Jane had her ups and downs.
She sold well enough in her lifetime, got largely forgotten after her death (in 1817), returned to print in 1833, was read, but she wasn't a superstar.

Then in 1869, her nephew published a memoir that introduced her to a new audience.
That's when her literary star began to rise.

I have been thinking about this more and here is what I came up with. It does not leave Austen aside, but bear with me, if you will.

Also, the Brontes hated Austen’s work as being too bland and polite, too unromantic and rational. They wanted more sturm und drang in fiction.

What chiefly distinguishes scholarship from vulgar error is precision. Lacking precision, what you get is mental mush. The author should have known better than to characterize Austen as Victorian.

The psychological realism of Austen’s characters is almost legendary; people compare the depth of her characters to those of Shakespeare. To class her with the highly colored, romantical excesses of Victorian penny dreadfuls is an error of perception that casts grave doubt on the scholarship of the author. It is like lumping Bach and Mozart with Beethoven and Wagner as being all the same kind of music.

I disagree with the author’s premises on other counts as well. Many Native American stories do not fit into his schema of Self-subduing Goodies and Self-promoting Baddies. Some of them ramble on from one event to the next without any moral content at all—just entertainment for a long winter night. Others portray exemplary skill at hunting or scouting: tales that present models of excellence not just ‘niceness’ or selflessness. Some of them are so intricately complex with surprise twists that it is impossible to gain just one moral from them. Not all of them emphasize the primacy of the tribal group; some of them speak about the need to walk alone. Some of them celebrate outright trickery, clever theft, or strangeness.

What JMG said about “knowing more than one story” is relevant here: the simplistic binary described in the article you reference above is the least effective kind of story. Some of the Sufi teaching stories deliberately insert incomplete threads of other stories into the main tale. Some of them are jokes that force you to re-evaluate your thinking processes anew when confronted with the odd things Nasrudin does out of his literal-minded logic. Others are historical events of saints and teachers whose spiritual attunement is much more profound than the ordinary seeker and give us something to aim for in our own individual development.

Stories can also serve as a preservative for transgenerational resentments that become embedded in the culture and prompt future acts of aggression. One study has given convincing evidence that parts of the Old Testament were re-workings of older tales, compiled in the 8th century and tweaked with the aim of encouraging the Jews to wage war on their current enemies.

Storytelling is certainly a much needed skill to cultivate for the future, and everyone from childhood on up should learn stories and gain some proficiency in the techniques of telling them.

But stories are not just nursery tales meant to regulate the egoism of children. Stories are alive. They emerge from the soil and the sea and the mists of the mountains. They hold more power and mystery than we can possibly confine in the coarse nets of rationalized academic classification. And most of them have teeth! Handle with care: they bite.

Austen’s characterizations are NOT cut & dried, black vs. white. Her heroes are not shining beacons of light but flawed human beings who have backbone, principles, and the courage of their convictions. She once said that “pictures of perfection” make her feel “sick and wicked.” Her villains are NOT cartoon monsters but common and recognizable human types who misuse their power, but who can be negotiated with and ‘disinfected’ by conscious humility and basic good manners.

All her characters are nuanced, even the seemingly flattest and most minor have moments when they spring into roundness, as Lady Bertram does in a true crisis. All JA’s people have varying degrees of sense and sensibility, pride and prejudice; all value both love AND money. Mrs. Elton is like a mirror image of Emma, displaying their mutually obnoxious, oblivious, self-satisfied snobbery with great clarity and savage wit. Who’s the enemy here? Why, Emma herself is her own best enemy.

I hope this clarifies why I disagree with the author and what I think is wrong with the above approach to the value and worth of stories.

Etymology has been profoundly helpful to me in writing both poetry and fiction. In fact, it often seems to me that, at some level, most people have a subconscious understanding of the origins and roots of many nuanced words and that understanding helps with comprehension. Literary scholars are, of course, appalled at the ham-handed treatment of Literature by ignorant and undeserving scientists; how dare they subject ART to scientific analysis! I found the article annoyingly simplistic but also quite interesting, especially in putting storytelling in it's place of prominence in primal cultures. (primitive vs. primal is a topic for another post!)

Since we are talking about villains, which seem to be the most interesting class of character to many writers, perhaps it is good to review the origins of the term?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-villain-in-the-history...

I will admit that the primary antagonist in the story I'm currently working on is far easier to write than the protagonist. In fact I fear my hero, while complex, is also rather predictable compared to the villain, who is both disturbing and surprising. I never know what he's going to say or do next! In some ways I'm writing this story because this is the story I want to read and if I don't write it, I won't know how it turns out!