Jane Austen has kept me entertained for years. I am reading a new analysis of her works by a Jane Austen scholar, Natalie Tyler, called Friendly Jane Austen.

It seems that our Jane was daring, if you consider the time in which she lived. She lamented the lack of education for women which forced them to marry well. Remember Mr. Darcy who had an income of ten thousand pounds a year?
He was quite a catch. It was better than being a governess .
An evangelist of the day, warned Austen's peers that some women had a dreadful propensity to think for themselves and even to move about as though they were not the property of their husbands.

All kinds of things were going on in the world around her, such as the American revolution and the beheadings in France but she wrote about the world as she knew it. We are told write what you know and she did it to perfection.

Jane enjoyed food and drink. She loved to visit her wealthy
brothers because of the good food and wine. She wrote in a letter to her sister, "Good apple pie is a considerable part of our domestic happiness". They drank a lot of "white soup" which is much like our eggnog but contains ground almonds,
and includes plenty of white wine or other white spirits.
Syllabub, almost equally rich was another of her favorites.

Jane had two proposals. She accepted one of them from a
wealthy landowner but broke the engagement because she didn't love him and was he was definitely not her intellectual equal. The other was from a clergyman and she knew first hand how poor they usually were.

She allows her characters to be witty and sarcastic. She started filling her notebooks with her writing before she was nine. She wrote because she was born to write and because in writing she could shape the world of her characters.

Personally, I love the dramatizations of her work but I also love to re-read her books. You miss some of her wit in the dramas.

I started reading her novels when I was about twelve and I re-read them about once a year. There is always something fresh and amusing.