Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen a lot of them will.

But if you read Jane Austen you know that she had a wicked sense of humor. Not only was she funny but her early writing was very dark and had a gothic tone to it.

I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.