The Guardian has not one but two articles about books about Jane Austen. The first, a collection of essays by Adam Phillips in which he combines psychoanalysis with literary study, is found lacking by the reviewer.
When Phillips examines literature head on he is similarly prone to oscillate between the obvious and the vague. I fell eagerly upon his discussion of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, because I feel that she is a writer whose suggestive lacunae are very much suited to playful excavation. But Phillips first tells us something that nobody has to be told about Pride and Prejudice: “It is as if they have to understand something, to learn something about their first impressions of each other in order to get on,” he says, and goes on stating this obvious point in different ways for a couple of pages. Then he drifts into a dismissal of this great writer, apparently scorning her lack of psychological realism: “We may be charmed but we are not fooled.” I wasn’t charmed by this judgment; does Phillips mean that we aren’t convinced by Austen? And if so, don’t we need more examination of what it is that stands in the way of us and her happy endings? Who is this “we” to whom Phillips refers so often, and so airily?
It is a happy ending. Go read it again, son.
The second article has an excerpt of John Sutherland’s book How to Read a Novel, in which he discusses Jane Austen’s view of marriage contrasted with that of her heroines.
For the law-abiding, fiction also has its manifold practical uses. In the 19th century, the period of its most rapid hot-house growth, the novel developed, as one of its many parts, into a middle-class manual of conduct. Anthony Trollope, when asked what good his novels did society, liked to reply that they instructed maidens how they should receive their suitors. Jane Austen’s novels (like those of her literary descendant, Helen Fielding, of Bridget Jones’s Diaries fame) are similarly instructional about the big question in a young woman’s life: whom should I marry? A Mr Collins, a Mr Darcy, or no one?
Miss Austen, having accepted her own suitor, decided - after a night’s second thoughts - that it would, after all, be no one. One would like to think that chewing the issues over so thoroughly in her novels helped in the decision. Oddly, none of her heroines opts for spinsterhood, and those that are left on the shelf are no advertisement for the single woman past her “bloom”. For a woman, said Jacqueline Susann (not one of Jane’s more distinguished literary descendants), “forty is Hiroshima”. Miss Austen would have agreed, but, on the evidence of Persuasion, would have located the catastrophe at 27.
We think that Anne Elliot’s “catastrophe” would not have been failure to marry, but failure to marry Captain Wentworth. 
