Jane Austen Guide to Life: Thoughtful Lessons For The Modern Woman

Jane Austen has become our patron saint of romance, our goddess of happy endings. Her name is synonymous with romantic sighs, period costumes, and the ideal of what love should be. But if she could give us advice about life and love, what would she tell us? What would she make of Match.com, of our Real Housewives, or of our obsession with finding The One?

Austen’s stories give us relationship advice that still works today, but her life offers us so much more wisdom than just that pertaining to love. In our fame-obsessed culture, it’s refreshing to think that Austen preferred to remain anonymous. Ironically, Jane Austen—master of love stories—never married and can teach us something about being single. She also endured many painful circumstances and managed them with grace and humor.

In this light biography and guide, author Lori Smith surmises about Austen’s sensible advice for twenty-first-century women—on everything from living our dreams, being a woman of substance, finding a good man, managing money, and much more.

As such an astute student of human nature, Austen can teach us an awful lot about ourselves and about what it means to live well.

 

Lori Smith is an adorer of Jane Austen and a member of the Jane Austen Society of North America. She feels connections to Austen on many levels—as a writer, a single woman, an Anglican, and as someone struggling with a mysterious chronic illness. She is the author of A Walk with Jane Austen, which received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. Smith’s writing has also appeared in Washington Post Book World, Publishers Weekly, Beliefnet.com, Skirt! and Today’s Christian Woman. Lori lives in Northern Virginia with her sweet but stubborn English lab, Bess. Visit her online at www.writerlorismith.com or at the Jane Austen Quotes blog, www.austenquotes.com.