Reprinted from Jane Austen's Guide to Thrift by Kathleen Anderson and Susan Jones by arrangement with Berkley, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., C...

After about two decades of being a voracious reader, I'm still at a loss as to why so many people have elevated Jane Austen to the level of literary herodom. To put it bluntly, I just don't the seemingly female-gender-wide obsession with Ms. Austen.

Austen died before putting the final polish on Persuasion. She was only forty-one. But "in fiction, . . . blessedly, the dead return to life." Despite her fears about women writers, Jane Austen never was deserted. Her influence is endless. The pen remains in her hand.

These days, I'm having a lot of trouble with irony. Sometimes I'm even afraid of the concept. Imagine that -- a literature professor afraid of irony. Isn't that ironic? Why am I afraid?

My class has just finished discussing Mansfield Park, and we are about to start Emma. With Thanksgiving quickly approaching, the combination is fortuitous. Among other things, both novels depict the pain of gratitude.

Unlike the typical politician, Austen always signals the artificiality of her narratives. If only political narratives -- or all the pundits insisting we need them -- could be as honest. But what politician says, "enjoy the artificiality of my American success story?"

How are Mitt Romney and Mr. Darcy similar? Let me count the ways.

In Pride and Prejudice, the reward for meticulous critical scrutiny is self-consciousness, intellectual expansion and moral growth. Long before the invention of fMRIs, Jane Austen knew that close reading was good for the brain... and for the soul.

Among her countless accomplishments, Jane Austen is making news in the field of neuroscience.

What does any of this have to do with prim and proper Jane Austen? How could such a fuddy-duddy author discuss sex organs? But she does.

My favorite memory of Emma is reading it in a hammock at the edge of my uncle's orchard outside Tel-Aviv. I loved it best among her books at the time, and I'd brought it with me almost as a talisman since I'd never been so far from home.

Nobody's expecting Wharton to ever be as popular as Jane Austen. After all, Wharton had a much more jaundiced view of life than Austen did, and she's unlikely to be hijacked as a writer of romances, the way Austen has been.

Most of them are addressed to her beloved sister Cassandra, and afford a unique and irresistible insight into the daily life of the novelist: intimate and gossipy, observant and informative - the equivalent of telephone calls between the sisters - and read much like the novels themselves.

I fell in love repeatedly in college. With authors. I was an English major and reeled from one new passion to another. Some of them feel like youthf...

Until yesterday, Jane Austen was thought to have died of bovine tuberculosis or Hodgkin's lymphoma, a strain of cancer. But crime writer, Lindsay Ashf...

Austen excelled at wielding the skewer. Lady Catherine de Bourgh is an obvious example in Pride and Prejudice. But the book holds worse.

Jane Austen is so popular these days she's probably been a write-in candidate in more than one election. Who knows, she might even have won some of them. I'd vote for her.

I've published twenty books in genres from memoir to mystery but I never thought of doing an Austen mashup until I read Pride and Prejudice and Zombie...

The only major Jane Austen manuscript still in private hands comes up for auction on July 14th, auction house Sotheby's said on Monday....