Does Jane Austen undermine her own endings? No. No she does not.
An unconvincing new study.
The next Austen book club is this Sunday, 19.00 UK time. The zoom link is sent to paid subscribers over the weekend.
Because this is the year of Jane Austen’s anniversary—two hundred and fifty years since her birth—we are being treated to several new books about her work. I shall not review all of them, but some of the more promising critical options will be covered here for paid subscribers. This is a review of Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness by Inger Brodey, a book which I thought was quite poorly argued.
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Why do Jane Austen’s novels end the way they do? No wedding ceremony, no profusions of romance, no sunset scenes. A new book this year, Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness, argues that Austen’s endings subtly undermine the idea of marriage. Inger Brodey argues that Austen’s endings are “artificial”. It is the arrival of poultry thieves that prompt Mr. Wodehouse to give Emma permission to marry Mr. Knightly. A mysterious viscount appears at the end of Northanger Abbey, allowing a resolution. I shan’t give more example, for fear of spoiling the plots. But Brodey argues there are many “sudden resolutions” which feel “artificial, gratuitous, and anti-romantic.”
This is, of course, the Austen we want. Critics often go hunting for a feminist Austen and are often able to fashion one. Brodey has no qualms about telling us, based on a single rather thin quote in a letter, that “Austen clearly feared the loss of time and independence involved in marriage.” In fact, we know no such thing. The general critical point that Austen not only promoted the happy ending of marriage but also challenged its conventions and strictures is over-stated. You can present marriage in the ambivalent terms which Austen often does (how few of her marriage couples of set a shining example, other than the Crofts?) without that being a means of challenging the institution.
When you are steeped in the jargon and tropes of modern criticism, it is easy to see these ideas in Jane Austen: when you look at her in her own time, on her own terms, the challenge she presents to marriage seems much less theoretical and absolute.