The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After

Richard Beck echoes Elizabeth Kantor, who made the link between Austen and the self-help genre:

Austen doesn’t do much out-and-out moralising—certainly not as much as Dickens or Eliot. Her irony leaves a lot of room for argument about a particular character’s habits and actions. But the necessity of making the judgements, of thinking and talking them through, could not be more explicit, nor more timely. Our cultural climate is dominated, in part, by two forms of entertainment which only make sense in the context of constant social judgement. One is the self-help book, which asks readers to judge themselves. The other is reality television, where the viewing pleasure comes from judging the people on screen. Jane Austen could not be a better fit.