Two Valentine’s Day articles discussed the new Headline editions of Jane Austen’s novels, and considering the date, we suppose it is not especially wonderful that the authors discussed the novels’ relationship with “romance,” not in the sense of “non-reality-based” as it would have been in Jane Austen’s Day (to wit, the work of Walter Scott), but in the sense of torn bodices and heaving bosoms. Normally we might be tempted to bring out the Cluebat of Janeite Righteousness, but luckily for the perpetrators we are sufficiently magnanimous to give them a bit of leeway for Valentine’s Day and also we are tired from staying up late to watch the Winter Olympics (and that Cluebat is heavy!)

The Oregonian does a pretty good job of discussing Jane Austen’s work in a short article, though perhaps it is the short length that forces the writer into broad strokes of description.

Austen’s novels, like “Seinfeld,” are about nothing, and everything — courtship, romance, family, foibles, friends and self-deception.

John Murray sent Emma to Walter Scott to review in the Edinburgh Review, stating, “It wants romance and incident, does it not?” John, son, that would be “the point” that just went flying over your head.

If she were around today, Austen might even stick up for romance novelists. She’d surely agree not to make fun of them, at least not for the entire duration of Valentine’s Day.

We agree with this; after all, if the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard? Jane might mock their more ridiculous works in private, perhaps in a letter to Cassandra.

In the Telegraph, Amanda Craig expands the definition of romance novels to include not only Jane Austen’s novels but pretty much anything to do with romantic relationships. That covers an awful lot of books, but she argues that all books are “genre.”

No book is easy to write. There are bad writers in every genre, just as there are great ones; and while many will object to Jane Austen being repackaged as the godmother of romantic fiction, complete with pastel covers, the idea that all great literature must, by definition, escape genre is snobbish and wrong. Great literature plays with genre, extends it, inverts it and subverts it - but it cannot, ever, be wholly independent of it.

“Genre” has a specific meaning in publishing, and Jane Austen would never be published in the romance genre today. Her books are too long, have too much telling and not enough showing, and there are no shagging scenes.

For the record, the Editrix’s official position on the pretty new editions is “mostly harmless” until we have the opportunity to personally inspect them for heretical and blasphemous forewords and other extraneous materials.