Reading for a Friday

Today is Ursula Le Le Guin's birthday. Happy birthday, Ursula!

---It's therefore fitting that today's first link is to a description by Ryan Britt of a panel discussion, at the Center for Fiction, on the influence Ursula K. Le Guin has had on the sf/f field. The panel was moderated by David Hartwell and included N.k. Jemison, Michael Swanwick, Ellen Kushner, and John Wray. I was particularly interested to read...

In terms of her influence on the panel’s writing specifically, N.K Jemisin noted that Le Guin made a big impact on rediscovering her love of short stories. Jemisin cited “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” as a major revelation as the story caused so much “pain, because it’s intended to be a painful story.” Jemisin previously felt she didn’t need nor understand the medium of short fiction, but after some prodding from peers and reading the short fiction of Le Guin, she thinks totally differently.

...because it reminded me of how important Le Guin's short ficton was for me in the 1980s and how for a long while I firmly believed her short fiction superior to her novels. Eventually I decided, perhaps because the generally shared assumption that novels matter more than short fiction began to insidiously erode my conviction that the best short fiction is as powerful and affecting as the best novels, that perhaps I might be wrong. (Not that I'm not used to being alone in my critical judgments...)

---This is a bit old in internet terms, but in case you missed it: Vandana Singh's most recent column for Strange Horizons continues with the second part of her series on "Science, Emotions, and Culture."

Spread/Art Culture has a photo essay by Kisa Lala, "Visions of a Treeless World," that ranges from the Vikings' slash and burn razing of forests to Easter Island to current day Manhattan, offering striking art work along the way.

--In her essay The Balm of Sisterly Consolation: Thoughts on Northanger Abbey and The Mysteries of Udolpho, Abigail Nussbaum wrestles with Northanger Abbey and The Mysteries of Udolpho and finds the young Jane Austen reacting against the labeling problem women writers face now as well as then. Nussbaum notes:

It's a question that crops up again and again, whenever art by, for, or about women is discussed. You see it whenever chick-lit--the term, the publishing category, and the question of who gets classed into it--is discussed, and especially when an author of literary fiction--usually a female one--comments disparagingly on it. These discussions, if they acknowledge that chick-lit is rooted in some deeply problematic assumptions (and that it is equally problematic that women writing about the domestic, such as Austen herself, are assumed to be writing chick-lit, or at least less worthy work than male writers who write about it), will usually fail to admit that the perception of chick-lit as frivolous and shallow is rooted in misogyny, and vice versa. During the discussion of the dwindling ranks of women writing SF, there were several surprisingly negative responses from female bloggers, which were partially explained by their argument that women haven't been driven out of SF but have left it for fantasy and paranormal romance, and that the prioritization of SF is just the flipside of the tendency to discount these genres. But all is not well even within those fields: witness, on the one hand, Stina Leicht complaining about the expectation that a female fantasy writer must be writing paranormal romance, and on the other hand, M.K. Hobson's creation of a moniker for a female-oriented subset of steampunk which she dubs "bustlepunk." And then there's the fact that what is meant by literature for women is often literature for white, middle class, heterosexual, cisnormal women, as discussed in the comments to Kyra Smith's review of a romance novel at Ferretbrain.

---Over at the Nation, Ari Berman weighs in with How the Austerity Class Rules Washington:

In September the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a bipartisan deficit-hawk group based at the New America Foundation, held a high-profile symposium urging the Congressional “supercommittee” to “go big” and approve a $4 trillion deficit reduction plan over the next decade, which is well beyond its $1.2 trillion mandate. The hearing began with an alarming video of top policy-makers describing the national debt as “the most serious threat that this country has ever had” (Alan Simpson) and “a threat to the whole idea of self-government” (Mitch Daniels). If the debt continues to rise, predicted former New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici, there would be “strikes, riots, who knows what?” A looming fiscal crisis was portrayed as being just around the corner.

