An auction of handwritten homages by famous writers, to raise funds for the Royal Society of Literature, is about to reveal just what modern novelists think of Jane Austen.

Pride and Prejudice “set a bad example” to the 12-year-old Margaret Atwood, she has scribbled, by exposing the young girl to “a hero who was unpleasant to the heroine, but later turned out to be not only admirable and devotedly in love with her, but royally rich … Were underage readers of this book, such as myself, doomed to a series of initially hopeful liaisons in which unpleasant men turned out to be simply unpleasant?”

Atwood adds: “I especially liked the scene in which Elizabeth Bennett [sic] stands down Lady de Bourgh. I longed to do the same to my gym teacher, but occasion never offered.”



Questions of influence … Margaret Atwood. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

Kazuo Ishiguro’s contribution admires a scene in Mansfield Park that has “Fanny Price … suddenly going off on one”, and says: “I’ve learnt so much from this profound novelist about nuance, understatement, technique ...” Ian McEwan prefers Northanger Abbey: “What’s striking is that in the very early 19th century before the railways had transformed the country, long before the telegraph, [this scene] evokes a world that is so connected, so in touch with itself.

“Perhaps this is the very essence of the condition of modernity – always to believe one has arrived in one’s time, at the summit of the modern. Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey profoundly influenced my novel Atonement.” In her note, Tracy Chevalier reveals how a real-life encounter between Austen and a Lyme Regis cabinet maker inspired her 2009 novel, Remarkable Creatures. Not everybody is such a fan, however; Ian Rankin even calls Austen’s novels “stuffy”.

There are 18 items to bid for, including an original short story by Hilary Mantel, drawings by Sarah Waters, Quentin Blake, Grayson Perry and Posy Simmonds, and a Pride and Prejudice film script annotated by Deborah Moggach. Online auction items can be bid on from now until midnight on Tuesday 27 June via rsl-austen-auction.com, while bids for “live” lots should be emailed to lucy.howard-taylor@rsliterature.org before 6pm on Monday. Get your bids in quick.