Pride and Prejudice at 200: Why Jane Austen has always left me cold Perhaps the problem was being unable to relate. As the nerdy daughter of working-class parents, the idea of focussing one's entire being on the decision of whether and whom to marry seemed slightly out of step with life as I knew it. From an early age it had been drummed into me to work hard, put myself through university, and get a doctorate. According to my mother I confidently declared, aged just three, that I would never get married and never have children. OK, so the first one turned out not to be true. Fripperies like dances and Darcy just did not appeal. Even now, understanding the social context of the books - an insight into women's lives where the wrong marriage could make or break your financial future - they are hardly more tempting. The essential lack of romance in Austen's writing is due to the fact that the only 'choice' a woman like her could exercise at that time was in making a marriage. Modern audiences may dream of Colin Firth in skintight trousers, but the reality was far more hard-headed and motivated entirely by social constraints. Yeah, yeah, the Bennets pined for love matches unlike their parents' joyless union, but that was just the afterthought of icing on a grimly practical cake. Gauze-lensing this year's fashionable young actress in ringlets does not change the fact that Austen is writing survival stories, not love stories. In which case give me some good old-fashioned crime or horror any day. I like my nubile heroines to face a danger somewhat more pressing than mouldering with the other spinsters in a Hampshire cottage. I loved Clueless, obvs, as did everyone else - but that was more Alicia Silverstone's doing. And years later found to my delight that the remix Pride & Prejudice & Zombies was the first Austen I could bear to read to the last page - actual danger! Actual womanly grit! But if the metaphorical Radio 4 desert island ever did make its appearance, Austen's books are the last I'd choose to nestle alongside seven life-changing music tracks and the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible. Admitting this caused one of my biggest professional embarrassments - I was outlining my distaste for All Things Austen to a radio producer while working on a recent series about anonymity (Austen's first few books were functionally anonymous, credited only to "A Lady"). Little did I realise the Austen fan and literature professor John Mullan was already listening in from a studio on the other side of the country. And he hates zombies. Oops. He forgave me... I think. Confession that Austen leaves you cold is a one-way ticket to ridicule, as I found out when I once wrote a letter to the Times in defence of John Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men being chosen for a school's curriculum over Sense & Sensibility. I was dissed by no less than Chris Woodhead who at least swatted the backhanded compliment that I'd managed to form my opinion in complete sentences using real words. Yes, you can still have a decent grasp of language even without swooning over Empire-waist dresses. But the biggest reason I have resisted Austen mania for so long has to do with its effect on grown women. I can see in my mind's eye very clearly, the posh-ish mum of someone I once knew, listless on the sofa watching endless hours of Austen adaptations and Gardener's World while her retired officer husband played virtual round-the-globe sailing on his laptop, fully oblivious to her. That for me was the modern legacy of Austen's world and one I am grateful to know I'll never inhabit. Jane Austen, you have delighted us long enough. Let the other great women writers have their time to exhibit.