She was such a good marketer of ideas, and at sneaking them into more palatable constructs.
The opinion you replied to frustrates me when I encounter it.
She was only doing "magical thinking" in her narratives so much as her novels are marriage comedies, and this is required.
The reality of her life was that she was incredibly uncompromising. She had to publish her early work under an androgynous pseudonym to profit from it.
She didn't marry cynically despite having opportunities to. She was a realist, and a strain of that runs through her work. There are many moments where she anticipates the great Russian realists. She managed to turn a good profit on her art in spite of her period's circumstances. She genuinely advanced the idea of who is allowed to make art, and who is allowed to profit from it.
Generally the novels have nuanced but happy endings. She was writing for an audience. She was a shrewd businessman at a time when there weren't businesswomen. In her personal life, she was genuinely uncompromising. She's a GOATed artist. You can't ask much more of a human!
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a robot suit to ride around and fight things with."
I was visiting Jane Austen's House Museum last year and it always gives me pleasure to see how wildly popular her work remains. There always seem to be tourists there visiting from all over the world. That is really heartening.
She was very innovative. Maybe even underrated as a craftsperson at the sentence level. My favourite trick that I believe she invented is slipping from prose into a soft Iambic pentameter, essentially unnoticed. Lots of people have copied that from her.
And class-pressure narratives will never not be relevant to people's lives. She's a very very humane storyteller in that respect.
I am slightly biased - she's my great aunt (x 6). Used to find that embarrassing but now I feel quite proud.
I'm not well read, and don't think I'd be able to finish any of the classics. As such I have no clue what "slipping from prose into a soft Iambic pentameter" means. I came here for the robots.
You know how in Disney movies they shift smoothly from talking to singing? It’s just like that, only instead of the bass beat to the character’s song starting to play, her ‘prose’ (think ‘non-poetry words’, aka what most people consider books to be full of) shifts smoothly into Shakespeare-like syllable emphasis patterns. Listen for the percussion notes starting about ten seconds into https://youtu.be/79DijItQXMM and imagine that instead of him bursting into musical song, he burst into chanting a limerick:
There once was a demi-god, Maui / Amazing and awesome: I’m Maui // Who stole you your fire / and made your days lighter // Yes, thank you, you’re welcome! Love: Maui
It’s a bit odd of an analogy, but limericks and “Iambic pentameter” are specific instances of an underlying language architectural thing, so it should be just enough to convey the basics of that “prose to Iambic” sentence. And: if you’ve ever watched “Much Ado About Nothing” from the mid-90s, that’s 100% Iambic.
(If you’re an English major, yes, I know, this is all wrong; it’s just a one-off popsicle-sticks context-unique mindset-conveyance analogy-bridge, not step-by-step directions to lit/ling coordinates in your field.)
English major here, and your post is great. It's not complete, of course, but you've hit everything a beginner needs to know to get over the first hump of understanding, in a way that "expert" knowledge sometimes gets in the way of communicating. I doubt the reply I was writing in my head would have been better, and probably would have been worse, so thank you for jumping in.
But (because I have to go there - and I promise getting to this paragraph wasn't the point of the compliments above), Much Adoisn't entirely in verse: the clowns - lower class, all of them (Dogberry, et al) - speak in prose. So, the next layer of the onion, for anyone who wants to pick at it, is noticing in what circumstances writers use different registers, and why. Austin does the same thing: Mr Collins speaks in flat, prosy sentences, except (if I recall correctly) when he talks about his patron, Lady Catherine de Bourgh. I think that has a subconscious effect, even on people who couldn't name an iamb, but once you pick up on it, it's one of those "ooh!" sorts of moments where you get a glimpse behind the authorial curtain.
and, yes, what you said! I vaguely recognize that from studying the written form but certainly I didn't remember it here beyond “I bet this needs a conditional or something”.
ps. I am especially proud of the unplanned field pun!
This is a great example, and not odd as an analogy at all. It surfaces something subtle.
Language architecture is really interesting, I think, for programmers who have bought into the LLM hype in any meaningful way. It's an important field to have a sense of.
Tokenizers, for example, generally have multi-syllabic tokens as their base-level, indivisible unit.
You rarely see this mentioned when LLM capability against non-coding tasks is discussed, despite it being deeply important for prose construction.
Not to mention, putting language models aside, that the vast majority of code is written in language with a logical grammar. The disciplines are highly linked.
