Currently, it seems, Jane Austen is hotter than Quentin Tarantino. But before we try to establish what the Austen phenomenon is, let us first establish what it is not. About eighteen months ago, I went to see “Four Weddings and a Funeral” at a North London cineplex. Very soon I was filled with a yearning to be doing something else (standing at a bus stop in the rain, for example); and under normal circumstances I would have walked out after ten or fifteen minutes. But these weren’t normal circumstances. Beside me sat Salman Rushdie. For various reasons—various security reasons—we had to stay. Thus the Ayatollah Khomeini had condemned me to sit through “Four Weddings and a Funeral”; and no Iranian torturer could have elicited a greater variety of winces and flinches, of pleadings and whimperings. One was obliged to submit, and absorb a few social lessons, in agonizing surroundings. It felt like a reversal of the Charles Addams cartoon: I sat there, thoroughly aghast, while everyone about me (save the author of “The Satanic Verses”) giggled and gurgled, hugging themselves with the deliciousness of it all. The only good bit was when you realized that the titular funeral was going to feature Simon Callow. I clenched my fist and said yes. At least one of them was going to die.

“Well,” I said, when it was over, “that was bottomlessly horrible. Why is it so popular?”

“Because,” said Salman, “the world has bad taste. Didn’t you know that?”

Still, bad taste doesn’t quite cover it. I can see that the upper classes might enjoy watching the upper classes portrayed with such whimsical fondness. But why should it appeal to four hundred berks from Hendon? In any postwar decade other than the present one, “Four Weddings” would have provoked nothing but incredulous disgust. A sixties audience would have wrecked the cinema. Yet now it seems that the old resentments have evaporated, and “the million,” as Hamlet called them, feel free to root for the congenital millionaires. They can lapse into a forgetful toadyism, and abase themselves before their historical oppressors. Class is harmless, class is cute; class is even felt to be . . . classy. “Four Weddings” is of course deeply “sentimental” in the colloquial sense: it displays false and unworthy tenderness. But it is also sentimental in the literary sense: an exhausted form has been speciously revived. Houses, parties, house parties, amorous vicissitudes in opulent drawing rooms and landscaped gardens, do’s and don’ts, “p”s and “q”s, old money and unlimited leisure. To get in the mood for “Four Weddings,” imagine you are the Reverend Collins on laughing gas. It is Jane Austen, in a vile new outfit.

“Persuasion” has recently been filmed, and so has “Sense and Sensibility,” and there are three versions of “Emma” in the works (not to mention “Clueless”), and no doubt someone will soon knock off the amiably mock-Gothic “Northanger Abbey,” and someone else will find the nerve to tackle the problematic austerities of “Mansfield Park,” and that will be that. For “Pride and Prejudice” has been most comprehensively taken care of, in the BBC’s six-part, nine-and-a-half-million-dollar serial, which has been emptying the streets of England every Sunday night (and which will arrive on American screens on January 15th). Austen fever, or more particularly Darcymania, is upon us. Features editors have been reduced to commissioning interviews with lorry drivers and insulation engineers who happen to be called Darcy; tourist pilgrimages to Jane Austen’s house (in Chawton, Hants) were up about two hundred and fifty per cent in October, and sales of Austen tote bags, Austen crockery, Austen sweatshirts, Austen tea towels, and Austen aprons were comparably brisk; while you’re listening to “The Jane Austen Music Compact Disc” (stuff she might have heard or played), you can rustle something up from “The Jane Austen Cookbook” (all ingredients have been modernized); and so on. Much of this enthusiasm is, of course, collateral enthusiasm, or Heritage enthusiasm: a blend of disembodied snobbery and vague postimperial tristesse. No doubt, too, many of the serial’s ten million viewers watched it in the same spirit as they watched “Four Weddings”—contentedly stupefied by all the eccentricity and luxe. But such wastage is inevitable, and even appropriate. “Sense and Sensibility” and “Persuasion” play at the art houses. “Pride and Prejudice” plays in your living room; and—true to the book—it comes at you with a broad embrace.