I still think her work is at most middling in terms of difficulty and likely not even that. Multiple levels of character insight is nothing compared to Ulysses

I still think her work is at most middling in terms of difficulty and likely not even that. Multiple levels of character insight is nothing compared to Ulysses parodying in sequence the entire development of the English language in stream of consciousness mirroring the gestation of a baby in a woman's womb, or the first chapter of The Sound and the Fury which tries to represent the internal experience of a severely mentally handicapped nonverbal 33-year-old man for whom past and present cannot be distinguished and who cannot understand simple phenomena like the movement of a horse-drawn carriage through space, or the second section of that same book which follows Quentin's turbulent and troubled mind through his final moments leading to his suicide. These sections are not just difficult to read, but also look outward from inside a character. Jane Austen is a great author, and her works can often be appreciated and analyzed on multiple levels. But I just don't think she's a reasonable example of a difficult author when one considers the full spectrum of literature available today.