The AI generated front page of HN posted yesterday had some generated comments in at least one of the threads that scanned and rhymed. It's clearly there in whatever model that was, and while it might just have been a confluence of having seen a specific word pair a certain distance apart in the learning data to account for the rhyming, I'm having a hard time explaining away the construction of a coherent meter.
Prose is mostly focused on describing meaning using any words that serve to do so.
Verse is more concerned with structural factors like rhythm, tonality, and structure within syllables, or within types of sound, or parts of speech. Other linguistic devices which look at details beyond the strict meaning of the words, like rhyme or many other factors (you could even use visual spacing for example) can be considered in verse.
Within verse there's the concept of iambs. I think of it as a tuple of two syllables which are said, weak-strong. Pentameter means ten syllables, and iambic means in groups of weak and strong. Most of Shakespeare is written like this. Also English naturally sounds iambic a lot of the time.
Iambic pentameter sounds like this:
I watched a bird attempt its beak upon
The end of fake too-moist baguette in vain
For it was sick of stale McDicks tossed on
It endlessly maintained its rationed pain
While others in its bobbing flock for scraps
Of birds fought for the thrill squawked on and on
Till cannibals among their kind rejoiced
To find cousins in mayonnaise so long
Normally you'd also look at rhyme structure if writing a legit Shakespearean sonnet [2] but I fired this one out as in the style of fast food. So this is technically iambic pentameter but not technically a sonnet.
Or like a particular Shakespearean sonnet [0]. Or like any of them, [1]
Minor nitpick: "pentameter" means 5 parts, and each part is an iamb in iambic pentameter, so it's 5 parts where each part is 2 syllables in a weak-strong pattern. That results in 10 syllables, but "pentameter" doesn't mean 10 syllables alone.
I don't know. All I remember from school is absolutely hating being forced to read, and understand/interpret, thing like shakespeare and Jane Austin. But then again I now like a lot of the vegetables I used to hate as a kid...
My daughter loves the classics, me, science fiction and fantasy.
_Pride and prejudice_ hits for me similar notes as those for fantasy and historical fiction, though of course it is commenting on contemporary issues with no magic (except the magic of love), alas. It’s like entering a foreign society where you may have to infer why people are acting the way they do. Now that you’re not in school, no one is forcing you to write essays on what you read, or even to understand or interpret what is going on in the narrative! Cool, huh?
She made free indirect speech [1] the cornerstone of the English language novel. She is recognized as a titanic figure. I don't know who would underrate her!
What I find strange is that people enjoy her books as romantic comedies because the world she represents is incredibly claustrophobic.
> I was visiting Jane Austen's House Museum last year and it always gives me pleasure to see how wildly popular her work remains.
I have believed for a long time that Austen is broadly popular because her works deal with issues of human relations and economic prosperity at the heart of modern, bourgeois existence. The draw is summed up in this excellent quote from the article:
> They also both, mostly, focus on characters who have enough privilege to have choices, but not enough power to escape circumstances.
That's a perceptive description of middle class life. The movie "Clueless" is an illustration of how easily Austen's insights translate to a society that is superficially very different from hers. [0]
She is although simply a joy to read. Witty remarks and well written.
"Elinor agreed with it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition". - from S&S
Who wasn't in a situtation where they felt arguing would do nothing? John Green asked: "Who doesn't want a friend as witty as Jane Austin to comment on life?
Austen's command of language and empathy for her characters is second to none. I love the hook at the end of this passage from Pride and Prejudice.
``And of this place,'' thought she, ``I might have been mistress! With these rooms I might now have been familiarly acquainted! Instead of viewing them as a stranger, I might have rejoiced in them as my own, and welcomed to them as visitors my uncle and aunt. -- But no,'' -- recollecting herself, -- ``that could never be: my uncle and aunt would have been lost to me: I should not have been allowed to invite them.'' This was a lucky recollection -- it saved her from something like regret.
There's an annual Jane Austen festival there too - it really brings people from all over the world. Very fun event even if you're just +1 to someone who's into it.
Of course! This is my favourite example, from Sense and Sensibility, because it announces itself with "burst", and that's the novel where she deploys it most:
"Elinor could sit it no longer. She almost ran out of the room, and as soon as the door was closed, burst into tears of joy, which at first she thought would never cease."
