I want to understand the fascination with Jane Austen's works, especially by hackers and designers (and an economist in this article). Paul Graham (founder of Hacker News) mentions Jane Austen in at least 5 essays, see below. I haven't read any of Austen's books, but I think I'll need to.
(1) "Everyone admires Jane Austen. Add my name to the list. To me she seems the best novelist of all time. I'm interested in how things work. When I read most novels, I pay as much attention to the author's choices as to the story. But in her novels I can't see the gears at work. Though I'd really like to know how she does what she does, I can't figure it out, because she's so good
that her stories don't seem made up. I feel like I'm reading a description of something that actually happened." -- http://paulgraham.com/heroes.html
(2) "One of the reasons Jane Austen's novels are so good is that she read them out loud to her family. That's why she never sinks into self-indulgently arty descriptions of landscapes, or pretentious philosophizing. (The philosophy's there, but it's woven into the story instead of being pasted onto it like a label.) If you open an average 'literary' novel and imagine reading it out loud to your friends as something you'd written, you'll feel all too keenly what an imposition that kind of thing is upon the reader." -- http://paulgraham.com/desres.html
(3) "What we can say with some confidence is that these are the glory days of hacking. In most fields the great work is done early on. The paintings made between 1430 and 1500 are still unsurpassed. Shakespeare appeared just as professional theater was being born, and pushed the medium so far that every playwright since has had to live in his shadow. Albrecht Durer did the same thing with engraving, and Jane Austen with the novel." -- http://paulgraham.com/hp.html
(4) "Like Jane Austen, Lisp looks hard. [...] Indeed, if programming languages were all more or less equivalent, there would be little justification for using any but the most popular. But they aren't all equivalent, not by a long shot. And that's why less popular languages, like Jane Austen's novels, continue to survive at all. When everyone else is reading the latest John Grisham novel, there will always be a few people reading Jane Austen instead." -- http://paulgraham.com/iflisp.html
(5) "Good design is suggestive. Jane Austen's novels contain almost no description; instead of telling you how everything looks, she tells her story so well that you envision the scene for yourself." -- http://paulgraham.com/taste.html
(1) I'm with him on her technical composition of a story being hard to tease apart (in a good way) but not so sure about them seeming unusually real or true. Structure and purpose of the novels' parts, the flow from incident to incident and scene to scene, is smooth and natural (more or less), plot, I dunno. Probably a personal thing.
(2) seems wrong to me, if by "literary" he means "broadly recognized as part of the 'Western Canon'" and not "recent works self-consciously written as literary fiction". Most read aloud really well, in my experience.
(3) Ugh.
(4) Austen's among the widest-read of the "canon", and not especially challenging (probably not an unrelated fact). This comparison is a real stretch. He couldn't think of someone better to use as an example? Huh.
(5) IDK about using it to illustrate this particular point, but yeah, basically.
If you struggle with Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility (I do—I find them too smug in a "gee look at me, the author, writing such clever things" way, though I think that's what people like about them so it must just be a me problem) try Persuasion. It's short and apparently Austen didn't get a chance to do her usual "punch-up" edit before she died, which probably explains why it comes off (to me) as less full of itself than the others and a much more agreeable read.
Emma seems to be her parody of herself, as best I can figure. I enjoyed it. Longer. Desperately wants to be a tragedy. (spoiler?) Isn't. Probably it shouldn't be, I mean she's Jane Austen and I'm just some asshole. Oh well, still good.
Haven't read Mansfield, which I understand is very well regarded, or her juvenilia. Tried Northanger but seemed pointless without a better-annotated copy, which I'll probably get around to acquiring and reading some day.
Point (4) strikes me as a bit off because Jane Austen is generally among the easiest classical authors to read. Pride and Prejudice in particular is a simple romance story that can easily be read and appreciated by almost anyone with little to no preparation. Compare this to, say, William Faulkner or James Joyce and calling Austen an example of difficult literature seems almost absurd.
She's very easy to read, but she's not so easy to understand. There are multiple levels of irony and character insight in all of the books.
You can take them at face value as superficial and nostalgic proto-Harlequins, and a lot of readers do. She practically invented the surly and arrogant romantic hero who actually loves his mother and is kind to children, small animals, and feudal tenants.
But the books are actually blisteringly insightful and perceptive social and psychological commentary, written by a fiercely modern spirit trapped rather unhappily in a superficially elegant but oppressively limiting social scene she both loved and hated.
Most contemporary authors wrote as if they were outside the scene and looking in, so you don't get the same sense of ironic but intimate self-disclosure.
Austen wrote as someone inside and looking out, describing her own perceptions and reactions - many of which are contradictory and complex. So as a writer, she's both sympathetic and uniquely fascinating.
I still think her work is at most middling in terms of difficulty and likely not even that. Multiple levels of character insight is nothing compared to Ulysses parodying in sequence the entire development of the English language in stream of consciousness mirroring the gestation of a baby in a woman's womb, or the first chapter of The Sound and the Fury which tries to represent the internal experience of a severely mentally handicapped nonverbal 33-year-old man for whom past and present cannot be distinguished and who cannot understand simple phenomena like the movement of a horse-drawn carriage through space, or the second section of that same book which follows Quentin's turbulent and troubled mind through his final moments leading to his suicide. These sections are not just difficult to read, but also look outward from inside a character.
Jane Austen is a great author, and her works can often be appreciated and analyzed on multiple levels. But I just don't think she's a reasonable example of a difficult author when one considers the full spectrum of literature available today.
I don't think it's some special fascination by hackers, designers or economists. She's a hugely popular and accessible novelist and, in the English-speaking world, many people are introduced to her work sometime in secondary school. They're fun reads and you should definitely check them out - if anything, spending time trying to parse out what Paul Graham thinks about them can only make them less fun.
(1) "Everyone admires Jane Austen. Add my name to the list. To me she seems the best novelist of all time. I'm interested in how things work. When I read most novels, I pay as much attention to the author's choices as to the story. But in her novels I can't see the gears at work. Though I'd really like to know how she does what she does, I can't figure it out, because she's so good that her stories don't seem made up. I feel like I'm reading a description of something that actually happened." -- http://paulgraham.com/heroes.html
(2) "One of the reasons Jane Austen's novels are so good is that she read them out loud to her family. That's why she never sinks into self-indulgently arty descriptions of landscapes, or pretentious philosophizing. (The philosophy's there, but it's woven into the story instead of being pasted onto it like a label.) If you open an average 'literary' novel and imagine reading it out loud to your friends as something you'd written, you'll feel all too keenly what an imposition that kind of thing is upon the reader." -- http://paulgraham.com/desres.html
(3) "What we can say with some confidence is that these are the glory days of hacking. In most fields the great work is done early on. The paintings made between 1430 and 1500 are still unsurpassed. Shakespeare appeared just as professional theater was being born, and pushed the medium so far that every playwright since has had to live in his shadow. Albrecht Durer did the same thing with engraving, and Jane Austen with the novel." -- http://paulgraham.com/hp.html
(4) "Like Jane Austen, Lisp looks hard. [...] Indeed, if programming languages were all more or less equivalent, there would be little justification for using any but the most popular. But they aren't all equivalent, not by a long shot. And that's why less popular languages, like Jane Austen's novels, continue to survive at all. When everyone else is reading the latest John Grisham novel, there will always be a few people reading Jane Austen instead." -- http://paulgraham.com/iflisp.html
(5) "Good design is suggestive. Jane Austen's novels contain almost no description; instead of telling you how everything looks, she tells her story so well that you envision the scene for yourself." -- http://paulgraham.com/taste.html