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?