Thomas Langlois Lefroy
In 1796, Lefroy began a flirtation with English novelist Jane Austen, who was a friend of an older female relative. Jane Austen wrote two letters to her sister Cassandra mentioning "Tom Lefroy", and some have suggested that it may have been he whom Austen had in mind when she invented the character of Mr. Darcy in "Pride and Prejudice", as the courtship between Tom Lefroy and Jane Austen took place over the year or so that "Pride and Prejudice" was written. In his 2003 biography, "Becoming Jane Austen", Jon Spence suggests that Jane Austen actually used her and Tom LeFroy's personalities as the models for Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, but not in an expected way. Spence suggests that Jane Austen used Tom Lefroy's more gregarious personality as the model for the novel's heroine Elizabeth Bennet, and her own measured demeanor was used as the model for the male protagonist, Mr. Darcy. So while the exact influence of Tom Lefroy on "Pride and Prejudice" continues to be debated, it does seem certain that his presence in Austen's life is in some way reflected in the novel.
Jane Austen in popular culture
The Iranian writer Azar Nafisi recalled teaching Austen secretly in Iran in the 1990s (in the Islamic Republic of Iran Austen is banned as a "degenerate" Western writer) to a group of teenage girls who loved Austen's stories which feature women who fall in love with men who are worthy of their affections, which was so different from their own lives. Nafisi noted in the Islamic Republic of Iran where wife-beating is legal, "love is forbidden, banished from the public sphere" and sex is "violently suppressed", her students fell in love with an author whose books feature female "rebels" who defiantly say "no" to "silly mothers", "incompetent fathers" and a "rigidly orthodox society", and moreover get away with it. An American academic who went on "Radio Times" web broadcast to talk about Austen recalled being besieged with callers of an Asian background. One Iranian woman, living in the United States, called in to say she had first read Austen after her teenage daughter brought home "Sense and Sensibility", which made her cry as she had experienced nothing like this in her own culture, where dating is forbidden and marriages are arranged. Another caller was a Chinese woman whose first Austen book was "Pride and Prejudice", which she read in translation after the ban in China on Austen had been lifted after the end of the Cultural Revolution, saying she nothing read anything so moving and romantic before. The Chinese woman added after seeing all of the violence and horror of the Cultural Revolution when the streets of China were soaked with human blood, so many lives were ruined, and so many had behaved so badly that reading "Pride and Prejudice" she gave her hope in humanity again.