I believe that Jane Austen endures because she was happy and confident, and wrote with a humour that presupposes universal ideals long abandoned by most modern societies: the purpose of life is to be happy; human relationships end only with life; and, for Jane and her peers, eighteenth century England was simply the best place—ever. She can laugh at her England because she is amused by her world, the world of an English Christian, with no cloud of existential self-doubt or insuperable guilt over relentless images of world-wide suffering. She is undisturbed by the uncertainties of terrorism, Freud, global warming, or getting into prep school. She is alive, living and writing in the moment which she believed—beyond doubt—to be the best of times and places, unquestionably created by a God, who—if not actually English—certainly viewed those of the green and pleasant land as his chosen people: Napoleon was vanquished; Iron Bridge Gorge triumphant; and, the rights of and opportunities for the ordinary Englishman surpassed anything in history. The rules of law and reason united to create a complacency in the English mind that requires a great reach for us to imagine, much less comprehend. It was the England of Reynolds, Newton, Faraday, Byron, Maxwell, Storr, Edgeworth (Richard Lovell), Wedgwood, Fielding (Henry), Gibbon, White, Turner, Priestly, Scott (Walter), Gainsborough, Dryden, Churchill (Charles), Wellington, Fielding (Henry), Händel, Hogarth, Walpole, Vanbrugh, Burney (Charles), Disraeli (Isaac), Burke, Pope, Garrick, Adams, Jenner, and—yes—Moser, LeBrun, Merian, Kaufmann, Cavendish (Georgiana), Fielding (Sarah), Wollstonecraft, Herschel, Burney (Fanny), Siddons, Behn, Bateman and Daughters, Heywood, Scott (Sarah), Sommerville, Edgeworth (Maria), Montagu (Elizabeth), Montagu (Mary Wortley), Churchill (Sarah Jennings)—and, Austen. Not only was England handsome, clever, and rich, but—to a degree unparalleled in recorded history—women shared in the benefits conferred by those blessings. Our failure to understand and appreciate the lives and times of “our ladies” is—in my view—not only to ignore and, thus, be ignorant of several centuries of English literature, but to be blinded to the intrinsic radiance of its brightest star.