Why Jane Austen remains an icon for so many young women
250 YEARS OF JANE AUSTEN (6/6). The subject of a real craze on TikTok, the English writer, born in 1775, continues to inspire many women of Generation Z. Why this craze? Perhaps because she offers them a role model who is the opposite of the “trad wife,” speculates the Italian weekly “L'Espresso.”
She wrote six perfect novels that Virginia Woolf [1882-1941] loved for “ their depth, their beauty, their complexity.” In them, she narrated the unremarkable lives of housewives for whom marriage was always the least bad option; she, on the other hand, never married. She spoke of these young girls who grew up dreaming of love, but for whom the main thing was to ensure their financial security.
Yet reading Jane Austen is still a rite of passage for many women today. Exactly 250 years after her birth, she remains surprisingly contemporary. How is it that this writer, who throughout her (short) life spoke of the need for young women of her time to “make a good marriage,” speaks to women today?
“I love Jane Austen’s lucidity and irony when she talks about the place of women in society. Before her, there was the sentimental novel, where each character 'embodied' their own feelings. Jane Austen, on the other hand, immerses us in everyday life, which allows us to identify completely with these stories – even when they are banal, even when they take place in a society far removed from our own,” analyzes Olga Campofreda, young author of a novel with an Austenian title
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