JANE’S FAME Claire Harman (Canongate, £20)

‘Scholars clash’ headlines appeared when Oxford academic and Austen authority Professor Kathryn Sutherland reportedly took umbrage at Harman’s book, saying it repeated ideas from her own research, without crediting her.

That a literary row between two Jane Austen experts and former friends should make the news is an indication of the novelist’s popular appeal.

But Austen’s popularity is relatively recent, as Harman explains in her book, which is not a biography, but a description of how Austen has been received by her readers — and the literary establishment — at different times in history, up to the present day.

There are delightfully post-modern touches, such as the episode of The Archers in which Nigel Pargetter, the aristocratic owner of Lower Loxley Hall, decides to ‘do a Mr Darcy’ and jumps into his own lake. Another character in the radio soap says: “That's the trouble with books,” forgetting that the Darcy wet shirt episode comes from the 1995 film starring Colin Firth, and not from the book.

Harman is fairly relaxed about modern TV and film adaptations, except when they prevent people from reading the books..

Jane Austen’s struggle to get published is a tale of interest to today’s would-be authors. When the publisher Thomas Cadell declined the unsolicited manuscript offered to him by Austen’s father, a Hampshire clergyman, in 1797, he made one of the biggest mistakes in publishing history. It was not until more than 50 years after her books were published that the cult took root, and she spent 20 years as an unpublished author, enjoying just six years of success before she died.

Even then, her work was dismissed by (mainly male) literary critics. Joseph Conrad, writing to HG Wells, asked: “What is all this about Jane Austen? What is there in her?”

She was under-estimated by family and friends — one remembered Jane as simply “the prettiest, silliest, most affected husband-hunting butterfly”. Even when she had become a published novelist, no one guessed she would one day be part of the literary canon. After her death most of her letters were lost or thrown away, and the early editions of her books were pulped or remaindered.

Harman believes this was due to more than simple male prejudice against ‘female’ stories about relationships. Austen was too modern for her times, with naturalistic dialogue and pared-down prose, plus an emphasis on character. Some of her best characters are monstrous, and she wrote about romantic love in a realistic way, recognising that lack of independent income affected women’s choice of partner.

Claire Harman is at the Oxford Literary Festival today at noon.