About six years ago to mark the publication of my novel, Ladies Coupe, there was a small book event in Delhi. Given that I knew exactly about one and a half persons in the capital, my editor, then at Penguin India, hastened to pad up the guest list by calling several fellow authors. One author declining said, "Anyway, my colleague will be attending. He thinks she is an Austen, Allende and Atwood combo!"

Later, my editor said in a bemused fashion, "I am not sure if that Austen reference was entirely complimentary!"
I knew what she meant. Jane Austen is very seldom referred to as a hallmark of great writing. In almost all countries, the literary establishment is a male bastion and so, the fact that writing by a woman is considered perhaps not that important or expansive or deep enough as compared to male writing is a bane women writers have to live with.
Though new to the world of letters then, I already knew that the literary world very often dismissed women writers as inconsequential if their works appealed more to women than men. And ordinary women unfettered by academic presumptions or baggage were bottom of the heap, so to speak.

Austen was to experience this time and again. With the publication of Sense and Sensibility, her book received just two reviews both loaded with 'masculine kindness, boredom and routine condescending praise'. When Pride and Prejudice appeared, the first three reviews were replete with pleased yawns of approval. Austen, whose identity was still unknown to the literary establishment, had to endure the mixed pleasure of seeing her novel become fashionable and live with the indignity of being told of a celebrated man of letters who is reported to have said, "I should like to know who the author is, for it is much too clever to have been written by a woman."
Last June, I was in Chawton in Hampshire. Almost 200 years ago, Austen, her mother and sisters, Cassandra and Martha, had come to live in a cottage provided for them by her brother, Edward. Now called 'Jane Austen's House', the cottage is a fascinating museum with daguerreotypes, topaz crosses, manuscripts, tea caddies and furniture. However, such places seldom stop at the literary or personal memorabilia. And so visitors are subject to both the morbid and the disturbingly intimate. From a lock of the novelist's hair to the washstand used by her.