The ultimate Queen of Romance and not in the least the Queen of Suspense, is the iconic Jane Austen. Scaling heights that few women have scaled, this Victorian writer, who only published a novel with her real name instead of ‘By A Lady’, posthumously, has captured the hearts of millions across the world. From raging intellectual discussions to schoolgirl fantasies, Austen has penned an escapist romantic fantastical fire that burns bright to this day. With thousands of books written about, and on her, with characters that leap off the pages and into our lives, with lines that still charm with their sardonic wit and inherent truth, Austen is a writer that has surpassed all others.

But this is less about Austen and more about the fanfare she generates – and in that, they are both entwined. Austen, like Shakespeare or Agatha Christie, is an icon that can never be cast in the past, as she continues to live and be relevant to this day, in the souls of readers and audiences, in the passion of the characters that spring alive on screen and leap off the pages of her books to influence our lives and thoughts.

Despite the fact that she wrote merely six novels and has had thousands written about her, it is her own novels that still continue to generate the most sales. Like Shakespeare and Christie, she has her finger firmly planted on the pulse of people, sentiments and circumstances that continue to be relevant.

Finally, after multiple versions of her stories were translated into the silver screen, a movie was made about her, the life of Jane Austen. What was she like? What was the romance in her life? Becoming Jane, starring Anne Hathaway in the role of Austen, released last year and sparked off a controversy of the author’s romantic pursuits. We learn that Austen loved a rambunctious lad called Thomas Lefroy, played by James McAvoy. In him, Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Darcy finds birth and Austen is living the life of her most famous heroine, Elizabeth Bennet. It doesn’t take much to deduce that Austen lived her happily-ever-after only through her books, to make up for the lack of ‘denouement’ in her personal life.

To prove a point about the extent of readers’ fascination with Austen, also in 2007 came The Jane Austen Book Club, a movie adapted from a novel by Karen Joy Fowler. Six people in California come together to start a book club to discuss Austen’s works, and discover that their own relationships (both old and new), begin to mirror versions of her novels. The characters start to blend, and the key point at which the six people choose the book they plan to read, in the famous coffee house scene, we realise that sub–consciously, they are defending their lives or trying to find a solution to their personal angst.

While ‘falling in love is like fiction,’ we find that ‘no man who has ever read Austen would dump his wife because it’s better for the other woman.’ With extramarital affairs, multiple marriages, lesbian lovers and dysfunctional relationships playing a predominant part, it is through the cathartic experience of living themselves through Austen’s portraits, of examining themselves under a magnifying glass through the mirror of the characters they resemble, that these people are able to put a finger on to what is going awry and subsequently find ways to fix it. Jane Austen is the ‘perfect anecdote to life’ – and it is as simple as asking, ‘What would Jane do?’ In this movie, as in Bridget Jones’ Diary, we really begin to wonder at the magnetic power of a Victorian spinster in managing modern-day relationships.