In a nutshell, I have not read Pride and Prejudice, Harry Potter, The Luminaries, Lord of the Rings or Fifty Shades of Grey. (That's a pretty spectacular list, I must say.) This post was originally written for a different blog but being that "content re-purposing" is the in thing, I present it here. A friend was reading some fiction I’d written the other day and after telling me what she did like about it, commented, “But you’re no Jane Austen.” I believe this is the book she was reading. I once read a Jane Austen. It was Emma. It was read under duress at university. I consider myself a person of not massively low intelligence, but it took three reads to get my head around it. Interestingly, that paper was not only my first and only complete Jane Austen experience, but my first and only experience of analysing English literature. I did get an A but not without suffering a degree of depression as a result. Yes, I gained an appreciation for some things (Elizab...