I have a thing for Jane Austen.

You might call it a passion. Or maybe an obsession.  It would probably be safe to call it a lifelong infatuation with her writing, her stories, her characters, and everything I have learned from them.

I’ve read every one of them; Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park, Persuasion. All of them. Some of them (Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility) I have read several times. I have also watched whatever movie and TV miniseries versions of these stories I could over the years. Also several times.

And that doesn’t include the film, Becoming Jane, with none other than Anne Hathaway and Mr. McDreamy himself, James McAvoy. I have seen that movie about the real life drama of Jane Austen many times and, big surprise, I love it!

I love everything about Jane Austen’s work. The time period, the clothing, the men, the women, the social constrictions, the etiquette, the wit, the irony, the sentence structure in her books, the cinematography in the movie versions. Literally everything.

All of that being said, I want to narrow my focus onto the one story that I think is her best known and most beloved, as well as my personal favorite, Pride and Prejudice.

My obsession with Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet began when I was a teenager. I was a voracious reader. When I dove into Pride and Prejudice I was instantly smitten. I read and re-read passages because the words were just too beautiful not to savor. My shy nature was flustered by every nuance of the ins and outs of the strict rules of their society. My adolescent crush on Mr. Darcy, and my realization that her name when they finally got married would be Elizabeth Darcy (my name in reverse!), began then and continues to this day.

In my humble opinion Mr. Darcy is one of the most romantic male lead characters ever written. He’s tall, dark, handsome, rich, misunderstood, and–in the end–works on his own issues to become a better person and, therefore, worthy of the love of his life. Who wouldn’t fall in love with that kind of man?

I started writing romance novels ten years ago, but there was always a part of me that didn’t want to admit how much I enjoyed writing them. I was a modern day woman, after all. Divorced. A filmmaker. Living my best life. Completely removed from the influence or interference of any man whatsoever. The cynical piece of my personality looked down on the romance genre. That is, until I Googled “best romance author” and Jane Austen’s name popped up.

With a single internet search confirming one of the greatest writers in history, and one of my personal favorites, wrote romance, I embraced my path. I had always loved stories about people falling in love. And if it was good enough for Jane Austen then it was good enough for me.

I originally thought this blog post would compare books to movies, movies to miniseries (Colin Firth’s miniseries is the best, Kiera Knightly’s film isn’t bad), but I quickly realized that wasn’t really what I wanted to talk about. Instead, I want to address what I see as the women’s issues that Pride and Prejudice takes on with grace and humor.

To the casual observer, the women in Pride and Prejudice are overly concerned, nay fixated, on finding a man. Not only finding a man, but finding a man with money.

While this is true on the surface, to me the underlying message of the story is how a woman in those times NEEDED to find a man. The five Bennet daughters were completely dependent on men. The fact that they couldn’t have money in their own name, that the estate of their father was going to go to their male cousin rather than one of them, leaving all five sisters and their mother without a penny upon their father’s death, was not just part of the plot, it was the reality of Jane Austen’s world.

And what strikes me whenever I read or watch a Jane Austen story is that this is still a reality in the world of women. Whether we live in places where women are second class citizens without the same rights as men, or we were raised by women–who were raised by women–who were raised by women–who lived in a world where finding a good man was your best, sometimes only, way to security and happiness, I think that in a way each of us are one of the Bennet sisters. And we feel very deeply the vulnerability, the desperation, and the drama of their predicament.

In her own way I believe Jane Austen vanquished that great inequality when Elizabeth Bennet won the man and the money while never caving in to society’s pressure to sell herself to the highest bidder. In the end Elizabeth gets the ending she deserves–the ending we all deserve–security, happiness and love on our terms.

I don’t proclaim to write stories anywhere near the caliber of Jane Austen. Nor will I ever have that level of talent. I do, however, try to make the heroines of my romantic tales the kind of women that Elizabeth Bennet might like if they were ever to meet. And I will forever be grateful for the example Jane Austen set for those of us who love stories about falling in love.

-Darci