Long before I began writing fiction, I was writing about literature. This may be one of the reasons why it took me so long to write fiction. The saying goes that writing a dissertation is the surest obstacle to writing anything that anyone would read, and writing about great literature (as I did in my dissertation) is bound to make writing even mediocre fiction all the harder. I suffered under this curse for many years, writing plenty of books of the academic sort -- which is to say, books that no one read.
I owe my breakthrough to Jane Austen. I had written about Austen in that dissertation and had taken great pleasure teaching her to undergraduates. This was in the 1990s, at the beginning of the great tidal wave of Austen-mania, when the first of a spate of adaptations of her novels had begun to appear on screen. It was as though her novels had been waiting for the cinematic medium to jump-start her popularity with a mass audience. Austen's simple romantic plot lines, her opulent settings and clever, highly interactive dialogue were ideally suited to movies and television. Mr. Darcy and Mr. Knightley, in their cutaways, their brusquely proper manners, and their moral high-mindedness, were ideal cinematic heroes; Elizabeth and Emma with their arch good humor and empire dresses (presented without the period's modest lace coverage to reveal ample decolletage) were perfect cinematic heroines. Moreover, Austen's plots were good in any sort of setting and time period, as evidenced by the enormous success of the 1995 Clueless (Emma set in a Beverly Hills high school).
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