Rachel Brownstein is a professor and fan of Jane Austen.

"Obsessed with sentimental nostalgia and the self-congratulatory pleasures of repetition, real profits, and ideal lovers and breasts, twenty-first-century Jane-o-mania has come a long way from the novels, and for the most part has even lost them. But even in its silliness the fascination with the novelist retains I think a tiny kernel of the old Janeite knowledge that Austen-land is a place where translating human worth and human relationships into cash is criticized, and the truth gets told and trusted, and good people look for real civility and love, a rootedness, relatedness, and belonging that is more enviable than wealth and manners. Jane-o-mania, in its wrongheadedness and banality, reveals our own inadequacies: stupidity and ignorance, arrogance and greed, the qualities Jane Austen mocked."

— Rachel Brownstein, Why Jane Austen?