When I first read Jane Austen I had an ulterior motive. I wanted to impress a girl who read her. I didn’t get the girl, but I got the novelist: persuading myself that I was the only 16 year-old boy in Newcastle who had read Jane Austen. Not yet subtle enough to appreciate the extent of how good she was, I was happy loving her heroines, ogling the country houses, trying to emulate the cads, and weeping at the broken hearts and accepted marriage proposals. Repeat this for the films and the endless BBC mini-series.
Then I discovered at university that every boy liked Austen – as did the old boys. I got the impression she was used as a beard (or a bonnet) by latently misogynistic readers who were patronising about other women writers.
Her authorial eye wasn’t rangy and blokish like George Eliot’s.
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