This was not a good book. I'm not sure if it was the incongruity of using principles from Jane Austen to justify very modern sexual behaviors or if it was the fact that a good amount of information about Austen's books was wrong (the Crawfords came to the neighborhood of Mansfield Park to visit their half-sister NOT their aunt. And Henderson repeatedly accuses Willoughby's wife of being "bitchy" which is unfairly harsh).

I'm also 90% positive that the majority of the "real life" examples were made up or heavily edited to fit the principle it was meant to illustrate. Not that it mattered since most of the examples didn't really make sense anyways.


I would not recommend this book at all. ( )

Not gender neutral, alas – full of advice for picking up Mr. Darcy but nothing about finding Ms. Bennett. Any of them. Author Lauren Henderson is English and found herself mystified by American dating advice, which she feels is much more complicated than the European version and lacking in common sense. Well and good, but Jane Austen’s Guide to Dating has a lot in common with any number of other dating guides: there are sections on Dos and Don’ts, Men to Avoid (with short little lists on how to identify them), capsule questionnaires for finding the Man You Like (for example, is his Ideal Move Star Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, Katie Holmes, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Zeta-Jones, or Pamela Anderson?), and so forth. A redeeming feature is Ms. Henderson, like Jane Austen, spends a lot of time pointing out that character flaws do not all reside on the Y-chromosome and (for example) Pride and Prejudice is as much about Elizabeth Bennett’s prejudice as FitzWilliam Darcy’s pride (the episode in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies where Elizabeth discovers her error and gives herself The Seven Cuts of Shame across the abdomen shortly after high-kicking Darcy so hard that his head shatters a marble mantelpiece comes to mind for some reason). Nevertheless, not really useful unless you know the object of your affections has read a copy or you are addicted to All Things Jane. ( )

After reading Jane Austen's whole work, much like a Nicholas Sparks fan, I wanted to read more books from her which as we all know is an impossibility. So while looking for some extended reading on her characters I came across this title. Most part of the critics that I read said the book was supposed to be a relationship guide with Jane Austen's characters as guides for real life relationships with funny and witty examples from Lauren. I picked it up because, like I said before, I wanted further reading on Jane's work and in fact, one can find in the book some pretty good insights on this matter, but overall I didn't find it one bit funny. And more, after many pages reading the author criticizing dating guides, I thought rather ironic that she had written one. So after fishing this book the conclusion I came to is that I should move to the USA in order to get a date, where guys play by the rules.
( )

A fun read; occasionally I found the advice inconsistent (for example, in one place she says follow your instincts rather than rules on when you should respond to a person’s advances; in another she lays out Rules You Should Follow), but overall she’s got some good basic common sense ideas, and I rarely thought she was stretching the point when using Austen characters as examples. ( )

A disappointment: I’d read a number of novels by Lauren Henderson, and had assumed that this was a work of fiction. It is, in fact, a dating guide – not something for which I have a lot of use! Although, as to being a work of fiction: just how likely is it that the author really knows all those couples who so perfectly illustrate every relationship example she presents? This one’s going straight to Oxfam, I’m afraid. ( )