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What always come through for me in Jane's writing is the love she has for humanity in general and her main characters in particular.

Yes, I get that her writing is consider by some to be about spoiled, stupid, privileged white people and why the heck should anyone care? But I feel like this is a red herring. She writes about a group that she has chosen (for whatever reason) and uses the interactions within that group to explore love, life, civility -- all the human foibles. The Regency nobility is her palette and humanity is her paint.

Let's talk plot and pacing? She's a master, imo. Her prose is beautiful and satisfying. Her books are fast reads, wonderfully skillful, funny and ironic. For those that have never read her, please do, you'll be doing yourself a favor. "Pride and Prejudice" or "Emma" are great places to start.

Yes, I guess I'm a fanboy. :D

"Gentry", surely, rather than "nobility". I remember no titles other than the obnoxious Lady Catherine de Burgh(?) in P&P; but then I'm not really a Janeite.

I don't think that you have to be a fanboy to enjoy Austen's novels. Some readers do seem to read her novels an awful lot, it's true.

(And I do not and will not believe that she would have tolerated the expression "personal flourishing" in her prose.)

> And I do not and will not believe that she would have tolerated the expression "personal flourishing" in her prose.

No, I think she would have used it. It would be something the heroine would be chasing at the beginning of the book, and came to see as foolish as the book went on. (Or perhaps learned that it wasn't found by chasing it.)

Another writer in the same league, writing about the same period (and who coincidentally was also a big admirer of Austen), is Patrick O'Brian. His Aubrey-Maturin cycle, about the 20-year relationship between a British naval captain and his physician, is fantastic. The second novel in the series, "Post-Captain", is something of an homage to Austen.
Yes! Those books are a delight.
Judging by your user name, you probably already appreciate Joseph Conrad, too. I'm actually reading Nostromo right now.
Read it several years ago -- it's my favorite book. The way the story progresses from the initial setup is masterful. I'm honestly still shocked that Nostromo isn't the first book that people associate with Conrad, given that it's so much more beautiful and thematically-dense than Heart of Darkness or The Secret Agent. It's like if everyone thought Typee was Melville's best work.
I'm not too surprised by that. If you look at what people think on Goodreads, it's pretty polarizing.

It's a slow-moving, difficult book. The approach is almost postmodern in its insistence on subverting established notions of how a book should be structured: There are multiple perspectives; the "protagonist" of the story only shows up about 2/3 of the way; there are a myriad of little detours into brief sketches of characters and histories that are not entirely integral to the story; and so on. At times feel it like Catch-22 in how the narrative keeps undermining its own progress by stopping to describe something apparently inconsequential. The first 100 pages or so are almost entirely establishing exposition.

The prose is also considerably more complicated. I remember making a note of the following, a scene that compares Gould with a statue of king Carlos IV of Spain on a horse:

   The weather-stained effigy of the mounted king, with
   its vague suggestion of a saluting gesture, seemed to
   present an inscrutable breast to the political changes
   which had robbed it of its very name; but neither did 
   the other horseman, well known to the people, keen and
   alive on his well-shaped, slate-coloured beast with a
   white eye, wear his heart on the sleeve of his English
   coat.
It is, at least to me, a sentence that befuddles with its elusive, overly flowery phrasing. I'm still not entirely sure what point is being made. Gould is not open about political leanings? Did he had to make that point while comparing the character to a king on a horse? I mean, I can appreciate the allusions to the remnants of an old regime (physical and frozen in the form of a statue), but I think Conrad is unnecessarily difficult here. Here's another passage that actually made me laugh out loud:

    Everybody around him was being robbed by the grotesque
    and murderous bands that played their game of
    governments and revolutions after the death of Guzman
    Bento. His experience had taught him that, however
    short the plunder might fall of their legitimate
    expectations, no gang in possession of the
    Presidential Palace would be so incompetent as to
    suffer itself to be baffled by the want of a pretext.
"So incompetent as to suffer itself to be baffled by the want of a pretext"?!

That said, it's of course very much enjoyable, but I can see why many people would find it a slog, especially the beginning. By comparison, shorter works like Heart of Darkness and Youth have none of these issues.

As a young man of low social acumen I particularly benefitted from the TV/film adaptations. The best are faithful to Austen's texts and contain added knowledge from the actors and directors. For instance they show something of how the author's scenes might manifest in terms of speech tone and facial expression. My favourites are:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_and_Prejudice_(1995_TV_s... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_and_Sensibility_(film)