In ‘The Jane Austen Syndrome’, Marjorie Garber – a Shakespeare scholar and self-confessed sufferer from the syndrome her 2003 essay describes – contributes to a long tradition of criticism asserting Jane Austen's kinship with the Bard. It is not only the case that this pair represent English literature's most masterful creators of character and dialogue. Nor for Garber do the similarities end when we acknowledge that Austen and Shakespeare are cultural icons, possessed of, and perhaps cursed by, a celebrity independent of their perceived value as writers. ‘More than any other authors I know’, she asserts, ‘Austen and Shakespeare provoke outpourings of love.’ That last remark registers the contribution Garber's essay makes to a second venerable strain in Austen's reception history, a tradition of commentary on the ardent identifications that the novels inspire. Jane Austen fosters in her readers, as most other literary giants do not, the devotion and fantasies of personal access that are the hallmarks of the fan. For a century, therefore, many a commentator has accompanied his interest in the novels with an interest in the extravagancy of audiences’ responses to them – an interest, particularly, in how that heady enthusiasm diverges from the level-headed dispassion that is supposed to define a proper aesthetic response. Thus Henry James in 1905 remarks on the rising ‘tide’ of Austenian ‘appreciation’ and finds it, he observes waspishly, to have risen, thanks to the ‘stiff breeze of the commercial’, ‘rather higher … than the high-water mark, the highest, of her intrinsic merit’. John Bailey (1864–1931) notes while introducing his 1927 ‘Georgian Edition’ of her fiction ‘the extraordinary spread of the cult of Jane Austen’ and explains the cult's recruitment successes with a paradox: the passage of time, though putting more distance between her era and readers’, has increased the intimacy of the author–reader relation. ‘She has ceased to be the ‘Miss Austen’ of our parents and become our own ‘Jane Austen’ or even ‘Jane’.’

As Bailey implies when he contrasts his parents’ generation and his own, the late Victorian period is when readers began thinking of Austen as an author with whom they might be on an intimate, first-name footing – whom they could love rather than merely esteem.