Well, I’m vacuuming mad, again, and Jane Austen is at the center.

How mad is vacuuming mad? Check out my post V.S. Naipaul vs. the World, and you’ll see the last time I was vacuuming mad. That is, until now.

This week Sandra Grayson shared Katrin Bennhold‘s NY Times article about Jane Austen concerning a proposal from The Women’s Room to add Jane Austen’s face to the British ten pound note. This follows the exit of the only other woman on British money (save the queen), prison reformer Elizabeth Fry. Bennhold puts forward a thoughtful article, examining everything from the structure of world banking and its near-exclusion of women to the accessibility of Twitter for both the empowerment and endangerment of women.

My only quibble with the article is Bennhold’s assertion that Jane Austen is “perhaps best known for her musings on 19th-century romance.” In my book, Austen’s musings detail not romance but love and friendship. And honor and loyalty and, yes, the bonds of matrimony. Romance, or at least the pink velvet heart-shaped candy box variety, has little to do with it. In Austen’s books, love trumps romance.

Who doesn’t love Jane Austen?

Surprisingly, quite a few.

Although the campaign to add Jane Austen to the face of money was ultimately successful, the aftermath was disheartening—readers responded to Austen proponents with threats of mutilation, rape, humiliation, death.

Hate mongers need very little persuasion, it seems, to spread their gender prejudice. Am I just getting old, or are we losing our moral sensibility? For do we have the poor in character always with us? I was earlier seized with this same sense of disquiet following the withdrawal from university of Kelsey Hough because of her fellow students’ unwillingness to curb their peanut consumption. I wrote about a vitriolic backwater backwash harsh enough to flay the skin right off a self-respecting idealist.Comment after comment of hurtful suggestions lacking any sense of, well, sensibility.

Sigh. In the face of all this public display of rage, I wonder what Jane would do? There, I think I’ve just found my new mantra: What would Jane do?

I’ll have what she’s having.