Jane Austen's Guide to Life

Jane Austen has become our patron saint of romance, our goddess of happy endings. Her name is synonymous with romantic sighs, period costumes, and the ideal of what love should be. But if she could give us advice about life and love, what would she tell us? What would she make of Match.com, of our Real Housewives, or of our obsession with finding The One?Austens stories give us relationship advice that still works today, but her life offers us so much more wisdom than just that pertaining to love. In our fame-obsessed culture, its refreshing to think that Austen preferred to remain anonymous. Ironically, Jane Austenmaster of love storiesnever married and can teach us something about being single. She also endured many painful circumstances and managed them with grace and humor. In this light biography and guide, author Lori Smith surmises about Austens sensible advice for twenty-first-century womenon everything from living our dreams, being a woman of substance, finding a good man, managing money, and much more.As such an astute student of human nature, Austen can teach us an awful lot about ourselves and about what it means to live well.