I dream of Darcy

"Before, I think that [spinoff] books and movies were a little more tied to the novels, either as sequels or retellings," said Sullivan. "Now we're seeing a lot of chick lit in which women use Austen and her world as a fantasy escape."

Sullivan's own book, a glossary and guide to social customs of Regency England, features a cover illustration of a young woman in jeans looking in a mirror to see herself in empire-waisted splendor, but is not meant to be aspirational, she said. Instead, she hopes it will serve as a companion volume that helps readers understand the social cues and status symbols so crucial to Austen's minute social critiques. "To me, the important thing is: Always go back to the novels," said Sullivan. "The movies are fun, the books are fun, but you always have to go back to Jane."

"Going back" is precisely the thing several of Sullivan's fellow Janeites seem to be aiming for rather more literally. There are currently three novels about 21st century women, single and bummed about it, who travel back to 19th century England to meet the perfect man (i.e., Fitzwilliam Darcy, in case anyone's still fuzzy on that).

In Laurie Viera Rigler's "Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict," heroine Courtney Stone falls asleep drunk in Los Angeles and wakes up in another woman's bedchamber and another woman's century. "Who are these people?" she wonders. "And what's with those outfits?"

Alexandra Potter's "Me and Mr. Darcy" is about bookstore manager Emily Albright, who, after a bad date that puts her over the edge, eschews a wet-T-shirty Mexico vacation with girlfriends in favor of a tour of Austen's England with a busload of old ladies. Though Potter didn't go in for all the fancy period-dress stuff, Emily does have a series of blackouts, dreams and possible stoned hallucinations in which she is wooed by Mr. D.

"Me and Mr. Darcy" offers a "Pride and Prejudice"-appropriate surprise. Graced with a gruesome chick-lit-by-numbers cover, it turns out to be one of the wittier of this summer's offerings, not to mention sharp and sad in its observations about what spinsterhood, identity and aging look like for women in 2007. Potter, a 37-year-old Brit currently living in Los Angeles, acknowledged that fantasizing about Regency England is more than a little twisted. "The feminists didn't fight this hard for us to be sitting around in corsets doing samplers, did they?" she said.

But, she added, "the fact is that everybody's sick of modern-day men, and everybody's guilty of looking for the perfect person, even if he's a fantasy." The Austen man, and Darcy in particular, she explained, "is going to love you forever. He's not going to bump into some 20-year-old in a bar. He's an honorable, chivalrous, upstanding man that is going to be a hard nut to crack, but once he falls in love with you, it's going to be forever ... He's not going to be into Internet porn. And he doesn't go for the prettiest girl in the room. He goes for Elizabeth Bennet, who is witty and sharp."

Part of what makes Potter's book unexpectedly charming is its, and her, understanding that, in fact, Darcy "doesn't exist" and that if he did, he'd probably be a crashing bore. "If you dated Darcy in real life, he'd be a big disappointment," she said. "'Brooding' equals 'miserable,' and Austen writes that he's proud, which would actually mean incredibly sexist, and he'd be glowering and rude."

In Shannon Hale's "Austenland," the author goes for broke, bypassing the dream sequence conceit in favor of full-bore fantasy immersion. Her heroine, Jane Hayes, attempts to quash her Firth obsession once and for all by vacationing at a Jane Austen theme park. No, it's not one in which if you don't marry a man of means by 25 you're branded a spinster and forced to live off the kindness of family for the rest of your life! (Coming soon: Woolf-Wharton Water Park, where visitors wade into a stream with pockets full of rocks and can be swept down a river of laudanum! Wheee!)

No, Hale's Austenland is simply a place where lonely, desperate women -- unfulfilled by the romantic opportunities available in a post-feminist universe -- can go to dress up in pretty clothes and play whist with handsome actors who simulate roguish grumpiness on command.

By phone, Hale said that she always loved Austen's novels, but that "it wasn't until I saw the BBC miniseries with Colin Firth that something changed and I fell completely in love with it -- with him." She added that she had friends who would watch the tapes twice in a Saturday "to the point where it was interfering with their normal relationships."

I asked Hale, who is 33 and lives in Utah with her husband and children, but calls her book "an ode to my single self," if she finds it odd that single women would fantasize about a period during which their freedoms were so limited. "It makes no sense at all," she said. "It's completely ironic and disturbing to me as a feminist that I still daydream about that era."

Hale, who talked about her single 20s as a time in which she couldn't even afford to purchase BBC videos, suggested that class fantasy plays a part in Austen fascination. "Especially for Americans, the idea of living in England, as part of the gentry, where you dress up in the morning and you have a maid do your hair and you put on a corset and there's this leisure living ... we fantasize about that!"

So ... corsets and a rigid class system. All those regressive bindings we have managed to slough off, at least to some extent. Who wouldn't want to live back then, anyway? (Also? No plumbing!) "It must speak to some more primal desire," said Hale. "It must speak to something inside of us that we lack."

Judging by the general tilt of this crop of Janeism, what Austen devotees seem to feel they lack is a man.

Next page: Did Jane Austen have a Darcy of her own?