For me, Mr. Darcy is David Rintoul, star of the 1980 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. I was 14, and I loved the idea of a man choosing a woman based on wit and "fine eyes." I found the Colin Firth version excessively modernized, but I was (and am) older than the intended audience.

A quick check of the IMDB shows that Pride and Prejudice films are made every 10-18 years. There's a British TV series in 1938, a film in 1940, 1958, 1967, my favorite in 1980, Colin Firth in 1995, and the more recent films mentioned in the article.

Every generation a new group "discovers" Jane Austen, a new round of films is made, and a new group of 14-year-old girls reads the books. I don't mind the marketing around it, that's just how everything is marketed in our culture today. I don't try to overanalyze why we all like the books so much; they just have some universal truths. I hope that young girls who discover them through this latest round enjoy them as much as I do.

Freedom is a frightening thing. We all have times when we feel like running from responsibility. It's one of the "big four" existential crises: mortality, meaninglessness, loneliness, and freedom. Sometimes, literally and figuratively, the corset appeals. But fantasy is not the same as real life. The same women (or girls) dreaming of their empire-waisted predecessors may also be quite happy with their independent and freedom-filled lives (but maybe just wish that it occasionally came with more silk and lace). Fantasy is not always about what we actually want to live. Sometimes it's about what we know we don't want but still get a thrill out of vicariously experiencing. And I think the fact that this fantasy all takes place with a healthy dose of wit and social commentary is not entirely lost on most readers, just on most Hollywood scriptwriters (who seem singularly allergic to that type of character, unless it's a cop popping off one-liners down the barrel of a gun).

And speaking of Hollywood habits, how seriously irritating is it that every biopic seems to have to center itself around a love story of some sort, even when that story isn't central to the main narrative arch of the actual person's life, and even if facts have to be stretched and warped beyond the point of believability to make it work? This doesn't just happen to biopics about women, either. /A Beautiful Mind/ comes to mind as a film that did the same type of thing with a male protagonist (whose relationship to his wife was idealized to a ridiculous degree, especially if you know anything about his actual life). Sometimes I find myself watching an action movie wishing that the scriptwriters had just dispensed entirely with the incredibly dull and predictable female character who has clearly been thrown in to add a love story element and draw in the couples crowd. Sometimes I feel the same about biopics and their unnecessary (male or female) romantic interests. You'd think some variation on "boy-meets-girl" was the only plot anyone ever cared to watch.

On a side note, I agree completely with the author who said that Darcy would have been a bore (though that same author's statements about modern men seemed ... um ... cringe-worthy). Who wants the "perfect" partner? There's nothing to learn from, no struggles to share, no give-and-take to grow from. I don't want a partner who expects me to be some sort of ideal, either. Blech. Who needs the pressure.

People who would like to romanticize Austen would do well to remember the marriage of Charlotte Lucas to Mr. Collins for reasons of financial security. The clear-eyed Charlotte understood her position. I believe no Austen character reveals more about the horrors of a marriage of convenience and Austen's possible feelings about such a compromise. Charlotte Lucas married for security and Jane Austen no doubt decided that she need not, but they had much the same attitude.

Do people still marry for security? I suspect that they do. This is dreadful of course because we should all marry for love, shouldn't we? For modern women finding either is not necessarily easy. Not only are there no Darcys. Sometimes there are no grownups.

By the way, Anne Hathaway is completely miscast as Austen. She really belongs in an Audrey Hepburn biopic.

Love and marriage, the song says, go together like a horse and carriage. I guess that means that the love comes first, but that on the first steep hill the horse is soon whipped until it collapses and eventually the wheels fall off.

Jane Austen was a very practical woman and was chiefly concerned with financial security. Marrying an obnoxious creep and becoming a breeding machine was not her ideal situation, and this is why she jilted Harris Bigg-Wither, who quickly married another woman and fathered ten children, long since dead, while Austen stayed single and parented a handful of novels that may live eternally.

However she didn't think women should marry for love outside of their social class and strongly disapproved of elopements, sexual entanglements, and irregular marriages. It is very difficult to locate Jane Austen in her novels, but clearly all of her heroines, except maybe Emma Woodhouse, are part of her.

Just as well she didn't marry, really, because if she had, probably no one would ever have heard of her.

The publishers of "Dear Jane Austen: A Heroine's Guide to Life and Love" sent me a review copy, and it looks embarrassingly bad. I think we need to snap out of the 19th century worldview, and this current wave of Austen-philia isn't really doing much for that.

Persuasion mournful? Hardly. The film was subtle, erotic and restrained. This story has the most interesting hero of the Austen novels. He has actually done something rather than manage inherited wealth.

In response to Mireya, I wanted to clarify that I didn't mean that the recent film version of Persuasion was "mournful" in a bad way. I thought it captured some of the sadness of what I think is Austen's saddest book (and my favorite, actually) very beautifully.

Thanks everyone for such thoughtful letters...

Best,

Rebecca