Love stories about the adventure of courtship and love are so popular, such a standard sub-genre of the genre of domestic histories, that people think it has always been the case. Yes, there are sexual and lustful couplings as well as fits of passion in the Bible and in Greek and Roman romance but there was something new that happened in the early Nineteenth Century, rightly beginning with what is called the Romantic Period, that does engage people with love and courtship as being a pivotal matter, as is elaborated by Goethe’s Werther, by Mozart’s trilogy of “The Marriage of Figaro”, “Così Fan Tutti” and “Don Giovanni'', all dedicated to the idea that love was revolutionary in that it unsettled social relationships and also made love independent of ordinary social relationships, nevertheless until that time everyone understanding that people were still attracted to but opposed to the lovers in Dante because the two are entwined but wafted about by the currents of the wind, and so therefore not the right way to be. Jane Austen, for her part, is preoccupied in every one of her books with how people will create a marriage out of elective affinities, as Goethe put it, rather than for some other reason or to deal with some other subject so as to fill out a novel. Jane Austen could have written about the improvement of agriculture, as was indeed a social development in the area of which he lived as well as a theme of the time, or the state of politics, about which her mentor William Shakespeare had more than dabbled and whose contemporary perturbations, as with the Warren Hastings Impeachment, Austen had followed. But instead she did focus on this new found topic of romance, which just a few generations ago Samuel Johnson had only gingerly advanced the idea that people should consider how well they can get along with the people they marry rather than just the fact that they might carry with them property or wealth or social position. And here Jane Austen is presenting the aim of her stories as treating marriage as people so deeply emotionally involved with their spouses so as to be the be all and end all of their purposes in life, however much the pursuit of romantic happiness has to overcome many hurdles of disparate wealth or personality. The pursuit of happiness, that Eighteenth Century idea, had been limited, in the early Nineteenth Century, to the pursuit of romance. How did this happen to a person remarkably circumspect about the traditions of society and who embodied a Conservative political philosophy which led her to believe that people, like as not, were better off to marry to people of their own class rather than try to cross over as spouses with people of different social backgrounds?
There was some inkling of this shift in the first decade of the Nineteenth Century. Fanny Burney is often mentioned as a model for Jan Austen’s investigation of domestic dramas. But Burney would be a model of what Austen would not want to be. Burney is concerned with gossip about scandalous affairs so that a properly raised girl will not get caught up by an adventurer lest a girl not make a wedding arrangement that is financially and socially beneficial, much too calculated and untrue to the way people Austen properly conceived provides a very complex presentation of how emotions and character and self interest intertwine in different degrees with any particular person. Moreover, Burney engages in an epistolary style that distances from its characters the straightforward narration told by Jane Austen in the third person and Burney also has a rather overly ornamented style of the late Georgian, displaying not so well balanced sentences, while Austen works in the plain style that had overtaken the Romantics ever since Wordsworth gave up his rhymes and clanky meters for straight exposition put in sentences that can seem mannered only by sentences that seem balanced only because her observations are biting and much less ornate and courtly than in fact they were. Austen offers clarity and wit rather than ostentation and that is revealed, I think, when Mr. Collins uses the invocation of Lady Catherine de Bourgh as being appreciative that she was “condescending” and therefore as an insult that only the nincompoop could not understand, while Burney, in “Evelina”, published in 1778, still considered “condescension” as a matter of praise when attributed to a person of high station.
In general, then, Austen was very much a part of the Romantic Movement in both style and substance rather than an outlier who has an aesthetic sensibility all her own. She is interested in romance for its own sake rather than just inspiring feelings of the languadness and alienation to be found in Chateaubriand; she is, as I have said, interested in the plain style rather than the Georgian one; and while she may not be much interested in nature, as Wordsworth was, but does share with both Wordsworth and Coleridge a deep probing into the nature of reflection, although she requires the reader to infer what people feel from what they say and what they say is very clear if the reader pays attention enough, not because what the characters say is obscure but rather very straightforward, blurting out or refusing to say more than they do, as when it is clear that Emma loves Mr. Knightly, the older man, more someone having a ward rather than being a suitor, in that she is so hurt when he scolds her, insisting herself to be independent of an elder when she just very much wants herself to be highly thought of by him.
The most important part of Jane Austen’s Romanticism is this: as a Conservative, she is taken with a stable order for social life. What is amazing about love is that it results in combinations that are sanctioned in society and so marriage sustains social life even while people can be, through these offices, passionate about one another. That means what is sanctified is passion that is conjoined with but is free in the sense that people of different sorts, different inclinations and even, occasionally, different social classes, can become emotionally involved with one another. So passion is sanctioned and so other kinds of passion are also legitimized as worthy of approbation however contrary such people may seem contrary to being part of what had been required in the orderly life. William Hazlitt, for example, examines the spectacle of a prize fight and what emerges is that a prize fighter is consumed with his passion as a prizefighter because his bravery and his stamina and his skills add up to what we would call, since the early twentieth century, as a calling, someone who is apart from just the struggles of commerce because of a person’s own slant on the worthwhileness of this activity for itself alone. There are other passions everywhere abroad: the will by Dr. Frankenstein to make a monster; the exquisite beauty that comes from Keats contemplating an urn or a grape; the passion by Wilberforce to free the slaves however contrarian such an impulse might originally be. Jane Austen’s passion is to find romantic love, something not unusual as a fantasy but so deeply felt that it becomes a prime purpose and so overwhelming that the social order is put topsy turvy however much romance is to be constrained and restrained by social conventions. So even if Austen despised the “enthusiasm” that was coming over Methodism, she was preoccupied with the enthusiasm of romantic love.
That this is the case, that love conquers all not as Dryden has, as a quirk and an unreasonable passion, but rather as an exquisite coming together of people who really do understand one another, as is made apparent in a number of the declarations whereby, in Austenland, people finally own up to their feelings to one another and admit the true nature of their feelings, each couple different from the others and so now finding the couple free to be what they are rather than just conventional in having entered into a marriage.The confession of love is by a character in Jane Austen is the most passionate, truthful and eloquent of his declarations, the equivalent of one of Shakespeare’s high points, whether in the Saint Chrispin’s Day speech in “Henry V'' or when Hamlet finally unburdens himself and reveals what he is thinking beyond the courtly speeches and the worries about Denmark when he begins his “Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I” soliloquy. Listen attentively, then, to what Darcey says in the course of his second proposal to Elizabeth: “I was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit…. By you, I was properly humbled.” What a triumph for Elizabeth! Darcey has not only admitted to his deepest shortcomings; he has also agreed to be corrected by his new wife’s judgment. Now that she has the upper hand, Elizabeth admits to herself not to tease Darcy because he is not yet able to appreciate it. And listen to what Mr. Knightly says to Emma: “While her dear father lived, any change of condition must be impossible for her. She could never quit him.” Knightly remains his moral superior and the organizing force of his marriage to Emma. He arranges a marriage the terms of which are different from the ones that had offended Elizabeth when Darcy made his first proposal: that there were legal arrangements and provisions to be made. But this is a different couple and the two couples need different things. Emma is emotionally dependent, always the child, and so to be married with a strong hand. Couples are different but all of each of them are codependant. Let’s face it. Jane Austen is a Romantic but she does not romanticize marriage. It is a long grind. Austen never married but she did understand people and characters don’t change even if they do marry.