“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a dominant man in possession of a good set of cuffs, must be in want of a much younger, submissive wife” begins Spank Me, Mr. Darcy (2013) by Jane Austen and Lissa Trevor. Pride/Prejudice (2010) by Ann Herendeen opens with Darcy (“Fitz”) and Mr. Bingley (“Charles”) in bed together, pleasuring each other and scoffing at the prospect of being married off to eligible women. Mrs. Bennet Has Her Say (2015) by Jane Austen and Jane Juska gives us Pride and Prejudice’s marriage-obsessed mother’s tale of pretending to be a virgin on her wedding night. Mr. Bennet repeatedly utters “Consummate!” while entering her.

Of course, Jane Austen-inspired pornographic fiction exists. There’s porn everything, and there’s Jane Austen everything. Why wouldn’t there be Austenesque erotica? Whether you welcome the phenomenon with open arms, a raised eyebrow, a raised fist, or a guffaw, you don’t have to do much digging to discover that twenty-first-century print-porn Austen adaptations have flourished. Although not every kind of porn has penetrated Austen’s original plots and characters, there is a wider variety of this material than one might think, especially when coming at the subject through Austen criticism, where treatment of it is sparse. Few of us who “do Austen” as critics have tried to make sense of the proliferation of such horny homages, or, if you’d rather, dirty dishonors. Perhaps it is because such texts may at first seem to require little by way of careful analysis to grasp their appeal or inner workings. Such texts thrive, you might say, because there is a market for them. They work (or don’t) by entertaining and/or arousing readers. Case closed.

An earlier, shorter version of this essay appeared in Salon.com, at http://www.Salon.com and remains in the Salon archives. Reprinted with permission.

Yet to stop at dollars and pounds, or sex and sensationalism, would be a mistake. As we try to come to grips with the scope of Austen’s legacy, celebrity, and iconicity, we must examine the meanings of even the most blatantly sexed-up Austen-inspired texts. In the first part of this essay, I start close to the present, providing an overview of recent straight-up and send-up Austen erotica, as it circulates in the early twenty-first century. But Austen-inspired smut is not as new as many might suppose, as I show in the second half of this essay. Its origins date as far back as half a century ago, with a disturbingly comic novel, published under a pseudonym, that has an unlikely story of authorship and reception. In the years since that apparently originary 1980 work, the sexy subgenre of Austenesque fiction has become, by comparison to its beginnings, more tame and banal. This essay charts the history of Austen-inspired erotica’s explosive growth and greater acceptance.