Hi, I’m Amy McDaniel, and this is my first post! In my HTMLGiant audition tape (no longer extant), I staged an argument with someone about Jane Austen. Since it got me this far, I thought I’d start with her.

There are lots of people I like who don’t like Jane Austen, and they can be annoying about it, but the real trouble is the people, of whom there are at least 12, who like Jane Austen for weird reasons and then write their own sequels, like Mr. Darcy’s Diary: A Novel, The Private Diary of Mr. Darcy: A Novel, Darcy and Elizabeth: Nights and Days at Pemberley. (If only it were 120 Nights of Pemberley.) The name for this particularly legitimized fan-fiction is Austeniana, a word perhaps even uglier than the thing it means. This has all already been much-bemoaned by right-thinking thinkers. But I want to think harder than they did. READ MORE >