The event spotlighted a central paradox in American politics over the past two years: how, in the midst of a massive unemployment crisis—when it’s painfully obvious that not enough jobs are being created and the public overwhelmingly wants policy-makers to focus on creating them—did the deficit emerge as the most pressing issue in the country? And why, when the global evidence clearly indicates that austerity measures will raise unemployment and hinder, not accelerate, growth, do advocates of austerity retain such distinction today?

An explanation can be found in the prominence of an influential and aggressive austerity class—an allegedly centrist coalition of politicians, wonks and pundits who are considered indisputably wise custodians of US economic policy. These “very serious people,” as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wryly dubs them, have achieved what University of California, Berkeley, economist Brad DeLong calls “intellectual hegemony over the course of the debate in Washington, from 2009 until today.”

Berman names some names and takes notes of the deep pockets backing "these very serious people."

---A New Scientist article by Andy Coghln and Debora MacKenzie reports that

An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."

Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The image the article provides of interlocking ownerships is awesome. 1318 corporations make up the "core," but a "super-entity" of 147 owned 40% of the total wealth in the network.

John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.

Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates."

"It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are," agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.

Fascinating stuff. The study is to be published in PloS One.

Much More Than That

In her essay Just Like a Woman, Audrey Bilger reviews (for the Los Angeles Review of Books) two works focused on their authors' passionate devotion to the "genius" of Jane Austen. One is by William Deresiewicz, who has previously published a more scholarly work, and one by Rachel M. Brownstein, formerly famous for her feminist work Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels (1982). The tale that Deresiezwicz tells is one of enlightenment, evident at once in his title: A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me about Love, Friendship, and the Things that Really Matter.

Bilger begins her essay by reviewing the V.S. Naipaul kerfluffle.

If Naipaul’s goal in putting down women writers was to get attention, he couldn’t have picked a better target than Jane Austen. In fact, it’s hard to imagine any other woman whose disparagement would have garnered so much notice. In a word-association game, if I say “woman author,” odds are the first name in your head would be that of the creator of Pride and Prejudice. It’s worth noting that when I tried to talk to one of my nonliterary friends about Naipaul’s remarks, his immediate response was “Who’s V.S. Naipaul?” Nobody ever says, “Who’s Jane Austen?”

And she references Naipaul when she begins talking about Deresiewicz's book:

Deresiewicz is someone who might have agreed with Naipaul’s point about Austen’s inferiority had he not undergone a dramatic conversion. When he was a young graduate student in the 1980s, he could barely bring himself to think of Austen: “Wasn’t she the one who wrote those silly romantic fairy tales? Just thinking about her made me sleepy.” In his misguided youth, Deresiewicz identified with manly modernist writers and their ungovernable heroes. “I was Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, raging against the machine,” he gleefully reports; “I was Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, the rebel artist who runs rings around the grown-ups. I was Conrad’s Marlow, the world-weary truth teller who punches through hypocrisy and lies.”

A Jane Austen Education recounts how Deresiewicz overcame his bias against Austen and became a better person because of her. When he actually sat down to read the novels, he discovered that “Austen wasn’t silly and superficial; she was much, much smarter — and much wiser — than I could have imagined.” He blames masculinity for his initial skepticism: “If I was slow to catch on … there was a very good reason. I’m a guy, after all.” As he recounts his moral education at the feet of the author he once thought of as the “girliest novelist of all, the godmother of chick lit,” he makes a case for why men need to take women seriously and why Austen is the perfect teacher.

For Deresiewicz, Austen becomes not just a representative woman writer, but a stand-in for all women, and his ongoing surprise and delight at being schooled in the art of being human by, of all people, a female, is certainly honest, even if it leads to some cringe-worthy moments.

