Romancing Jane Austen

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xv

   PDF

2. Introduction: The Persistence of Jane Austen’s Romance

   • Ashley Tauchert

   Pages 1-26

3. Northanger Abbey: ‘hastening together to perfect felicity’

   • Ashley Tauchert

   Pages 27-48

4. Sense and Sensibility: ‘her opinions are all romantic’

   • Ashley Tauchert

   Pages 49-72

5. Pride and Prejudice: ‘Lydia’s gape’

   • Ashley Tauchert

   Pages 73-92

6. Mansfield Park: ‘she does not like to act’

   • Ashley Tauchert

   Pages 93-110

7. Emma: ‘the operation of the same system in another way’

   • Ashley Tauchert

   Pages 111-136

8. Persuasion: ‘loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone’

   • Ashley Tauchert

   Pages 137-155

9. Conclusion: ‘such an alternative as this had not occurred to her’

   • Ashley Tauchert

   Pages 156-169

10. Back Matter

    Pages 170-192

    PDF

We celebrate Jane Austen as the mother of the English realist novel, but have you ever wondered why she insists on giving her mature heroines the 'perfect happiness' that can only be realized in the romance? Romancing Jane Austen asks the reader to consider Austen's happy endings as a 'prophetic' rather than merely 'illusory' answer to the contradiction that feminine subjectivity represents for history. A happy ending for the feminine subject? But that would be against all the empirical odds...

• Jane Austen
• novel
• realism
• Romanticism
• British and Irish Literature

• University of Exeter, UK

  Ashley Tauchert

ASHLEY TAUCHERT is Senior Lecturer in the School of English, Exeter University, UK. Her previous works include Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine and Gender, Teaching and Research in Higher Education.

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