Fictional accounts of steamy love affairs with Jane Austen, erotic Pride and Prejudice sequels, and evangelical Christian romance novels loosely based on Austen’s works: these were the main manifestations of sex and romance in the worlds of Austen’s readers and fans that I mapped just over a decade ago in Everybody’s Jane: Austen in the Popular Imagination. “Austen hybrids,” I argued then, “are unmistakably an American phenomenon,” although I acknowledged influential contributions by, among others, the Canadian comic artist Kate Beaton, the British novelist Helen Fielding, and the Canadian filmmaker Patricia Rozema.

The contributors to Jane Austen, Sex, and Romance: Engaging with Desire in the Novels and Beyond compellingly demonstrate how much more there is to think about now with respect to Austen and sex, from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Laura Engel offers a new view of Austen’s life and novels, especially Sense and Sensibility, via comparison with her all but forgotten contemporary, the portrait artist Jane Beetham Read. In addition to illuminating shadowy erotics in Austen, Engel’s interpretation of Elinor Dashwood’s fire screens makes an important contribution to the ever-evolving field of Austen and the arts. Mary Ann O’Farrell argues, utterly convincingly, that teasing is sexy in Pride and Prejudice both before and after marriage, so much so that Georgiana Darcy receives an education in adult relationships simply by observing how her brother and his wife talk to each other in her presence. In a chapter that I plan to share with my undergraduate students, who hunger for nonheteronormative interpretations, Jade Higa attentively addresses “queer possibilities” in Mansfield Park and encourages all of Austen’s readers to do the same. In the kind of essay I wish all Austen-inspired creators would write, Diana Birchall takes us behind the scenes to explain the origins of her indelible, Bella Abzug–like Mrs. Elton. And I take my hat off to Devoney Looser for her indefatigable research into Austen erotica, which shows how much more there is to the story of this intriguing phenomenon.

The title and subtitle of this volume underwent several changes during its gestation; my own title here harks back to one of those earlier incarnations. The concept of representation, in the fullest sense of the word, is especially resonant today, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement and of continuing conversations about diversity within both Austen studies and Austen fandom.