Let me start with a confession: I’m a British man in my late 20s, have a literature degree and consider myself a feminist—but until summer 2018, I had never read a Jane Austen novel. Or a Charlotte Bronte novel. Or, indeed, an Emily Bronte novel.
A lazy holiday forced me, finally, to confront the gender gap in my reading history. I found a copy of Pride and Prejudice in the house where I was staying, and decided “not really liking 19th century literature” was no longer an excuse. I’d read a fair chunk of Dickens, after all.
I was lost to my fellow vacationers for the next two days, delighting in Austen’s peerless prose.
