Mr. Darcy’s Ten Thousand a Year
I want to understand the fascination with Jane Austen&#x27;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&#x27;t read any of Austen&#x27;s books, but I think I&#x27;ll need to.<p>(1) &quot;Everyone admires Jane Austen. Add my name to the list. To me she seems the best novelist of all time. I&#x27;m interested in how things work. When I read most novels, I pay as much attention to the author&#x27;s choices as to the story. But in her novels I can&#x27;t see the gears at work. Though I&#x27;d really like to know how she does what she does, I can&#x27;t figure it out, because she&#x27;s so good
that her stories don&#x27;t seem made up. I feel like I&#x27;m reading a description of something that actually happened.&quot;  -- <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;heroes.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;heroes.html</a><p>(2) &quot;One of the reasons Jane Austen&#x27;s novels are so good is that she read them out loud to her family. That&#x27;s why she never sinks into self-indulgently arty descriptions of landscapes, or pretentious philosophizing. (The philosophy&#x27;s there, but it&#x27;s woven into the story instead of being pasted onto it like a label.) If you open an average &#x27;literary&#x27; novel and imagine reading it out loud to your friends as something you&#x27;d written, you&#x27;ll feel all too keenly what an imposition that kind of thing is upon the reader.&quot; -- <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;desres.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;desres.html</a><p>(3) &quot;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.&quot; -- <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;hp.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;hp.html</a><p>(4) &quot;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&#x27;t all equivalent, not by a long shot. And that&#x27;s why less popular languages, like Jane Austen&#x27;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.&quot; -- <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;iflisp.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;iflisp.html</a><p>(5) &quot;Good design is suggestive. Jane Austen&#x27;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.&quot; -- <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;taste.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;paulgraham.com&#x2F;taste.html</a>