**Romanticizing Jane.** Jane Austen was a nonconformist. She was the seventh child of an Anglican priest and belonged to what we might now call the middle class. She had many books at home, and both parents taught her to read and write, supported her, recognized in her the same talent we all know her now. Moreover, she was unlucky in love: it does not seem that her parents sought to marry her, it is quite plausible that she did not want to marry for economic reasons and the love affairs that we know of her were short and fruitless. With the publication, very shy, of her first editions, the w...