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250 (& More) Reasons We Love Jane Austen

Austen at 250 logo with fireworks in background



Born on December 16, 1775, Jane Austen turns 250 this year. Help us celebrate! 

Everyone has their own reason for adoring Jane Austen, and we would all love to hear yours. Whether it's as simple as "Mrs. Bennet's nerves," a favorite witty line, or a heartfelt toast, we're gathering a joyful collection of 250—and more!—reasons you, her readers and fans, appreciate her. Join us in celebrating the incomparable Jane!

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  • Lena Apr 1, 2026, 5:51 PM (5 days ago)

    Reading through these comments, I've enjoyed seeing how Jane Austen is so many things to so many people. We really do each how our "own Jane" who is just what we love about her most. Religious Jane, feminist Jane, civil Jane, rebel Jane, moral but not preachy Jane, and sometimes many at once! What made me fall in love with her work was her humor, built on language and novelistic expectations, with more layers than a milllefeuille. But what made me want to go back in time and spill the tea with her, were her letters. Shakespeare is wonderful, but we don't have his diary to pour over and read his real opinions about Elizabeth and James. Even modern authors who wrote autobiographies haven't given us that voyeuristic view into their psyche, that Jane's letters to Cassandra give us.

    Reading them felt like eavesdropping on the sisters, and to my surprise, they sounded like the conversations my mother and I would have. When life presented us with the weird and wonderful we relished it. We discussed books, film, art, and she'd notice something I missed, or I would connect it up to an event or novel from the past. Things we could only discuss with each other, because no one else was interested. I didn't notice it at the time, though.

    Seeing a similar sense of humor, the openness and honesty, the love and trust Jane and Cassandra had, it made me feel close to them, as though I really knew them. And when Cassandra wrote, "the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow," I understood her grief completely, even before my mother died. I am so grateful that Cassandra saved all those letters when so many didn't, but I wish she had saved just a few, just one, of the letters she had written to her own Jane.

  • Judy Flores Feb 22, 2026, 1:08 PM (43 days ago)

    Aside from her beautiful writing, clever stories, and fun characters; what I love about Jane Austen is that she wrote in real time about how life was for middle and upper class women. With every rereading of her novels, I feel transported to her time.

  • Josie Feb 19, 2026, 8:29 PM (45 days ago)

    Jane Austen is a superheroine. Faced by societal pressures to marry, she stayed true to herself. She stayed strong and went against societal norms by refusing to marry without affection. It’s difficult enough now to deal with societal judgement and pressure; imagine how she endured it in her time? And yet she did. Thank you, Jane. So ahead of her time.

  • Catherine Gwinner Jan 11, 2026, 7:03 AM (3 months ago)

    During one of my husband's Army deployments to Iraq, I rediscovered Jane Austen. During this challenging time I started reading and learning more about her life and her novels. She 's become a cherished friend now after 20 years.

  • Susan Johnson Jan 4, 2026, 12:30 PM (3 months ago)

    A little known fact about Jane Austen's Amber Cross Necklace was that it was worn by the heiress Caroline Crosby (CC) at her wedding in her parent's house on Park Avenue in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1933 when she married Charles Beecher Hogan. He was the owner of both Jane and Cassandra's necklaces and would ultimately donate the two amber crosses to the Jane Austen Museum in Chawton, UK in 1974. The unusual wedding news made the New York Times and many other newspapers across the country. It was also the talk around the community at Yale. In true Jane Austen fashion, did Charles marry Caroline for love or for her fortune? At the time the headlines described him as a low level librarian at Yale. Charles knew about the family milling fortune (later to be General Mills) because CC's brother was a professor of Art History at Yale and her sister also lived in a New Haven area which is why Caroline went to live there as a young woman to study piano. After his marriage to CC, Charles world opened up and he spent many summers in England researching books on the theater, buying first edition copies of Jane Austen's books and compiling a vast body of Jane Austen related materials that can be found today in the libraries at Yale and Harvard. Although he never completed more than a Master's Degree at Yale, he is often referred to as a Professor of English at Yale. CC and Charles never had any children and when he donated the necklaces to the Jane Austen Museum he did it only in his name even though it was said that he had given them to CC as a wedding present. He also never acknowledged or thanked CC for her support in any of his published books. Does the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice hold true in the opposite way: "that a single man [woman] in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife [husband]!!

  • Jane Axelrod Dec 31, 2025, 6:13 PM (3 months ago)

    I love her wit and humor. Some laugh out loud, some subtle, some ironic. Her observations about human nature and human foibles are so spot on, but never malicious. One sees it all through her characters who are very real and very revealing. She is a mistress of "show don't tell" in her writing. I also love the slow burn of her relationships between men and women, how it develops and comes to fruition in subtle ways.
    One can learn an amazing amount about people and human nature by reading Austen's works,
    She manages to communicate it all without hitting you over the head with it as her insights are not preachy, gloomy or dreary but the observations from daily life and told in story form through memorable characters. She is the ultimate raconteur!

  • Beth Parrish Dec 31, 2025, 12:00 PM (3 months ago)

    I didn't start reading Austen until I was in my 30's. For the last many years I have turned into a true Janeite! I cannot get enough. I will re-read all her books in succession at least once a year, and never get tired of them. I have recently began to branch into Jane's favorite authors. Reading Clarissa in its entirety. All my literary friends think I am crazy, and I am glad to be crazy for Jane!

  • Fay Radding Dec 31, 2025, 11:53 AM (3 months ago)

    I've been a fan of history for decades and I love the "Jane-iverse" for giving me the chance to consume with gusto the feelings and daily concerns of Jane Austen and others in her orbit who are at the center of her novels, biographies, film adaptations, spinoffs and last but not least, scholarly articles! I'm captivated and grateful for the inspiration and joy of being a Janeite!

  • MS Dec 31, 2025, 11:17 AM (3 months ago)

    Jane , is a timeless author because of the descriptiveness of each character in her stories. It enticed me from the very first time I read her book. Giving a glimpse of an epoch gone by.

  • Katherine Koller Dec 31, 2025, 10:08 AM (3 months ago)

    I love Jane Austen because she is always laughing and encourages us to laugh, too, in the face of inequity, hypocrisy, ignorance and lack of feeling, even behind her most serious observations, right up until the end of Persuasion.

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