An incomplete list of things Jane Austen disliked.

It appears that Jane Austen found many things tiresome. Here are a few things this writer did not prefer:

Bath

Apparently she even fainted when informed that she was going to have to move there. Not only did she dislike Bath, describing it as “all vapor, shadow, smoke & confusion,” but she didn’t get any writing done there, a devastating blow for any city.

The name “Richard”

Famously, in the opening lines of Northanger Abbey, Austen takes a little dig at the name “Richard,” writing “[Catherine’s] father was a clergyman, without being neglected, or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard—and he had never been handsome.” In the annotated edition, David M. Shapard notes that Austen echoes her dislike of the name in a 1796 letter, writing “Mr. Richard Harvey’s match is put off, till he has got a Better Christian name, of which he has great Hopes.” Shapard adds that she “never uses the name for a speaking character in her novels,” but there is no obvious reason for her aversion. “It may have been an inside joke among her family, or at least with her sister (the recipient of the letter), though that cannot fully explain why she should include the joke in a work intended for publication. One commentator [F. B. Pinion] speculates that the popularity during this period of Shakespeare’s Richard III, whose title character is a monster of iniquity, may have created a general animosity toward the nam

Evangelicals

In a 1809 letter to her sister Cassandra, Austen wrote “I do not like the Evangelicals.” (But by 1814, she had changed her mind, writing to her niece Fanny Knight that “I am by no means convinced that we ought not all to be Evangelicals, & am at least persuaded that they who are so from Reason & Feeling, must be happiest & safest.”)

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