Bilger's discussion of Brownstein is where her essay gets interesting. Consider this passage:

Rachel Brownstein, author of Why Jane Austen?, shares Deresiewicz’s humanistic approach, but unlike him, she would rather we stopped talking about gender altogether. In referring to her 1982 study, Becoming a Heroine: Reading About Women in Novels, a foundational text for feminist literary scholars, Brownstein expresses nothing but remorse. In fact, she claims to have written this new book “to atone for joining the chorus that has ended up by imagining Jane Austen as first of all and most of all a woman, the paradigmatic prisoner of sex and gender, and a paragon of proto-feminist romance — in other words, by misreading her, and not reading her as she meant to be read.” Brownstein now wants to focus on “genius” and on how “Jane Austen’s subject is, as she wrote, human nature.”

Both Deresiewicz and Brownstein are critical of ideological readings and of the current state of the academy, and Brownstein is, in addition, particularly hostile to feminism. She begins the book by expressing discomfort at having been called, at a literary party in the 1980s, a “feminist critic,” — this would have been a new term then — and although she comes to admit that this is exactly what she once was, she wants to distance herself from “the women’s party,” as she calls it.

According to Bilger, Brownstein wants to rescue Austen:

A subtext of Why Jane Austen? is Brownstein’s own disillusionment with academia and her recovered faith in the life of the mind via this exploration of what Jane Austen means. She recalls what it was like to encounter Austen before the late-20th-century culture wars erupted: “When I was in college in the 1950s, Jane Austen was the author of great works that were by the way delicious, six peaks of pink icing on the cake of English literature (or perhaps its rich center).” In discussing what happened in the decades that followed, Brownstein claims, “the critical attack on the canon in the late 1960s, and feminism and queer and postcolonial criticism, and the new media and the sense of a new millennium” all combined to diminish Jane Austen’s status. Toward the end of the book, Brownstein writes, “We reread Jane Austen because she persuades us to be nostalgic for what we never knew, and because we want her clarity.” She concludes by identifying the history of the novel as the “story of civilization,” and she associates Austen with the highest possible meaning: “[M]any of us see civilization now as a fiction, a story threatening to come to an end. Jane Austen is the focal point of nostalgia for that old story, a name for it.”

Rescuing Austen, as Bilger reminds us, is an old, old mission. Fans of one sort or another have been battling one another over Austen's ownership for more than a century. (Janeites: Austen’s Disciples and Devotees, ed by Deidre Lynch, which she quotes from, is a fascinating book that addresses just that subject.) But I find it hard to wrap my head around the notion that "feminism and queer and postcolonial criticism" are responsible for ruining Jane Austen, given that Brownstein seems to be fussing most about Austen's being associated with "girliness" (which isn't an association that feminist, queer, or postcolonial criticism ever makes). Unless, that is, I zoom in the phrases "the story of civilization," "nostalgic for what we never knew," "civilization as a fiction, a story threatening to come to an end..." And once I do that, I'm really rather aghast. Brownstein is reading Jane Austen for that? Wow. I've never felt nostalgic when reading Jane Austen. Ever. So what is that all about? Oh: civilization. Ah, yes. The reactionary's longing for the Good Old Days, when the wealthy were ladies and gentlemen, and the poor knew their place and were grateful when the Mr. Knightlys condescended to them. Before a band of outlaws attacked the US exactly ten years ago. Now I get it.

Bilger doesn't zoom in on that, but she does go to the heart of what's at stake in the Naipaul kerfluffle:

For Brownstein, emphasizing Austen’s role as a woman limits any sense of artistic greatness. “Readers who excoriate (or, indeed, adore) her too narrowly imagine Jane as first-and-foremost a woman, a writer of romances, and/or a moralizing goody-two-shoes,” she declares. “She was in fact much more than that.”

This, from someone who used to call herself a feminist critic? Why in the world does she imagine that feminist, queer, and postcolonial critics don't see her as "more than that"? (Unless by "more than that" she means the reactionary ideologue filling us with nostalgia for the Good Old Days? For me that would be less, rather than more.) The problem is sexism, not feminism. For, as Bilger notes, "If feminism ever succeeds in making men and women full-fledged equals (for what else might?), we will be able to stop talking about whether women genuinely belong to the literary canon. Maybe there will even come a time when we can speak of Jane Austen without thinking of her as a female. Then comments like Naipaul’s will be universally mocked as the sexist “tosh” they so obviously are. Whenever this comes about, Jane Austen will still be a great author." I can't imagine why Brownstein thinks that rescuing Austen from feminist and queer theorists will bring about Austen's universal recognition as a Great Writer. It certainly won't bring the day on which we stop thinking of her as "female" a step closer.