She 'tends towards Iambic' in literary criticism terminology. So it's not a strict Iambic, more like a 'soft Iambic' which is a term I can't remember if it's actually used in lit crit, or if I made it up.
You need to drop the "at" syllable, in that example (which you would do in vocal rhythms of English, then and now), for it to be a true Iambic.
There's lots of good writing on the King James Bible "tending towards" Iambic, which should be more Google-able, and her father was a preacher, so that's a likely influence there, I would speculate.
Some others I like that I remember:
"You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope." - Persuasion (I think?).
"Till this moment I never knew myself." - Sense and Sensibility again? I can't remember off the dome. That's a gorgeous strict Iambic.
There are much longer examples - whole paragraphs that close chapters of Sense and Sensibility specifically. I'll try and find the version I have notations on when I'm next around my books. She regularly slips into it to close moments of emotional crescendo - "Cursus" being the Latin term for an analogous technique, when it was more frequently used in a more stylised manner.
> "Till this moment I never knew myself." - Sense and Sensibility again? I can't remember off the dome. That's a gorgeous strict Iambic.
"Till this moment I" and "I never knew myself" would be trochaic and iambic, respectively, but they don't strictly scan when you overlay the 'I's. You can of course get them to by e.g. eliding 'moment', or adding a line break and taking '-ment' as a feminine ending, or just scanning according to the writer's idiosyncrasies.
And individual writers can be very idiosyncratic here. Shakespeare, for example, if I remember right, lets monosyllabic words occur in almost any position. Disyllabic words on the other hand can have any combination of stresses (iamb, trochee, spondee, or pyrrhic), but only if they're foot-aligned. And so on.
The field has probably evolved since I was last part of it, but I'll still recommend Kristin Hanson's work in this area: https://linguistica.sns.it/RdL/9.1/Hanson.pdf. (Actually the second time I've recommended Hanson on HN. The last time was, let's see, 6 years ago!)
+1! Hanson is one of the gold-standards on this. It is idiosyncratic, you're right - to the speaker / reader as much as the writer (is my contention with their work).
Personally, I do take 'ment' as a feminine ending there, or - more specifically - the T sound runs into the I sound when I read it, the way it would in the predominantly Italian stuff she's likely referencing.
I'm very much with Gordon Lish on Shakespeare's monosyllabic drift words - that he was educated in Latin, and integrating Germanic vocabulary into that structure relatively freely, and further analysis is almost impossibly complex. That said, there's a lot of moments in those where I'd kill to hear where the stress landed when first performed.
This specific area is really one of those "What if?" moments in literary criticism, I think - I believe it would be incredibly beneficial for the form if this was the dominant focus of critique, rather than thematic stuff. On the rare occasions I teach at universities, this is all completely new to students, which sucks - it's entirely possible to approach prose theory with the same rigour as music theory, and it seems (in the UK, at least) to be very quickly becoming a lost art!
Thankyou. Scanning those phrases, I am trying to read the cadence and understand this -- this is very much a comment to return to and ponder. Thankyou very much for answering my question, too.
I don't think equating "extremely close" with "pretending like it can" is a fair way to frame the sentiment of the comment you were replying to. Saying something is close to doing something is not the same as saying it already can.
In terms of cinema tech, it took us arguably until the early 1940s to achieve "deep focus in artificial light". About 50 years!
The last couple of years of development in generative video looks, to me, like the tech is improving more quickly than the tech it is mimicking did. This seems unsurprising - one was definitely a hardware problem, and the other is most likely a mixture of hardware and software problems.
Your complaints (or analogous technical complaints) would have been acceptable issues - things one had to work around - for a good deal of cinema history.
We've already reached people complaining about "these book spines are illegible", which feels very close to "it's difficult to shoot in focus, indoors". Will that take four or five decades to achieve, based on the last 3 - 5 years of development?
The tech certainly isn't there yet, nor am I pretending like it is, and nor was the comment you replied to. To call it close is not laughable, though, in the historical context.
The much more interesting question is: At what point is there an audience for the output? That's the one that will actually matter - not whether it's possible to replicate Citizen Kane.
Interestingly, Gemini 3 Pro Thinking clocks in at 2nd place - behind Horizon Alpha, but ahead of any actually-released model checkpoints - on the TvP Benchmark, with a score of 71.8%.
This blows Sonnet 4.5 (64.8%), GPT5.1 (58.7%) and Opus 4.1 (66.3%) away.
