BookTok-Inspired Austen Covers Flop with Fans Online

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the literary online love to complain, and the objects of their ire this week are these heinous young adult covers of Jane Austen classics. Puffin, Penguin UK’s children’s imprint, has released a series of brightly colored Austen covers, featuring Gen-Z renderings of her famous protagonists. They’re calling the series “First Impressions” and purposefully gearing it toward young readers with forewords by famous BookTok romance authors like Ali Hazelwood. But agèd millennials online are not having it.

“I hope Jane Austen rises from her grave and kills booktok herself,” wrote @saintmaudlin on X. 

I hope Jane Austen rises from her grave and kills booktok herself https://t.co/oGDBhDuD2i

— Page Against The Machine🫀 (@saintmaudlin) January 31, 2025

There is a pretty lengthy Reddit thread on r/janeausten cataloging fans’ feedback. Most sentiments accuse Penguin of turning Austen’s beloved works into BookTok novels or fanfiction, given their general resemblance to every other new cutesy romance cover right now. “[The style is] super popular right now and I feel like it’s on the cover of every other rom-com type novel published. So while these might be unique for an Austen print, it ends up making them feel super generic to me!” wrote u/girlunderh20. Many other users said the very modern covers don’t match Austen’s style and writing, which would confuse a young reader who picked the book up. “It’s like book catfishing,” wrote u/thelaststarebender.

In LitHub, Emily Temple compares these covers to many previous attempts to modernize the covers of Austen’s novels, including this truly incredible Twilight-inspired cover of Persuasion from 2010. In contrast, I don’t think these are quite so bad, though I think they will age just as poorly.

“Real Life” author Brandon Tyler ended his X hiatus in order to comment on the new covers, writing, “I came back because I was shown the YA Jane Austen covers and I need to complain.” He continues, “I actually really like the color and the energy, and I think it’s a brilliant and inspired choice to have YA and romance authors introduce these books. However, these PARTICULAR covers are…weird, and the plot descriptions are bad, lol.” Tyler’s not wrong; the marketing copy for these classics is, at best, very boring. As writer Henry Oliver found, ChatGPT can conjure up a better description than these Penguin execs. 

Only time will tell if the redesigns will actually be successful among the youths. But the stakes are high; like Mr. Darcy, once their good opinion is lost, it’s lost forever.