More to the point, perhaps, is Bilger's quote of Deidre Lynch:

“Shakespeare fans, we should note, can act like fans, parade through Stratford-upon-Avon every April 23 sporting sprigs of rosemary, and not put at risk the plays’ claims to be taken seriously. No one, it seems, feels compelled to take this cult audience to task for their excesses and their failure to blush over them.” Bardolatry does Shakespeare no harm, but Austen’s cult following has, in the eyes of many, branded her as a chick-lit exemplar, a frivolous writer of “feminine tosh.”

And isn't that the real problem?

Reflections on Becoming Jane

This weekend I saw Becoming Jane, a film that fictionalizes Jane Austen in the same way that movies have fictionalized her novels. Yes, I know the novels are fiction. But the film treatments of these novels in a certain sense fictionalizes the texts they are based on—going beyond mere reading or interpretation of the texts to willfully create an entirely new entity with independent lives of their own. And so it is with this movie’s treatment of “Jane’s” (as opposed to “Austen’s”) life (for which we do not really have a text, since lives are not texts, however many documents it may leave behind). And although all biographies and history are fictional in the sense that they use narrative and speculation and imagination to make sense of the “facts” that come to us through documents, fictionalizations are conscious, willful departures from texts and documented facts.

Becoming Jane fits into both the “Heritage” genre (as cultural studies scholars call it) and the more widely recognized genre of biopic which can range from the charmingly ridiculous (think Shakespeare in Love, Amadeus and Impromptu) to serious (Frieda and Vincent and Theo). Altman said about Vincent and Theo: “I’m sure my film is not factual, but I hope it’s truthful.” I suspect Julian Jarrold, the film’s director, imagined he was being in some sense “truthful” with his fantasies about “Jane.” Since most people’s sense of truth fondly imposes anachronism on texts and lives alike in service to the cherished notion of the “Universal,” I was fully prepared for the sorts of anachronistic distortions that typify the whole “Jane” film genre (and largely account for their appeal to such a wide—albeit largely female—audience)—which was, of course, exactly what Becoming Jane delivered.

Near the beginning of the film, we see Jane seated at a desk, writing, with a pair of scissors positioned near her ink pot. And then we see her sister Cassandra, reading the letter Jane has written her that is literally full of numerous rectangular holes, cut with meticulous precision, so that Jane’s beautiful script is not marred by inked out deletions. Jane, it seems, wields a pair of blades to edit her letters (rather than producing a clean second draft through copying, as we see her doing with her fiction). Likely the filmmaker provides this image to amuse his viewers (and it certainly did amuse me), but it reminded me from the outset that one of the reasons we know little about Jane Austen and her private life is because Cassandra purged her sister’s letters after her death, to be sure that no minor blot or imperfection would mar the image of her sister that Cassandra wished to project.

Which is to say, since her death, very little has been known about Jane Austen’s private life or, indeed, about her personality or the character of her social relationships.

My sense of dead authors generally takes one of two modes. In rare instances, I will have read the author’s letters and diaries or memoirs, their essays and other nonfiction, and possibly biographies about them. In some indefinable sense, what I know about such an author will merge somehow with my reading of their work. My sense of Virginia Woolf, for instance, partakes of that mode. But the most common mode is that of the author as a near-blank. In this mode, I know a few facts about the author but have no real picture of their life or personality: the author is a name and the producer of a voice that I do know. In other words, I know the second self that the author created. My sense of Jane Austen partakes of that mode. I never think of the real person who produced the voice in which her novels are written when I’m reading her work: she is absent and may as well not exist.

