This chapter examines the myth that only women read Jane Austen's novels. A carefully conducted and analyzed poll undertaken in 2008 for the Jane Austen Society of North America showed that of 4501 respondents 96% were women. The fact is that Austen emphatically did not understand herself to be a “woman's novelist” or her novels to be women's literature. Men dominated English letters at the time, and it should come as no surprise that men were Austen's first intensely enthusiastic champions. Women writers, by contrast, particularly those who reached more conspicuously for grandeur, expansiveness, or dramatic intensity in their works, were decidedly chillier about Austen's novels. If it seems self-evident to us today that women like Austen because her novels are romantic love stories, it seemed just as obvious to Reginald Farrer in 1917 that women dislike Austen because her novels were not romantic enough.