really wrote her own books–or whether she even existed at all?
I had this idea while I was doing a copy edit with The Leading Edge (apparently, if you help them with their slushpile consistently enough, you get roped into the higher level stuff like copy edits, substantive edits, and even get a position with some authority–eventually). We were taking a quick break and I was chatting with some of the other editors about story ideas, and somehow out of the conversation this idea spawned. Good heavens.
I think it’s an awesome idea, but I know for sure that I don’t have the chops to pull it off. I haven’t read enough Austen to really develop a taste or a love for her work, or even really an understanding of it. If someone else with much more knowledge and love of Austen could pull it off, I’d definitely like to see it. If you think that’s you, feel free to “steal” my idea and run with it.
If I personally were going to write it, I’d extrapolate a crazy middle-far future world that basically resembles our own, with a few key cultural and economic shifts, and focus on the question of her gender. I’d think of some awesome reason why these futuristic people specifically question whether it was a man who wrote her books and pattern the debate off of the kinds of debates we have about the authorship of Shakespeare’s works. The characters in the story would probably be literary elites who are WAY WAY worked up over this question–the kind of people who go to war over this stuff. From there, I would make it a comedy of the sexes, and use the story as a way to examine, in a humorous, upbeat way, some of the timeless differences between men and women.
But that’s just how I’d do it. Maybe you have a better idea. If you do write something like this (or know of something similar), please let me know, because I want to read it!
