A backlash is a healthy thing, if only because it provokes a sharper defence of whatever is being lashed out at. Celia Brayfield’s attack on Jane Austen here yesterday struck some amusing chords — yes, many of us are bonneted-out and do not hunger for more films full of luminous Hollywood divas and chaps in breeches. Yes, there is only so much sprigged muslin one can take.

There are some fine films, and some atrocious ones. The new Becoming Jane is a jeu d’esprit in which the young authoress lives most of her own novels in months, with James McAvoy morphing from Mr Darcy to Mr Wickham before becoming in turn Willoughby (when he runs off with a richer girl), Edward Ferrars (when he can’t defy his rich relative) and finally Captain Wentworth (when she turns him down). To appreciate Austen you do not need to like the films. But you do need to read the books fairly.

Brayfield does not, furiously abhorring the “doll’s house world” of drawing-room restriction. The author of Wild Weekend and Mister Fabulous and Friends now accuses Jane Austen of focusing on “young women’s fancies” while ignoring the French Revolution, Napoleon, and the Chinese woman pirate Zheng Yi Sao. She berates Austen for not being Mary Wollstonecraft, for failing to “look out of the window” at poverty and recording a sexist society. It seems a bit hard to condemn a writer both for ignoring her society and for recording it, but let that pass. 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.

Being a middle-class girl in the 1800s, clinging on to the lower rungs of the financial ladder, was frightening. Daily life was arduous — all that sewing was not a hobby but household maintenance and the construction of clothes. In the country, livestock must be tended and a woman’s retreat to the drawing-room in a clean dress was often well earned. The older generation, especially if moneyed, held a power over the young unimaginable to our generation.

Beyond the walls of home the prospect was alarming: no social security, no pensions, no dole, no health service, antibiotics or reliable contraception; terrifying childbirths, no careers for single women without a slide down the social scale towards poverty. Austen’s dark word “want’ is very different from its equivalent in modern women’s fiction, all wannabe and must-have. Her willingness to laugh at Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice is actually brave and edgy: five unmarried daughters really could end up in the poorhouse, given the entail (on financial matters she is as precise as Balzac).

In her world, marriage was not a rom-com happy ending: for the girl with no money it was a necessary escape from either poverty or the despised dependency of a Miss Bates. Yet escape had its own dangers; a husband could beat, starve or bore you with impunity. To hold out for love and a companionate marriage was nobly foolhardy: Charlotte Lucas is not wholly condemned for taking Mr Collins and finding consolation in “her parish and her poultry”. There’s hard realism for you — not “young women’s fancies”.

Yet Jane Austen laughs, poking fun at her world with more acuity than those who merely sneer at bonnets. She muses cheekily on men who find that “imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms”. She is witty, she is observant, she tells a good story. She is no modern feminist, yet through silly Catherine Morland she utters a complaint that prefigures exactly our own feminist historians: “History, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in . . . I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men so good-for-nothing, and hardly any women at all — it is very tiresome.”

The accusation of ignoring her era’s history is common enough, but misguided. Poverty is not ignored; it is not dwelt upon probably because it was ubiquitous, and even daft Emma spends a lot of time helping cottagers. The most telling descriptions are the Portsmouth scenes in Mansfield Park, with dirt and sluttishness and a rough drunk father to remind Fanny Price what happens if you marry without judgment. This is as stark as any modish fictional slumming of today: starker, because closer to home. As to foreign wars, fringe characters vanish into them and sometimes die; if we are honest, that is all that most of us would know of wars today, if you discounted television pictures watched from a sofa.

When not excoriating her for ignoring Chinese pirates, Brayfield attacks Austen for not recording developments in molecular theory or joining the philosophical fight between reason and romanticism — though what else, on a domestic scale, is Sense and Sensibility? She also accuses Austen of making today’s publishers ban women novelists from putting war scenes in their books (though nobody remotely dissuaded me from putting Basra and Umm Qasr in one of my own, before sidling back to the personal dramas). But here we come to a wider modern error: the self-important belief common among writers that their work is worth nothing unless it plonkingly takes on current “issues”.

Thus affluent chaps from Primrose Hill sit smugly writing up the cracked concrete and crack cocaine of the inner city, a knowledge of Scottish syringe argot is a sine qua non on the festival circuit, and many a gritty novel has been inspired, not by a feeling heart and personal vision, but by a calculated scan of the home and foreign news pages in search of a “high concept” to excite the Sunday critics.

Jane Austen would see right through that. And laugh.

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