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In fact, according to a recent tweet from the Comedy Central writer, he wants to make his feelings clear that "Jane Austen does not write love stories."
He's not completely wrong. Jane Austen was funny.
Author Gwen C. Katz was scrolling through Twitter, reading a thread about members of marginalized groups advocating for more work written by marginalized individuals. Of course, it went haywire — especially when a man just had to jump in to assure others that he was every bit as capable of writing an accurate female character as any woman.
"I think writers should be able to write from any perspective as long as they can pull it off. It takes research, skill, and creativity, but if a good writer can't do those things, he/she isn't a good writer, right?" he wrote. "My book is a first-person [point-of-view] and the [main character] is a woman. I'm definitely not a woman. But it works because I was able to pull it off. I reject someone saying I couldn't write a female [main character] because I'm a male, because, well, I just did. It's called writing."
Our most popular promotion was a summer one: buy two books, get one free. Romance readers loved it. One afternoon, an older woman filled up a milk crate with books and told me as she paid that it was her "favorite day of the year."
Our stockroom guy, who liked parachute pants, muttered "loser" when she left. I wasn't surprised. I wouldn't be surprised if someone said it to me today, nearly 20 years later. Romance novels have been labeled as bad, stupid, insipid, and for "losers" since long before parachute pants existed.
And it's even better with a classic novel, right? But classics can sometimes be ... kind of funny.
In 1926, The New York Times described Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" as "a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame."