In Defense of Jane Austen

On a windy afternoon, I sat by the lake trying to keep Cudahy’s copy of “Persuasion” from flying into the unforgiving waves of Lake Michigan. 

Around me, students strolled past — I just sat there, lost somewhere between 1817 and the present as I watched the romance between Frederick Wentworth and Anne Elliot play out. 

With Austen’s 250th birthday on the horizon, I realized Austen’s novels aren’t simple relics of romance — even though the romance is phenomenal — but dissections of class, gender and survival too many people dismiss as “chick lit.” 

For more than two centuries, Austen’s name has been both adored and misunderstood. 

Helena Kelly in “Jane Austen, The Secret Radical” argues readers often mistake her work for polite tales about rich people finding love, when in reality, her novels reveal a world where women’s survival depended on wit, marriage and moral negotiation within an unjust system. 

Even if taken at face value, writing about women refusing to marry unless it was a relationship based in love was revolutionary on its own.

Nevertheless, Austen is still dismissed the way many women writers are — as the author of shallow “chick lit” meant only for middle-aged women.

Men avoid Austen because she’s perceived as girly, while many so-called intellectuals dismiss her as an author for light readers. 

These assumptions hinge on the idea that a woman writing about domestic life disqualifies her from being radical, profound or politically sharp. 

Within her novels, beneath every polite conversation, she’s mocking the very systems trapping her characters. Her novels are built with class commentary and feminist subtext. 

“Sense and Sensibility” explores the emotional labor women perform under financial pressure.  “Mansfield Park” critiques colonialism and the moral dilemmas of women. “Persuasion” examines female aging and regret through one of literature’s most quietly devastating heroines. “Pride and Prejudice” is a lesson in how women must navigate their pride and dreams in a misogynistic world. 

However, because her stories end in marriage, readers mistake the resolution for submission. 

Scholar and author of “Wild for Austen” Devoney Looser said Austen’s irony is so subtle, her most radical prose is mistaken for compliance. 

The real tragedy isn’t the readers who don’t “get” Austen — it’s our culture who still genders taste. 

Male authors can write about love, gossip and drawing rooms and be called “realists.” When women do it, it becomes “romance” or “women’s fiction.” 

This misogyny is so ingrained even women internalize it. Author Kristian Colyard admitted they used to hate Austen until their professors helped them see the subversion in Austen’s work. 

Many of us are taught to measure literary greatness by masculine standards, but Austen’s work was about women and girls making the most out of the terrible hands they were dealt, according to Colyard. 

Her novels remind us social rebellion isn’t always loud. Women’s inner lives are worthy of serious art, and Austen adds a level of humor to her tales.

I haven’t found my Mr. Dary — or even my captain Wentworth — but I did find something better: proof women’s stories have always been political, even when they’re polite. 

I’ll keep reading Austen by the lake, even if the wind’s against me. 

After all, she’d be the first to remind me that the world rarely rewards good sense — but it’s always worth having anyways.