So, as browsing the Seattle movie listings I read that the film was showing (the first that I knew it had even been made) and decided to see it, I realized that I lacked an image of Jane Austen substantial enough to be challenged or affronted by whatever image the movie had chosen to create of her. And I found that an odd realization to make, especially as I went on to consider how the fans of the “Jane” film genre have invented a “Jane” (largely based on their consensual re-invention of “Lizzie,” as so many call Elizabeth Bennet) they are sure they know intimately and do, of course, love.

This train of thought called to mind D.A. Miller’s celebration of Austen’s voice in the opening passage of Jane Austen: or The Secret of Style:

Whereas Emma’s talk merely held Harriet with the charm of a person, what Austen’s writing channeled for us [who read Austen early—say, at eleven or twelve, the age when she began writing] was the considerably more exciting appeal of no longer being one. Here was a truly out-of-body voice, so stirringly free of what it abhorred as “particularity” or “singularity” that it seemed to come from no enunciator at all. It scanted person even in the linguistic sense, rarely acknowledging, by saying I, its origination in an authoring self, or, by saying you, its reception by any other. We rapt, admiring readers might feel we were only eavesdropping on delightful productions intended for nobody in particular. And in other constituents of person—not just body, but psyche, history, social position—the voice was also deficient, so much so that its overall impersonality determined a narrative authority and a beauty of expression both without equal. The former, bare of personal specifications that might situate and hence subvert it, rose to absoluteness; while the latter, likewise emptied of self, achieved classic self-containment. No extraneous static encumbered the dictation of a grammar that completed, and an art that finished, every crystalline sentence. Altogether, such thrillingly inhuman utterance was not stylish; it was Style itself.

While Becoming Jane does not offer us an image of Jane Austen powerful enough to stamp the imagination forever with its imprint (or, I would guess, even set out to do so), its entire point, however, is to fix that voice to the fantasy of a particular person, body, and set of experiences that the movie imagines made Austen the author she became. (Hence, of course, the “becoming.”) Much of the delight of a film aimed at fans of “Jane” must, of course, be the constant occurrence of recognizable lines and figures from the film versions of the novels.

And so Anne Hathaway’s Jane herself is naturally an amalgamation of Austen’s heroines, while the people in her life and the situations she finds herself in are a combination of those to be found in her novels, fashioned onto a few carefully selected struts of the framework that is the little that is known of Jane Austen’s life. (For the record, the film’s hero, Tom Lefroy, was in real life a member of the bar in Ireland, had nine children with the woman he married in 1799, and became Lord Chief Justice of Ireland in 1852; Austen did mention him in a few letters and remarked of him that he was “a great admirer of Tom Jones” [which book Austen no doubt read without Lefroy’s prompting] and that that admiration inspired his only fault, that of wearing light-colored and colorful coats.)

It’s a formula that works perfectly to create a film that fits nicely within the Jane-film genre. Thus, Jane’s mother, Mrs. Austen, resembles the two television-film versions of Mrs. Bennet; Judge Langlois resembles the General in Northanger Abbey; Lucy Lefroy resembles Mary in Pride and Prejudice; Lady Gresham (a wholly invented character) combines Lady Catherine de Burgh and Lady Dalrymple in Persuasion, and so on. Even more importantly, perhaps, the characters spout familiar lines.

If one were to take the movie seriously, one would have to conclude that Jarrold means us to believe that the Austen wit was all around her, ready for to be used: but of course that’s not the reason those lines can be found on the characters’ lips: like the resemblances between the film’s characters and those of the film version of the novels, they’re meant to afford the viewer with the pleasure of recognition.

Jarrold affords us occasional moments of recognition of scenes from other, non-Austen heritage films: how can we not recall Merchant-Ivory’s Room with a View when seeing Jane and the Countess running through the woods after LeFroy and Jane’s brother Henry, to watch them strip off their clothes & dive naked into the water (even as we also think of Colin Frith’s Darcy nude in his bath and later diving into a pond to cool off after a long ride home)?