An example output:
'''
The cabin was cold. It smelled of pine needles and old dust. Bryan sat on the porch with a glass of scotch balanced on his knee. It was cheap scotch. He missed the good stuff, but he wasn't in Paris anymore, and he certainly wasn't in Beverly Hills.
He checked his watch. It was a bulky thing, black rubber. He checked the Glock on the table next to him. That was black, too.
"I told you," Bryan said. He wasn't talking to anyone. "I told you not to go into the woods."
He was thinking about Kim. He was always thinking about Kim. She was safe, probably. At a mall in Santa Monica. Or maybe a library. But it felt like she was gone. It always felt like she was gone.
The trees at the edge of the clearing shifted. There wasn't any wind. The air was heavy and humid, unusual for October. A bird stopped singing. Then the crickets stopped. It got very quiet.
Bryan took a sip of the scotch. It burned his throat. He liked the burn. It reminded him he was still there.
Three red dots appeared on his chest. They made a small triangle.
Bryan didn't look at them. He set the glass down on the railing. He picked up the phone. It was an old flip phone. He pressed a button.
"I don't know who you are," Bryan said into the phone. "I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money."
The leaves rustled. A shape began to form out of the empty air. It looked like heat rising off the highway in August. It was tall. Much taller than a man.
"But what I do have," Bryan said, "are a very particular set of skills."
The shape solidified. It was ugly. It had skin like a lizard and dreadlocks that looked like heavy black cables. It wore a metal mask. It made a clicking sound. Click-click-click. Like a Geiger counter.
"Skills I have acquired over a very long career," Bryan said. He stood up. His knees popped. He felt the ache in his lower back. He was getting too old for this.
The thing roared. It wasn't a human sound. It was a wet, guttural noise.
"I will look for you," Bryan said. He put the phone in his pocket. "I will find you."
The creature raised a metal gauntlet. Two jagged blades slid out. They caught the moonlight.
"And I will kill you," Bryan said.
He raised the Glock and fired twice. Pop-pop.
The creature didn't fall. It took a step forward. Green blood, thick and glowing, leaked from its shoulder. It looked like antifreeze. The creature touched the wound, then looked at its hand. It seemed surprised.
Bryan didn't wait. He moved off the porch. He moved fast for a man his age. He went left, toward the woodpile. The creature fired a blast of blue light from its shoulder. It hit the porch swing. The swing exploded. Wood splinters rained down like confetti.
Bryan rolled behind the logs. He breathed in. He breathed out. He could hear the heavy footsteps crunching the dry leaves. Crunch. Crunch.
"You're big," Bryan whispered. "That makes you slow."
He grabbed a splitting maul from the stump. It was heavy. The handle was smooth hickory.
The creature came around the woodpile. It was scanning the trees. It didn't see Bryan down low. Bryan swung the maul. He put his hips into it. He swung it like he was chopping a cord of oak.
The blade hit the creature in the knee. There was a snap. A loud, wet snap.
The thing howled. It fell onto one knee.
Bryan dropped the maul. He stepped inside the creature’s reach. He knew exactly where to hit. The throat. The armpit. The soft spot under the ribs. He hit the creature three times, hard chops with the side of his hand. It was like hitting a brick wall, but he felt something give.
The creature swung its arm back. It hit Bryan in the chest.
Bryan flew backward. He hit the dirt. The wind went out of him. He lay there for a second, staring up at the stars. They looked very far away. He wondered if Lenore was looking at the same stars. Probably not. She was probably sleeping.
He sat up. His ribs hurt. Maybe broken.
The creature was trying to stand. It was clicking again. It tapped something on its wrist. A series of red symbols started flashing. They counted down.
Bryan knew a bomb when he saw one.
"No," Bryan said.
He tackled the thing. He didn't think about it. He just did it. He grabbed the creature’s arm. He twisted the wrist mechanism. He’d seen something like it in Baghdad once. Or maybe Istanbul. The memories ran together now.
He ripped the gauntlet loose. Wires sparked. He threw it as hard as he could into the darkness of the woods.
Three seconds later, there was a flash. A boom. A shockwave that shook the pine needles from the trees.
Silence came back.
The creature lay on the ground. It was breathing shallowly. The green blood was pooling under it. It took off its mask.
The face was hideous. Mandibles. Beady eyes. It looked at Bryan. It said something, a garbled copy of Bryan's own voice.
"...good luck..."
Then it died. It just stopped.
