Why are we so obsessed with Jane Austen's love life?

Why does Jane Austen's spinsterhood bug us so much? Austen, who published six timelessly great novels between 1811 and 1818, never married and never exhibited much of a romantic life. Nevertheless, the film Becoming Jane, which opens today, spins a yarn about the young novelist's sexual awakening, suggesting that an early experience of being loved and left was the true source of her artistry.

Becoming Jane is hardly the first fantasy about Austen's romantic life. In 1924 Rudyard Kipling, better known for The Jungle Book, wrote a poem titled"Jane's Marriage" that imagines Austen's ascension to heaven, where she confesses to the angels that her one unfulfilled wish during life was for"Love." (Celestial matchmakers, the angels swiftly find her a suitable consort.) And at least one modern Austen fan has gallantly offered to wed Austen himself, as if meaning to belatedly right a historical wrong."Ours will be a tryst for the ages!" film studies professor Richard A. Blake announced in his 1996 review of the film Emma, not stopping to wonder whether Austen would accept his proposal. Why are so many of Austen's admirers eager to demonstrate that, even though she never made it to the altar where she regularly deposited her heroines, she really was marriage material?