Jane Austen sucks?

Question

Why do all women love Jane Austen? Every single one of her books is the same...some headstrong girl who doesn't want to be conventional but ends up marrying some guy that understands how "independent" she really is. BORING. The woman basically wrote the same book 10 times. She really just indulges every girl's fantasy who wants to believe she's a feminist but has no freakin clue what that term really means...hence all of her protaganists end up married with a typical suburban housewife life. Women need to wake up and see that this woman and all of her books are a crock of crap. Why does everyone love this poser?

Answer 1

Well,

Perhaps Jane writes long sentences, and focuses on romance a lot, but she is not, under anyones definition, a "poser."

Why don't you pose this question to any of your women friends who've read Jane?

And if you think about it, women still need to find partners (they are the childbearers, you know), who have some financial ability, who won't simply ignore them or beat them, who can carry some of the romantic load in the relationship, and who also inspire them, just a bit.

How does a feminist who wants a family find that partner? A lot of them read Jane (just like the hopeless romantics), and pray.

Answer 2

Wow. Okay, well, Jane Austen is great because it's social commentary disguised as just a cute little romance novel. The woman was writing in the early 19th century, in England. Ladies just did not do things like that. If she tried to write anything other than romances, I doubt she'd've done very well at all. They had to follow a certain formula if she were to survive as an author at that time.

Her heroines do not end up as a typical suburban housewife because the novels are set, oh, about 140 years before suburbs existed. They are society books, and the society is upper class England during the Napoleonic era. Again, her novels had to follow a formula. Her heroines had two choices: marry, or become spinsters living off of someone else. There was no other choice for women back then. However, her heroines were still able to remain true to themselves and all married men who respected them and their intelligence. Really, it's the closest thing to feminism you can get in an era when the most most women could hope for was a husband that didn't ignore you too much and had enough money to support you.

Answer 3

I'm a woman and i don't love jane austen. We have to read her for one of my classes and i find it dull. Not because it's headstrong women ect. but because nothing exciting really happens it's probably because i'm a child of a different century. I wouldn't call her a poser but she was a revolutionary for her time and i'm glad she wrote what she did in her own way she changed history if only in a small way. Her writing may have inspired authors that u do like no so i wouldn't say she sucks i respect her i just can't be bothered reading her book right now

Answer 4

Not all of her books are the same. Sense and Sensibility's main chick is very introverted. Persuasion's main chick is as well. It's just her style of writing.
Ever notice how Mary Higgins Clark ALWAYS writes about someone dying? My heck! Get over it! It's the same every time! Someone gets killed, and the main character discovers that the killer is the least suspected person in the book!
That's the way Mary Higgins Clark writes, and the way that Jane Austen wrote was exceptional women falling in love.
I think that Jane Austen is wayyyy too wordy for my liking. However, I like the stories themselves, and enjoy the movies. (Not the 6-hour ones, ick.)

Answer 5

I don't like Jane Austen books, just like I don't like 'Jane Eyre', loved 'Wuthering Heights' though, and the reason is because it's not a feminist book, but the others are, and when you read them carefully, they're disappointing because in 'Pride and Prejudice' you agree with Lizzie (is that her name? I forget, now), and in the end she just gives in and ends up exactly the same as the others. And in 'Jane Eyre' it's similar, then I reread it when I was a bit older and more of a woman than a girl and I realised that's the point, it's NOT happy in that book when she finally falls in love with Rochester and ends up marrying him, because it's saying women can't escape being servants, whether they're serving family, job, religion or husband.

But I still don't like those books, because I don't live in the 19th century, I grew up in the 80s/90s, and this is 2006, and women are a very different creature, we're no longer debating whether women are even human the way they did 150 years ago, we're just being women, and what that means is changing every year. So I think the reason why those books were so popular in their day is because they spoke to the women of THAT generation, because they were the ones who were stuck in that sociopolitical environment, whereas today you're either a woman who wants to escape into a soap opera and so you read those books, or you're a woman who says 'this has absolutely nothing to do with who i am, this is not my definition of woman' and you hate them.

I also think all her books have very similar storylines, there's always the woman who's dying of heartbreak and it drives me insane because it's so weak, but again, you have to take everything in context, and actually if I look at all the authors I do like, they all have their own themes and seem to rewrite the same stories over and over, but I don't care with them because they're books I relate to. That's really all it comes down to.

Answer 6

Jane Austen is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in Western literature. Her novels are remarkable for their powers of characterization, for their ability to depict different social spheres
with great accuracy and for the writing itself in which a pervasive and subtle use of irony and satire is evident. Some of her heroines are headstrong but it is wrong to suggest that they all are. Anne Elliot follows bad advice submissively and suffers for it and Fanny Price is very submissive and dutiful. It is wrong to argue that Austen is a feminist writer as she is in fact socially conservative. She was no radical. Her novels deal with themes of love and marriage, exactly what women were supposed to think about at the time. What makes them so valuable is the author's moral and intellectual discernment.

Answer 7

You're right, they are similar - just because the mind of a women those days was troubled by similar problems... But she is v. important as a woman in literature, she means sth new, originality, progress...
And she is evolving somehow. The best book for me (and I'm a literature student - and teacher) is Pride and Prejudice, cause there she was able to create the characters who are not so straight, there are niuances, difficulties in finding out their real thoughts, character, souls... But - it tends to be disapointing for us today, for us who are used to films, pictures and solving things by gestures, words, etc. In a book it is spoiled sometimes, as she describes, for example, a love scene - and a reader WANTS a dialog, that truth, that feeling.. And she just points: and they talked.,.. Ufff.....

Answer 8

1

Answer 9

People like it for the same reason they like soap operas... because it's a fantasy they all want to live but it'll never ever happen so the best they can do is dream.

Answer 10

Is she good at it?