Bryan stood up. He dusted off his pants. He walked back to the porch. The swing was gone. The railing was scorched.
His glass of scotch was still sitting there, untouched. The ice hadn't even melted.
He picked it up. He took a drink. It still tasted cheap.
He took his phone out and looked at it. No service.
"Well," he said.
He went inside the cabin and locked the door. He sat on the couch and waited for the sun to come up. He hoped Kim would call. He really hoped she would call.
An old joke that I was thinking about recently: Two local government consultants - tasked with seeing if it'd be financially beneficial to dig a new tunnel so that cars don't have to drive up and down a mountain - dig two small holes on opposite sides of the mountain then stand at either end.
The punchline, which I can't remember, is something about the two holes being, according to the two consultants, an MVP of a tunnel: "Just stand at either end of it."
When the British government invited commercial proposals for the digging of the Channel Tunnel between England and France, one man submitted a bid for only £10,000. “How can you possibly dig under the English Channel for only £10,000?” asked the project manager.
“It’s simple,” replied the low bidder. “My partner takes a spade, goes to France and starts digging. I take another spade and start digging from England. We’ll both keep digging until we meet in the middle.”
“Hm, I see. But what happens if, through a miscalculation, you two do not meet?”
“That’s even better for you!” replied the bidder enthusiastically. “In that case you will have two tunnels!”
An answer to your puzzle in another post that is locked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42498953
The "alternate" 5x5 word square that satisfies all the clues without using the words from the first grid is:
S T R I P
C H I N A
R E G A L
A T O N E
P A R E R
Breakdown of the solution:
Across
STRIP (Remove the outer layer of, perhaps) — Counterpart to SCALD.
CHINA (Region on a globe) — Counterpart to POLAR.
REGAL (Like some movie theaters; e.g., Regal Cinemas) — Counterpart to ARTSY.
ATONE (Command to a lawbreaker) — Counterpart to CEASE.
PARER (Rhyme for Tom Lehrer /'lɛrər/) — Counterpart to ERROR.
Down
SCRAP (____yard; scrapyard is a common sci-fi setting) — Counterpart to SPACE.
THETA (It goes something like this: Ꮎ) — Counterpart to CORER.
RIGOR (Feature of liturgy, often; strictness/adherence to rubrics) — Counterpart to ALTAR.
INANE (It's vacuous, in a sense) — Counterpart to LASSO.
PALER (Fino is paler than Pedro Ximénez sherry) — Counterpart to DRYER.
The grotto is unpleasant - absolutely, in my opinion, a Victorian (give or take) rich man's folly, per the Wiki.
The imagery is all faux-Mediaeval - mostly the standard utter nonsense Rosicrucian 'interpretation' of Kabbalistic symbols. It's very bullshit, edgy, Hot-Topic-Victorian silly stuff.
Except for where, at the Malkuth mark, IIRC, it opens up into a sort of temple-and-altar situation, where it is actually somewhat frightening, in the way that any secret Bacchanalian temple is, because nobody builds that sort of thing for a good reason.
My last full-time role was being in charge of product at a marketplace company. Since then I've been doing ML research full-time, funded by two novels I wrote that Penguin have published or are publishing. I'm really good at testing and shipping new ideas quickly, with a specific focus on the efficacy of new architectures.
I miss being on a team, and having project-specific focus, so if my portfolio (in the linked resume) is aligned with what you're working on, I'd love to hear from you.
The earlier stage and smaller, the better - I get the most joy from projects where I can see the impact of my research, and where I can take on genuine responsibility for my work's success or failure.
I've spent a few weeks building and using a terminal LLM client based on that RLM paper that was floating around a little while ago. It's single-conversation, with a tiny, sliding context window, and then a tool that basically fuzzy searches across our full interaction history. It's memory is 'better' than mine - but anything that is essentially RAG inherently will be.
My learning so far, to your point on memory being a limiting factor, is that the system is able to build on ideas over time. I'm not sure you'd classify that as 'self-learning', and I haven't really pushed it in the direction of 'introspection' at all.
Memory itself (in this form) does not seem to be a silver bullet, though, by any means. However, as I add more 'tools', or 'agents', its ability to make 'leaps of discovery' does improve.
For example, I've been (very cautiously) allowing cron jobs to review a day's conversation, then spawn headless Claude Code instances to explore ideas or produce research on topics that I've been thinking about in the chat history.
