Jane Austen on Venus
(Hey, there’s an idea for some enterprising sequel writer! Just remember us in your acknowledgements.)
Alert Janeite Kimberly wrote to tell us about an article in the Guardian that talks about the novels that men say changed their life.
The project, called Men’s Milestone Fiction, commissioned by the Orange prize for fiction and the Guardian, followed on from similar research into women’s favourite novels undertaken by the same team last year.
The results are strikingly different, with almost no overlap between men’s and women’s taste. On the whole, men preferred books by dead white men: only one book by a woman, Harper Lee, appears in the list of the top 20 novels with which men most identify.
Women, by contrast, most frequently cited works by Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Margaret Atwood, George Eliot and Jane Austen. They also named a “much richer and more diverse” set of novels than men, according to Prof Jardine. There was a much broader mix between contemporary and classic works and between male and female authors.
Well, we know there are SOME men who read Jane Austen…some of them even read this blog! 
April 7th, 2006 at 1:50 am
Ah, but that’s because we know, deep down inside, that the so-called “Jane Austen” novels were written by Tom Leffroy (he was the one that gave Branwell Bronte the idea of using his sisters as fronts for his own writing habit).
This is the twist in the tail of Becoming Jane that they don’t want you to know about…
April 7th, 2006 at 7:17 am
Harper Lee is a woman? I’ll have to cross her off my “to read” list - now I’ll have time to read more Jim Harrison!
April 7th, 2006 at 8:26 am
Harper Lee is not only a woman, she’s a Janeite!
(To Kill A Mockingbird is my all-time favorite non-Austen book, by the bye.)
And Stephen–don’t give them any ideas. *shivers*
P.S. Nice to see the gents representin’–though I expected no less.
April 7th, 2006 at 9:51 am
Thinking about it, the only men among my absolute favourite novelists are - Hanif Kureishi, Robertson Davies, Ian McEwan and Anthony Trollope
April 8th, 2006 at 12:23 pm
Speaking of Nabokov (only tangentially: see list in cited article) I tease the cultist-priestess with this
–September 25, 1980: Professor Nabokov by John Updike (The New York Review of Books)