Jane Austen as chick- lit...

Jane Austen's novels have been repackaged as chick-lit to reflect our modern conception of her as a romantic novelist. But her world is less comforting than we think, argues Laura Thompson...

"...Kingsley Amis thought so, too. In 1946 he wrote to his great friend Philip Larkin that he had finished reading Pride and Prejudice and thought it "rather nasty, on the whole". It would be a brave man who dared to say that today. He might find himself drowned in a vat of skinny lattes. Yet Amis, for all that his judgment is typically yah-boo-sucks, came far closer than we do to the truth about Jane Austen. Our vision of her - lazy and oddly sentimental - simply edits out all the nasty stuff. Austen's morality, toughness and cynicism are vanishing into the air, leaving nothing but a few eloquent phrases and a pair of drenched breeches..."