In the land of TV mini-series literary adaptations, Pride and Prejudice tops the bill. The poll did not show preferences among men and women, but Austen, literary luvvie that she is, makes women teachers go weak at the knees.

Her enduring popularity is in part because she's an evergreen on school book lists. She is also, apparently, a pioneering game theorist. Michael Suk-Young Chwe, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, has written a book, Jane Austen, Game Theorist, in which he argues that Austen's capacity for "strategic thinking" shows she was one of the originators of modern game theory.

"Simply put, we play games better if we try to understand the thinking of the other players," Professor Chwe writes. "Austen's fiction is, we might say, not so much about what her characters think as what they think about what other characters think."

This was not something I picked up on in 1971 when I was taught Pride and Prejudice in a dusty Melbourne high school. My English teacher swooned over Austen's irony. It was a life-changing experience. It gave me a career as a literature teacher. I thought, as a teenager, there had to be better books than Austen's to teach – books with more intellectual heft. It didn't take me long to find out.

I vowed never to inflict Jane Austen on anyone. To do so would be an act of unfettered cruelty.

Admittedly, Austen did change the face of the novel. She gave rise to the genre of chick lit. Moreover, Austen, no shrinking violet, was not without confidence or ego. She wrote in a letter to her sister, just before Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813, admitting: "I must confess that I think Elizabeth Bennet as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print."

Since 1813 Austen has conned 20 million readers. Teachers have promoted her reputation. Why? Pride and Prejudice is a story in which nothing happens. But this is in itself a biting commentary on gullible readers prepared to be sucked in by Austen's preoccupation with domestic minutiae; a point missed by Sydney author Tegan Bennett Daylight, who wrote of Austen: "The greatest literature, wherever or whenever it was written, feels as though it was written for us, or to us, right now."

Really?

If we are honest, Pride and Prejudice is a simpering story that has the supposedly riveting, and Austen's most quoted, immortal yet curiously vacuous line: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

This is sigh-worthy romance at its cloying worst.

But while readers uncritically delight over Austen's prose, they have been duped. Austen couldn't write a clear sentence to save her life. In the surviving fillet of a manuscript from her later novel, Persuasion, (Austen, sensibly, did not think much of her manuscripts and disposed of them) her waffly sentences and ignorance of the use of commas were symptomatic of her wittering on in her chirruping tone. The editors at her publisher, John Murray, took a much-needed blue pencil to her rambling, undisciplined prose.

The result is Pride and Prejudice, but not authentic Austen by a long way. The book that has some readers dizzy with adoration is a slickly edited, truncated version of a meandering story that didn't go anywhere much at all.

Still, it has been marketed superbly. Just think about the television series. Colin Firth, all horse sweat and leather, did more for Fitzwilliam Darcy in a wet shirt than Austen's corseted pen ever did.

The smouldering sexual frisson Firth's Darcy brought to Austen's stuffy drawing rooms was a well-overdue fillip to her dead prose. This is something dual Booker Prize-winning writer J.M. Coetzee noted in the aptly titled book Giving Offence: "Jane Austen finds sex as demonic as Sade does. She finds it demonic and therefore locks it out."

The problem with Jane is that she is no longer a mere writer but a cult. Her supporters, English teachers especially, say if you have not read her then you simply are not well read. This is arrant twaddle. Mark Twain, who could write a bit, would not have a copy of her work in his prodigious library and witheringly dismissed Pride and Prejudice, saying: "Every time I read her I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin bone."

My prejudice against Jane Austen is not just because her reputation is based on a palpable lack of Victorian substance, but that she is a poor writer. I am not alone in this view. Austen didn't know how to punctuate. Roger Walshe, curator of an exhibition in 2010 at the British Library of Austen's work, described her writing as lacking "rationality" and noted that she did not write in paragraphs.

This has not stopped the Austen industry affirming the impact of Pride and Prejudice on her devotees. Beyond the T-shirts boasting "Mr Darcy is mine", or aprons declaring "Who invited Mr Collins?", at Liverpool University in 2012, scientists identified a pheromone in the urine of male mice that makes them irresistible to females. They duly called it Darcin.

Added to this, a computer program, so New Scientist reported last year, examining page texts using a customised version of Google's PageRank algorithm, confirmed Austen's status. After studying digitised copies of more than 3500 novels published between 1780 and 1900, Austen, together with Walter Scott, topped the list as the most influential authors.

This is not sufficient reason to ask young people to read Pride and Prejudice as a novel you must experience before you can call yourself literary. The momentum Austen has enjoyed for two centuries is because she has been oversold as an author who is fundamentally important in the study of literature. She is safe, as intellectually undemanding as Mills & Boon and oscillates between absurdly awkward, naive expressions of human emotion and barnacled description. She's Victorian chick lit and that's all.

If ever a novel needed the windows open to relieve its suffocating turgidity, Pride and Prejudice is it.

I will never teach Austen, because reading should not be akin to suffering.

Christopher Bantick is a senior literature teacher at a Melbourne boy's Anglican grammar school.