''Every few years, I reread a Jane Austen novel, and I’m not alone,
according to “Among the Janeites,” Deborah Yaffe’s playful exploration
of Austen obsession. In fact, if I were a true Janeite, I’d be
handstitching my empire-waisted gown and perfecting my country dancing,
and I’d enjoy it, as Yaffe does when she decides to go all out for a
Jane Austen Society of North America (Jasna) convention. What I might
not enjoy are the members’ competing opinions about who Jane was and
what she would be thinking about every little issue, personal and
political. And the Janeites are not all women: Yaffe interviews quite a
few men. Perhaps the most peculiar is Arnie Perlstein, a conspiracy
theorist convinced that Austen buried in her apparently conventional
novels a “radical critique of 19th-century patriarchy” that he has
“spent more than 15,000 completely uncompensated hours devising.” Other
Janeites don’t need compensation. Among the most fascinating is Sandy
Lerner, one of the founders of Cisco..''
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