Happy birthday, Jane

"Why not seize the pleasure at once, how often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparations."
--- Jane Austen

Yesterday was Jane Austen's 237th birthday.

   Many years ago, I visited her grave in Winchester Cathedral. It was a moving experience, to realise that all that was mortal of Jane lay beneath my feet, the closest I would ever be to her physical self. Yet through her novels, she has become immortal; what we know of her is there in her writing.
    Films have been made and books have been written about her life and the puzzles and conundrums posed by it.   Why did she not marry? What was she really like ( as evidence is often contradictory)? What did she die of?
   To the last two questions, I'd have to answer It doesn't matter.
   To the first, I'd also have to answer, It doesn't matter, but also, that she was wise enough not to.
   She knew herself and her talent well enough to know that marriage and children were not for her. Marriage and children would have deprived the world of her genius, and we, her readers, would be the poorer for it.
  Happy birthday, Jane.