Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy have a lot to answer for, as do Emma Woodhouse and Mr. Knightley, Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram and a host of minor couples who trip down the aisle at the end of Jane Austen’s novels. According to this charge, which started in the 1990s with Bridget Jones’s Diary, but was still going strong decades later with From Prada to Nada, a Latina reworking of Sense and Sensibility, Austen is responsible for spoiling the love lives of generations of her female readers.
These tragic bookworms, goes the theory, have made the mistake of taking Austen’s romantic plots as real-life road maps and ended up disappointed when the path leads nowhere. While holding out for a Darcy — handsome, devoted and seriously rich — they let scores of perfectly “good enough” partners fall by the wayside. Left on the shelf, they wither into tragic spinsterhood (think Miss Bates in Emma) with nothing more exciting than next month’s book club to look forward to.
Not so fast, says Inger Sigrun Bredkjaer Brodey, a Danish-American professor who reckons that we have been getting Austen’s endings all wrong. No one can forget Alan Rickman as Colonel Brandon throwing a shower of golden coins into the air in Ang Lee’s 1995 film of Sense and Sensibility, a gesture that neatly combined material wealth with sexual ecstasy.
Yet while screen adaptations of Austen’s work may climax with blushing brides and lovestruck heroes, her texts are far cagier when it comes to promising conjugal bliss. Indeed, Brodey says, read Austen carefully and you will find constant reminders that “marriage is not the only way to achieve happiness.” Indeed, it is often not even one way. Any sensible reader contemplating Charlotte Lucas’s decision in Pride and Prejudice to settle for a lifetime with the creepy cleric Mr. Collins might well prefer to remain single.
Original readers certainly didn’t think of Austen as a romance novelist so much as a social satirist. For one thing, there’s the way she refuses to linger on any of the climactic love scenes in her novels. The moment Emma finally realizes that Mr. Knightley loves her, Austen deadpans: “What did she say? Just what she should, of course. A lady always does.” In Sense and Sensibility the novelist is even more withholding, teasing the reader with what she will not be revealing. Of Edward’s proposal to Elinor, Austen writes: “In what manner he expressed himself, and how he was received, need not be particularly told.” So there.
These tragic bookworms, goes the theory, have made the mistake of taking Jane Austen’s romantic plots as real-life road maps.
Even once the happy couple have exchanged their vows, Austen is careful to dismantle the fantasy that they are living on moonbeams and dewdrops. We are told that, in the first blush of their marriage, Elinor and Edward are mostly concerned with getting “better pasturage for their cows.” Elizabeth Bennet, meanwhile, claims archly of herself and Darcy that “it is settled between us already, that we are to be the happiest couple in the world,” making it clear that she knows that life at Pemberley will soon become humdrum once the novelty has worn off. Elizabeth knows only too well how early sexual attraction can sour, having endured the constant bickering of her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, one of the most mismatched couples in English literature.
In the place of intense romantic attraction Austen offers her readers more enduring, less showy kinds of love, particularly sibling solidarity. Mansfield Park, which is often criticized for matching up everyone randomly in the last few pages, expands eloquently on the importance of getting on with your brothers and sisters, maintaining that “even the conjugal tie is beneath the fraternal.” Elinor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, meanwhile, are delighted that their marriages will mean that they will live “almost within sight of each other,” and that early signs suggest that their husbands are likely to get on.
Original readers certainly didn’t think of Austen as a romance novelist so much as a social satirist.
This is typical of Austen’s endings, Brodey says. Instead of zooming in on the happy couple, she insists on panning sideways, moving the focus toward the extended family and community whose emotional and material support will be crucial if her young people are to prosper. Austen knew from her own life that fathers die, banks fail, widows lose their homes, generous brothers take second wives and all of these catastrophes are more likely to be endured if wider family and community bonds have been properly maintained.
Not that Austen was ever naive or sentimental about other people’s niceness. At the end of Emma, when the wealthy heroine finally succumbs to marriage, the ghastly vicar’s wife Mrs. Elton declares the wedding service to be “extremely shabby”. She complains that it has “very little white satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business!” and the stage is set for years of social sniping from the sidelines. In Persuasion, Anne Elliot’s sister is determined to do everything she can to ensure that her new brother-in-law, a brave naval officer who has fought Napoleon, never gets a baronetcy. Mary can bear Anne being “the mistress of a very pretty landaulette” — i.e., a carriage — but snagging a title would be a marriage benefit too far.
Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness is not a book for hopeless romantics. It is instead for anyone who has ever felt a stab of disappointment at the way Austen appears to rush her endings, refusing to let her readers linger at the wedding breakfast to finger the wedding dress or raise a glass to the happy couple. Deploying tough love, Brodey reminds us that our desires are the consequence of getting confused between the countless screen adaptations of Austen and the original texts. Go back to the source material and you will find that, while Austen lightly sketches in the happy endings we crave, she “simultaneously leaves the price tag attached.”
Kathryn Hughes is an author, academic, and critic, specializing in the Victorian period. She also writes for The Guardian and The New York Review of Books
