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Literary Twitter is all in a tizzy, and we couldn't be more delighted, because the burns are piping hot, and the subject of the controversy is novelist extraordinaire Jane Austen.

On Friday, the Washington Postran an essay about the fact that Jane Austen never married, despite the fact that marriage and courtship were her main subjects in books like Pride and Prejudiceand Emma. But the ~scandal~ really got going after the Post tweeted out the piece on Sunday.

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Based on a cache of journals and letters, the author represents Austen as a woebegone "spinster" who somehow managed to write classics about love despite lacking experience in marriage herself. But as Twitter users pointed out, a writer does not need first-hand knowledge of a subject to write about it masterfully.

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Tweet may have been deleted

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Fantasy and science fiction writers really took the objection to the next level, by applying the article's observation -- that Austen did not write about what she experienced -- to their own slightly more out-of-this-world work.

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Others pointed out that, given Austen's life and work, she might not have felt *quite* the despair at being unmarried that the Post'sauthor suggests.

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Tweet may have been deleted

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And then there were the straight-up literary burns.

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Tweet may have been deleted

Woe to the person who dares f*ck with Jane Austen fans on Twitter.

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