CELEBRATING THE JOY OF JANE

Who’s your favourite Austen heroine?

I‘Her books are literary penicillin’ Austen’s barbed wit and feminist message have been a lifelong inspiration for Kathy Lette

t was Jane Austen who made me want to become a writer. Beneath her humorous veneer, Austen is a barbed commentator on the battle between the sexes. As a woman, she realised that poetic justice is the only justice in the world – and set about impaling misogynistic enemies on the end of her pen. I, too, only write because it’s cheaper than therapy, and writing humorously enables me to kneecap the pompous, pretentious and chauvinistic.

Austen’s books are literary penicillin. Doctors should prescribe them. Replace the antidepressants with a bracing Northanger Abbey or a juicy Persuasion, and you’ll feel better in no time. I’d call it ‘Prose-ac’ – only it’s not tranquillising, it’s transforming.

On the surface, Jane’s prose is so beguiling, her sentences so beautifully crafted, that the reader is lulled into a false sense of literary security. But a couple of chapters in, you realise her message is radically feminist and socially subversive.

She proves that novels can be pleasurable but also profound; an experience that lifts the spirits while engaging the mind. Jane, who actually endured many hardships in

her life, clearly agrees with my own motto: laugh and the world laughs with you; cry and you get salt in your gin and tonic.

I love Pride And Prejudice’s Lizzy Bennett. Women were then seen as breeding cows, and wedlock was little more than a padlock. Lizzy is determined to prove she’s more than just a life-support system to an ovary. Marrying for love was a luxury few women could afford, but still she refuses to compromise. Elizabeth Bennett taught me that a woman can stand on her own two kitten heels and not wait to be rescued by some knight in shining Armani.