First, Jane Austen's literature (not necessarily the movies based on them) evinces a respect for women and for the domestic world that women were forced to solely inhabit that is nigh impossible to find in the literature of her contemporaries. She (in scant company) pauses to look in the window of the cottage where mother and daughters sit in isolated companionship, and she regards them kindly. She does not follow the father or the bawdy brothers out into the world to tell her story. She knows that the inner life of an intelligent woman is lush with insight even when the world around her only recognizes her value based on what man she belongs to.
As an intelligent woman myself, I appreciate Jane's sincere and unflinching gaze at the world of women who came before me. (If she is preoccupied with marriage: guess what? Single ladies were probably preoccupied with marriage in those days. I also rest this theory on, you know, how single ladies TOADY are preoccupied with marriage. Ahem, and also married ladies).
Second, Jane's uncompromising refusal to settle for a marriage based on convenience and status is admirable and encouraging. Jane Austen not only died a lonely woman, she lived her life a lonely woman. If Pride and Prejudice is too neat and perfect a package, rest assured it was not because Jane was a deluded, wealthy, courted woman. I think of P&P as her ultimate daydream. And what magnificent work she does with it! My daydreams are much sillier, more self-involved, less kind, and not nearly so truthful or well-wrought. If that was the longing of her heart, then she was a good steward of that longing.
How many women have only bitterness, disappointment, and insecurity to show for the time that they spent longing for someone to love them? Out of those years Jane Austen brought Pride and Prejudice. Emma. Mansfield Park. And, really: Persuasion.
Third: Jane Austen is funny. So? Lots of people are funny. Chaucer was funny. Shakespeare was funny. Tom Jones was lame, but I suppose some people think that book is funny. Jane wasn't punchline funny. She wasn't 30Rock funny (which I love). She was Arrested Development funny (smarter). She developed characters and then developed situations and then that character was so perfectly suited to say that perfectly-hilarious thing in just that crowd and at just the worst (best) moment!
And that is why I love Jane Austen. I know girls are supposed to love Jane. But I mean, I think that my appreciation for Jane is something I could feasibly manage even if I were a man. I love her because of what she did with her talent; in her time and place, she did so SO well. I would be so lucky.
And those are my mighty reasons.
