Love in Jane Austen’s Novels

Abstract

A graduate student in my course on the novel some years ago — she was better read though less guarded than many of her contemporaries — produced this critical comment after rereading the chapters on Marianne’s desertion by Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility: “Oh, Mrs. McMaster, I just cried and cried.”¹ And a male colleague of mine once admitted that he found Elizabeth Bennet more sexually stimulating than the centre-fold of Playboy. I cite these two not altogether academic responses to Jane Austen’s work as evidence for what will be my main arguments in the following chapters: that Jane Austen, knowing satirist and beautifully controlled comic artist though she is, is far from deficient in feeling; and that, notwithstanding her spinsterhood and her vaunted determination not to stray in subject-matter beyond the limits of her own experience, she is acutely awake to sex, and quite able to convey sexual feeling even though she may not take us into bedrooms.

Note: Three of the next four essays were part of an 80-page monograph called Jane Austen on Love, which was published in 1978 in the English Literary Monographs Series, at the University of Victoria in Canada. Although not widely distributed, that little book has done well in its way, and parts of it have been anthologized, for instance in the Modern Critical Interpretations series under the general editorship of Harold Bloom. It has been out of print for some time now, so I am glad of the chance to give it a new lease of life in this volume of my essays.

The last essay, on the “Women in Love,” is new; and its addition to the others will mark some progress in my thinking on feminist issues.