Jane Austen's latest fan

How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!
Jane Austen

My favourite author was just elevated to some political eminence when it was revealed that President Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan, is an Austen aficionada. She reads "Pride & Prejudice" yearly!

This piece of very important information became public knowledge in a thread on Marty Peretz's Spine blog, here. This sensational bit of news, was discreetly inserted between discussions of Shylock, Derrida, TS Eliot, and suchlike, you know, the usual high-brow topics quarreled over on The New Republic, and immediately provoked waves of protestations and dire prognostications. The informer was poster K2K, a citizen of the Republic of Pemberley, who appeared to derive much relish from the shock waves of disbelief she unleashed. Here is what she said, somewhere on p. 2 of the blog post:

05/11/2010 - 1:15am EDT | K2K

NYT reports that, Elena Kagan is also "the literature lover who reread Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” every year. "

"But no sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she hardly had a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes."

As is my wont, I wanted to verify this information since things too good to be true have to be double checked for authenticity. And indeed, another source reported the same:

She was the razor-sharp newspaper editor and history major at Princeton who examined American socialism, and the Supreme Court clerk for a legal giant, Thurgood Marshall, who nicknamed her “Shorty.” She was the reformed teenage smoker who confessed to the occasional cigar as she fought Big Tobacco for the Clinton administration, and the literature lover who reread Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” every year.

When asked what she thought about the nominee, Jane Austen decorously said:

“Everything united in her; good understanding, correct opinions, knowledge of the world and a warm heart”