(by Alice Chandler)
Why do so few men read
Jane Austen? That question has been getting a lot of attention recently. In an
article reprinted in the blog Jane
Austen’s World, William Deresiewicz writes about “the strangeness, the effrontery,
of a heterosexual man who reads Jane Austen.” Another article by Margaret
Barthels, talks movingly about her father, who was a lifelong Austen reader,
even in a world of “female-dominated fandom.” A 2008 survey readership found that 96% of all
Austen readers were women. Even allowing for the distortions of such
self-reported data, the evidence is clear. Women read Jane Austen. Men do
not--or to be more accurate, most men do not. It was not always so.
