Austen has long been praised for her deft use of English in delineating her characters: Mr. Woodhouse’s “habits of gentle selfishness, and “Lydia Bennet’s “high animal spirits” clearly define the natures of their possessors even to-day. Yet, for all of the beauty and brevity, those characters thus defined are the relatively shallow, less-interesting people of the novels. There are other descriptions, I believe, that we can only correctly conceptualize if we admit, as twentieth-century thinkers, that—in the best case—we don’t understand, and, in the worst case, we misunderstand what we read. If we thoughtlessly replace eighteenth and early nineteenth century meanings with what we understand today, we lose much of the true genius of Austen’s language, the intricacy with which she delineates her characters, their relationships to and in a society long-lost, and the enduring contribution of that genius to English literature. If we listen to Mozart without any knowledge of the history and achievements of the Baroque, we can never fully appreciate his genius, the degree to which he changed music—forever—and the great gifts those contributions give us to-day. Jane Austen is the same, yet we read not with any real understanding of what she was actually saying, thinking, feeling, writing, and with little appreciation of the nature and scope of her contribution to English literature. Rather, the novels are regarded as exceptionally nice stories (I note that neither “nice” nor “exceptional” means anything even close to her use of those every-day words), external to any context in which her genius and her contribution may be appreciated, or with any accepted notion as to why her writing has persevered so uniquely over the centuries, exciting our love and admiration even through the murky lens of our ignorance.