Thank you for a wonderful defense of Jane Austen. Ms Brayfield and the other critical articles in the Times the last week or so violate one of the most important rules of any kind of historical writting....namely you never judge a historical period thru the eyes of your own time. And you never judge it by the mores of your own time period. Ms Brayfield lost any sort of credibility when she brought the female Chinese pirate into her argument. Considering that
most people....male/female,wellread/ueducated,rich/poor didn't even know what was going on in other side of their own country let alone across the world. Also don't most writting teachers preach that the best writters write about that which is familiar to them.

Linda, Santa Fe, USA

I absolutely agree, Jane Austen would be laughing in somebody's face. She is projecting her era through words and while it may be interpreted as politically incorrect by todays standards it was undoubtedly right on the mark for the era in question.

Kathleen Lee, Savannah, GA USA

Doc M appears to share Gradgrind's view that unless something is fact, fact, fact, it is of no importance. The truth about human emotions and the fierce internal battles people fight with their own natures may take place in a 'tea-party world', but that doesn't make them insignificant. Art holds a mirror up to nature, it's not supposed to be history!

Carolyn Ten Holter, Oxford,

What a splendid piece of writing. Please avert your gaze as you step over the mangled remains of Celia Brayfield. Libby on song is up with Chesterton.

Mike Fowle, Felixstowe, Suffolk

You can judge the quality of Jane by the quality of her friends and enemies. It's not a co-incidence, I think, that she was greatly admired by Sir Walter Scott, Anthony Trollope and Rudyard Kipling - but rather despised by Charlotte Bronte, who hadn't cottoned-on to the fact that Jane (in Northanger Abbey) had taken the p*** out of Jane Eyre before CB had even written it!
EVERYBODY has met a Miss Bates, or a Mr Collins or a Mrs Elton (Kipling's The Janeites); how many people have met a bigamist who keeps his mad wife locked up in the deserted wing of his crumbling mansion . . .?
Most of Jane's characters could read her description of themselves without getting the joke, and yet she tells it in a way that makes you think that only you and she are in on it.
Unhappily, it is that wonderful gossipy quality of her writing (like P.G. Wodehouse) that makes her work virtually undramatisable without diminishing it - noble though some of the efforts to do so have been.

NicholasThorowgood, Reading, Berks.

Thank goodness (not for the first time!) for Libby Purves, this time in her welcome 1000-word pasturing of the tiresome hee-hawing Celia Brayfield. Like effective writers everywhere, Libby combines solid knowledge (here the books of Jane Austen) with pertinent common sense ("The fact is that England in the 1800s was indeed sexist, and it is salutary to be reminded that our modern mores are not some historical norm but an interesting new adventure"). Brayfield tells us little about Austen and very too much about herself (what a novel insight on Austen: she didn't write about female Chinese pirates). As Libby says, "Jane Austen would see right through that. And laugh".

Peter Leary, Edinburgh, UK

The lives and concerns of women, whoever they may be, and however rich or poor they may be, are as important as any war or pestilence.

AJ, Great Neck, New York

Those who criticise Jane Austen seem to hinge their remarks on her not writing what they want. Jane Austen wisely stuck to writing about what she knew, which did not include the poorest. And belittling the social problems of the past because they don't seem very serious in our NHS and welfare supported world to be very serious, is just anachronism of the worst sort. The fate that could befall you if your circumstances shifted just slightly do not bear thinking of - no benefits of any kind except the poorhouse which was worse than prison, hanging for theft, burning alive for killing a violent husband (such a burning actually occurred during Jane's youth).
The Prices in Portsmouth have a maid, but that does not make them middle class. At that time everyone above subsistence level had one. Maids were the domestic technology of the period, and to say someone who has one is middle class is like saying anyone who has a washing machine or a vacuum cleaner now is middle class.

alexandria, Sheffield, UK

I don't think that Jane Austen's political beliefs matter. It is her books, her art that matters. Pride and Prejudice is as neatly organized as any great play by Shakespeare, starting with a view of the unsuccessful marriage of Mr and Mrs Bennett and trying to define or find a good marriage. Every detail in the book is essential, and none can be omitted, just as every brush stroke or every color of a great painting must be a part of a whole, whether it is by Raphael or Rothko. Added to the structural unity of the work are the vitality of the characters and the brilliance of the writing. No wonder that Virginia Woolf called P and P a perfect gem. Like all great art, it opens a magic door on a world, and it only requires a suspension of disbelief to cross that threshold. We may close the book at the end and wonder why the book did not begin at the ending, but the theme or question dealt with the nature of love and not the marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy who were parts of an argument.

jim, Brewster, MA, USA

Not all women readers actually enjoy novels in which the only plot is the mating habits of the upper middle-class. Austen's heroines don't face the poor-house: just becoming 'poor relations', or (shock! horror!) *work ing* as governesses! The Prices in 'Mansfield Park' are shabby-genteel (her father was an invalided Marine officer), and they have a maid, albeit an incompetent one. There is no sign of the rural poor (except as the object of charitable visits), none of the burgeoning industrial working-class. It's a twee, tea-party world, where the worst thing that happens is a bit of quickly-punished adultery (with none of the anguish that better novelists, of wider range, have brought to the theme).

I prefer to read of "The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page". So what if "there are hardly any women"? At least matters of significance are at stake. I only read Austen because I was forced to: not the kind of novels I would touch with a barge-pole

Doc M, Glasgow, Scotland

Jane Austin was a brilliant writer of her time, like Charles Dickens. People who criticise Jane Austen like Cecelia Brayfield, have a very poor understanding of quality writing.
Unfortunately she is a victim of the modern era and the general falling standards of writing skills.
Good writers are people with imagination and awareness of what is going on around them and developing it in their own style, through the characters they portray in the stories.
Very few have this quality and sadly in the modern era of mobile phones and computers unlikely to produce very many more like Jane Austen in the future.

John. Gilmore, Chantilly, France

The 'womens' world of Jane Austen is more peaceful and exciting than all those historical wars in which men feature mainly. If only men could solve their issues like Jane's characters!

R. Ince, Istanbul, Turkey

Well said Libby! An excellent defence of class against the mediocre. However, whilst agreeing all of your valid rebuttals of Celia Brayfield’s article, you omitted what is probably the greatest thing that separates the likes of Austin from those carping critics who can see no further than promoting their own dogma. Where most novelists struggle to be merely workmanlike, stodgily applying language to tell a narrative, the great ones use language with the finesse of a swordmaster. Shakespeare clearly had it, as did Spencer. In modern times Tolkein achieved the same. As with them, Austin was a master craftsman (craftswoman?), She was, if you will, a Michaelangelo of the written word. It is a joy to read her, irrespective of the content of her writing. That content, significant as it is, merely enhances the effect. And it is this mocking eloquence that brings home the injustices of her times far more effectively than the strident braying or incessant whining of today’s activists.

Bob Finbow, Haverhill, England

All those novels based on contemporary issues -- will anybody be reading them in 200 years?

Marie, Washington DC, USA

Yes. Austen's novels are based on her " personal vision" and that's what makes them so interesting. I agree that one doesn't necessarily have to focus on some contemporary issue, that makes the headlines in newspapers, to make a novel interesting.

Suganthy Krishnamachari, Chennai, INDIA

The fact remains that 'who is going to marry whom' represents the only plot line in all of the novels. Boring as hell! We men don't care who marries whom!

Hrothgar, Schaumburg, USA