Still, most narratives have subtexts, and this movie is no exception. The principal subtext is rather heavy-handed: the sexual excitement and romantic infatuation followed by self-sacrifice of her affair with Lefroy gave Jane the experience she needed to produce those wonderful novels. And yet a second, subtler subtext offers a kernel of truth to be found beneath the multiple layers of the film’s fantasy. This emerges in the scene in which Jane meets Mrs. Radcliffe, the Gothic novelist who actually made a living by her pen, and realizes there might be an alternative to the life her mother tells her she must accept. Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels involve wild adventure and exotic travel. When Jane asks her about her experience (which Tom has been telling her she needs to acquire in order to write Real Novels), Mrs. Radcliffe comments that imagination can make up for all that the writer lacks in experience.

Becoming Jane had a few jarring moments, of course. I can’t imagine what possessed Jarrold to have Jane make a crack about who may judge who’s really important, for the crack was obviously intended to draw attention to how much more important she would become posthumously, when all those who viewed her as an impertinent, insignificant chit had sunk into ordinary obscurity: thus winking to the viewer to enjoy the irony (which certainly did not need to be pointed out to anyone in the theater).

In sum, the movie was a frolic that accomplished its aim and I’ve no doubt it will give the fans of “Jane” repeated hours of pleasure. Still, it would have been interesting to have had Robert Altman’s version of Jane Austen: I can’t help but thinking he might have been more interested in elucidating the enigma D.A. Miller admires, rather than conflating the fictionalizations of the writer's fictions with the writer.

Why Would Any Sane Woman Want to Live in Jane Austen's World?

Writer Shannon Hale's new novel, Austenland, creates a theme park where Jane Austen fans can find their own Mr. Darcy -- or some other romantic equivalent.

I find the idea of the book almost as appalling as I would find such a theme park. I confess I have not read it, but only heard the report about it on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday, so perhaps I'm not being fair. But the tone of the radio report makes me think Hale has written yet another romance-centered book that completely misses the point of Austen's novels.

I did not find it a selling point when Hale said she'd dedicated the book to Colin Firth, the actor who played Mr. Darcy in the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice. Mr. Firth may have done an excellent job of bringing Mr. Darcy to life, but he's an actor playing a role. And actors bring their own interpretation (as well as that of the screenwriter and director) to a part, one that may or may not be the one that Austen intended.

(I recall when I saw the movie version of Sense and Sensibility, I had trouble seeing what Marianne Dashwood saw in Willoughby, the supposedly romantic choice, when she had the fascinating Colonel Brandon, played by Alan Rickman, also seeking her hand. "Why doesn't she like Alan Rickman's character?" I whispered to my sister, a thorough Janeite. "He isn't Alan Rickman in the book," she replied.)

But what really bothers me is that some women -- including Hale, apparently -- are so fixated on the romance in Austen's books that they're blind to the whole world she wrote about. Haven't they noticed how many women in Austen's novels are forced to make compromise marriages, or live in straightened circumstances, depending perhaps on the charity of a brother-in-law? Hasn't it occurred to them that the culture so limits Austen's women that their only real opportunity in life is a good marriage -- and that a good marriage is not necessarily the most romantic one?

Austen was a brilliant writer. In the guise of writing love stories -- a suitable occupation for a woman -- she gave us a stunning critique of her society. I rather think Austen would be appalled by the idea that people crave the romance of her times -- a brief experience that only few could experience -- in lieu of the many opportunities of our own.

But then, I find it hard to even read Jane Austen, much as I admire her wit, her beautiful sentences, and her powerful evocation of her times. I cannot get through any of her books without wanting to throw the book across the room because I see woman after woman trapped in a society that doesn't really appreciate her skill or worth.

Truth is, I think Jane Austen wrote horror novels. And personally, I wouldn't choose to spend my vacation in a horror theme park. Or to read a book about women who would.