That's not much different from the 'regular tasks' that Perplexity (and I think OpenAI) offer, but it definitely feels more like a singular entity. It's absolutely limited by how smart the conversation history is, at this time, though.
The Memento analogy you used does feel quite apt - there is a distinct sense of personhood available to something with memory that is inherently unavailable to a fresh context window.
I think a hidden problem even if we solve memory is the curation of what gets into memory and how it is weighted. Even humans struggle with this, as it's easy to store things and forget the credibility (or misjudge the credibility) of the source.
I can envision LLMs getting worse upon being given a memory, until they can figure out how to properly curate it.
Roughly, we had Cursor software engineers record real questions they were asking models, and then had them record the PR that they made that contained the result. We then cleaned these up. That is the benchmark.
Are you able to give a sense of how many questions, which domains they were split over, and how that split looked in % terms?
As a user, I want to know - when an improvement is claimed - whether it’s relevant to the work I do or not. And whether that claim was tested in a reasonable way.
These products aren’t just expensive - it requires switching your whole workflow. Which is becoming an increasingly big ask in this space.
It’s pretty important for me to be able to understand, and subsequently, believe a benchmark - I find it really hard not to read it as ad copy where this information isn’t present.
> Like some Newcomer men. They don't feel truly masculine
until after they've given birth.
> I'm afraid, George, that giving
birth doesn't quite cut it. You ever see movies? Remember Sylvester Stallone? That beefy fellow with the headband, always had a big gun? Remember that scene in First Blood when Stallone falls off a cliff? He has this huge gash in his arm and he sews himself up. See, that's considered being a man.
> Tell you the truth, Matt, I find his movies simplistic. Why does everything have to be so complicated with you?
Later in the script the extraterrestrial references this in an unintentionally hilarious way, provoking a concerned response from IIRC his wife:
> If I wanted I could fall off
a cliff and sew myself up.
> George, have you had your
lead supplements today?
Aside from its lampshaded effect on popular US conceptions of masculinity in general, the Rambo fantasy seems to have been so popular among, uh, boys who like to cosplay as soldiers, that the knife featured in the movie became the dominant form of cosplay knife for many years, if we believe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n3QiP5LNDE. Some poorly-thought-out regulation here in Argentina has criminalized the possession of knives made to look similar, specifically having a sawblade on the back.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/FirstBlood1982 discusses some of the popular literary tropes that appear in it, including "Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene" (which affected the popular perception of Vietnam veterans such as the fictional protagonist); "Affably Evil", in a context that some people think of whenever they hear about a police manhunt on the news; "Asshole Victim", in which the most unpleasant person coincidentally suffers great misfortune; "Break the Haughty", in which the arrogant sheriff turns out to be a coward; "Trauma Button", whose shallow depiction of PTSD was the pattern for the popular understanding of PTSD for many years; and of course "Invincible Hero".
A lot of these are not "near-universal" in the sense of "applicable in nearly every situation", but they are "near-universal" in the sense that everybody has either seen the movie, or seen other movies made by people who were influenced by the movie, or heard stories from people who were influenced by one of those movies, etc.
Some of them are applicable in nearly every situation. Whenever someone thinks that bad things won't happen to them because they're a nice person, for example, they're unconsciously believing in the puddle of ideas around "Asshole Victim", and Rambo's instance is just one drop of blood in that puddle. More insidiously, when people learn that someone has suffered misfortune, "Asshole Victim" subconsciously prompts them to search for reasons they deserved it.
Of course it's easiest for me to identify the thought-patterns that result from tropes I dissent from, not the ones that reflect (as I misunderstand it) Reality.
The opinion you replied to frustrates me when I encounter it.
She was only doing "magical thinking" in her narratives so much as her novels are marriage comedies, and this is required.
The reality of her life was that she was incredibly uncompromising. She had to publish her early work under an androgynous pseudonym to profit from it.
She didn't marry cynically despite having opportunities to. She was a realist, and a strain of that runs through her work. There are many moments where she anticipates the great Russian realists. She managed to turn a good profit on her art in spite of her period's circumstances. She genuinely advanced the idea of who is allowed to make art, and who is allowed to profit from it.
Generally the novels have nuanced but happy endings. She was writing for an audience. She was a shrewd businessman at a time when there weren't businesswomen. In her personal life, she was genuinely uncompromising. She's a GOATed artist. You can't ask much more of a human!