Jane Austin - her biography

Jane Austen's writings have always appealed to me for the historical era that she writes about, giving me a wonderful view of life in the late 1700s. I love Pride and Prejudice, both book and movie. I was surprised to read of its popularity among the Saints, and then realized just how true what they say of Austen's morality in her writings and the modesty in her female dresses. I had not thought of that myself

Why Jane Austen appeals to LDS women
Angela Lankford - 21 hours ago
source: LDS Living
When author Howard F. Clarke published a re-formatted version of the Jane Austen biography, Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters, a Family Record, he discovered that book sales in Salt Lake City, Utah surpassed sales in all the other U.S. cities by a ratio of 8 to 1.
This unusual spike in sales caught Clarke’s interest, so he contacted Aspen Anderson, the Utah Regional Coordinator of the Jane Austen Society of North America to find the answer.
Anderson told Clarke she thought the reason for these statistics was largely based on a matter of morals. The relationship between the morals found in Jane Austen novels and the values of the LDS Church may in fact have largely influenced the sale of the biography in Salt Lake City with its 60 percent LDS population.
“Jane Austen’s society and the way that it was reflected in her writings reveal a time of manners and morals that are not present today in most of our society,” Clarke said, “except for in special groups like the Mormon ladies who adhere to nobility and moral standards handed down from parents that is different from the ideals of most of society.”
Although written in the early 1800s, the values present in Austen’s characters are similar to the values that LDS women strive for today. These similarities in characteristic values are what draw LDS women to Austen’s novels. Leslie Johns, an LDS fan of Jane Austen, believes that “Austen’s novels represent LDS culture in a way that transports the LDS woman’s experience today into a similar setting as a woman’s experience in Austen’s day.”