h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The entry itself is a very fine account of Austen indeed - but it seems a bit daft for the front page to describe Austen as one of the 'pioneers of English Literature'. There's about a thousand years of literary history being written out of the equation in this title. Even in terms of the novel in English, she's still a century after Defoe. Given that Austen is one of the Gods of the English novel, could someone not have come up with something a bit more exact?

Unfortunately, that's a century that almost completely excluded female writers. As one of the first women to find herself published (albeit through unconventional methods, as the entry explains), Ms Austen surely deserves to be recognised for leading the way?

Certainly - but that's not what it says. What it says is 'One of English Literature's first pioneers'. By all means say 'One of English Literature's greatest novelists' or even 'One of English Literature's greatest women novelists' (though that seems a bit superfluous, even condescending in Austen's case), but it's the idea of 'pioneer' I'm objecting to. Austen simply wasn't a 'pioneer' in this sense: even restricting it to women novelists, she had many precursors (Ann Radcliffe, Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth - if you're going to give the title 'pioneer' to any Englishwoman, then it would surely be Aphra Behn, though it would be nice to see Madame de Lafayette given a nod, a hundred and fity years prior to Austen). To say nothing of the really exciting work being done at the moment in rediscovering women writers of the Renaissance, many of whom did work in prose.
To say it again, I'm not objecting to the entry, which is very good, but to the way the front page advertises it. It's just sloppy - and, frankly, even if it was intending to say something like 'great woman pioneer', that's still perpetrating a myth. Austen was exceptional because of the quality of her writing, not because she was the only woman novelist of the age - that simply isn't true. Why so many women writers of her age (and many centuries prior to that) were overlooked for so long is another matter. But I'd suggest that even if the front page were rephrased to give it the meaning you say it's supposed to have, it would still be misleading. Referring to an enormously rich tradition of women's writing in English by dropping the same three or four names (Austen, Brontes, George Eliot) time after time is not actually as helpful as you might think. It suggests that we should be interested in these novelists because they were women, rather than because they were exceptional writers and it also does the vast numbers of their often unjustly neglected female contemporaries a disservice.
Sorry to be so picky - but it surely wouldn't hurt to be a little more exact with so significant a figure.

P.S. As regards publication, around the same time Austen was getting into print, the best-selling author of the day was Felicia Hemans. Heard of her? Nor will you or anyone else until the idea that Jane Austen was the only woman to write a book before the mid-nineteenth century (an untruth I can't imagine the 'Big Read' is going to do much to correct) gets challenged.

Sorry for the tone. Bit passionate about this.