THE #Me Too moment has changed everything – even Jane Austen.

When ITV presented Clara Brereton in its adaptation of Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon as a streetwise survivor who’d been sexually abused as a child, it was a quantum leap away from Austen’s own limited depiction of the character.

But it chimed with the expectations of modern audiences. We don’t do helpless female victimhood any more. We don’t downplay abuse, leaving it offstage. If a character is scheming or damaged, we want to know why. If a classic novel doesn’t chime with our demand for three-dimensional depictions of women, then the book has to change.

Enter Mary Cratchit, the surprise heroine of the BBC’s Christmas Carol adaptation. Barely mentioned in the original, her invented story changed the whole course of the tale on screen.

It feels almost as if we have fallen out with the literature of our past, and are looking for ways to reconcile with it.

This discomfort about our cultural heritage has been growing for a long time but the last five years have amplified it, due largely to the massive global feminist awakening caused by #Me Too.

Me Too has been led by younger women infuriated by everyday sexual abuse but it has also made older women look back on their lives through a different filter, one which suddenly makes the lower-level abuse and discrimination they have endured leap out at them like germs under ultraviolet light.

It has caused a social earthquake affecting everyone, putting people of all ages on notice that unthinking sexism in any form will be called out. The responsibility of individuals to challenge it is the theme of International Women’s Day on Sunday.

In short, it sometimes feels as if a human habit of the last five millennia – insidious sexism – has finally become socially unacceptable only in the last five years.

But this leaves us with a dilemma: what do we do with our cultural heritage?

For parents, the fact that sexism no longer has anywhere to hide, poses a huge opportunity but also a challenge: the opportunity to bring up girls who are as empowered as boys, and boys who regard girls as equal in every respect; but the challenge of how to achieve that without cutting them off from a back catalogue of books and films redolent with messages we now find hopelessly retrograde.

Ah come on, you might say, relax. Isn’t it unfair to deny little girls princess stories and classic books that generations have loved? (Or perhaps: isn’t this just insufferable woke angst?)

I wondered that, until I started reading my daughter those stories.

When you are encouraging your child to see herself as courageous and independent, it’s more than a bit annoying to have Enid Blyton inform her that girls are timid creatures who defer to the leadership of boys, or have Paddington author Michael Bond tell her that the man is the head of the household.

Fairy stories often vex parents because they are full of misogynist tropes and disempowered young women, but the stories are rollicking. Take Hansel and Gretel. I bought this book remembering how much I’d enjoyed it as a child, but it’s a proper horror show. It features a cannibalistic witch, a murderous stepmother and a father figure who is presented as blameless in spite of agreeing twice to lure his own children into the woods and leave them there to die.

It’s much more HBO than Disney.

One answer is to edit this stuff as you read it to your children. Parents do that routinely, in my experience. Increasingly, though, the stories are being changed. Authors do it and so do filmmakers. Guy Ritchie reinvented Aladdin’s wet heroine Jasmine as a kick-ass ruler-in-waiting in last summer’s movie, and the 2017 Beauty and the Beast turned Belle into an inventor like her father who tries to escape from the beast rather than submitting to her fate.

And that’s fine with fairy stories. They are folk tales that have been evolving for centuries anyway. Change is part of what keeps them alive.

But books, which are complete works of art in themselves, pose a greater problem. There’s a real possibility that we could come to disown important literature because it no longer fits with our world view. If so, we could lose so much that is rich and meaningful in the process.

This doesn’t just apply to children’s books. Last year, I read The Crowthers of Bankdam. This little-remembered book, published in 1941, is an absorbing , vivid generational saga about two warring branches of a mill-owning family in 19th century Yorkshire. At its heart is the tension between the plain-speaking, hard-working Crowthers and the aspirational, social climbers on the other side of the family. It’s as adept a portrait of the Yorkshire character as you’ll find.

It also includes some casual slut-shaming, and every female character, once married, is referred to by her husband’s name. To me, each instance of this was like a klaxon going off.

Of course, we’re grown-ups, so we know to put this stuff in context. There’s no point getting worked up about a dead author’s prejudices. But you can’t turn off your modern sensibilities. You can’t help being irritated.

Some great novels, in spite of their age, transcend the centuries in their rich and rounded depictions of women, novels like Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and, for that matter, most Dickens and Austen.

But it’s a sobering thought that others could fall into obscurity, not because they are without merit, but because they inadvertently press the wrong buttons.

It is never straightforward, coming to terms with our collective history, particularly for a nation with an imperial past. Manchester University students objected to the display of a Rudyard Kipling poem in their student union, while the “greatness” of Winston Churchill has come in for reassessment in light of his obvious racism (rightly so, in my view).

After centuries of casual, unthinking sexism, however, we cannot just “cancel” the past. We can tell ourselves that if Austen and Dickens lived now they would embrace the new reality of the 21st century, but eventually we have to find a way of loving our literary past without changing it.

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