 Hello, I'm Devani Lozer, author of the book, The Making of Jane Austen. Jane Austen is best known today for having written that masterpiece of a novel, Pride and Prejudice. When she died in 1817, 200 years ago, it was without any inkling of the great fame she would go on to achieve. Listen, this isn't working for me. I just don't think this sets the right tone for Jane Austen. Can we try something else? Who was Jane Austen? Just one of the few classic novelists who remains perpetually a hot-screened property. My guest today is that hot-screened property Mr. Darcy himself, Colin Firth. Colin's still coming, right? You canceled? Okay, alright, well then forget this too. Since the 19th century, there have been hundreds of Jane Austen-inspired illustrators, dramatists, activists and educators who helped create readerships and fans. I'm shown called Jane Austen, faculty advisor to the Arizona State University Derby Devils. Come along with us and let's meet some of the quirky weirdos in my book who helped make Jane Austen. Jane Austen! Austen's early illustrators helped generations of readers visualize her characters. Believe it or not, her first English illustrator drew images that packaged Austen's novels as suspense-filled Gothic thrillers, not as ballroom-intensive love vests. That illustrator was the eccentric, lifelong student Ferdinand Pickering, whose family life would turn out to echo the sensationalized, threatening images he drew to accompany Austen's fiction in the 1830s. Read more about Ferdinand Pickering in chapter one. But Austen's most famous illustrator was Hugh Thompson, whose 1894 Pride and Prejudice peacock images are still found on tote bags, t-shirts and puzzles. Read more about Hugh Thompson in chapter three. Early dramatists contributed to the Jane Austen we know today too. Playwright and director Rosina Felipe was the first to adapt Austen's characters for the stage. Female actors delivered her lines in drawing rooms, turning them into admirable domestic protest speeches. Read about Rosina Felipe in chapters four and five. The first Austen dissertation was completed at Harvard in 1883. Its author, George Pellew, died young under mysterious circumstances. But he's said to have returned from the dead through the era's most famous medium. Read about George Pellew in chapter ten. More than a century of unsung innovators pushed Austen's stories before popular audiences, way before all those zombies and vampires. These early innovators created, reshaped and propelled her and us forward, giving us the Jane Austen we know today. The making of Jane Austen moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around at her history, you might speed right past the important stuff.