We are coming upon the cosiest time of year, so what better thing than to write about Jane Austen? Today you will read my hot take, which is: Jane Austen’s novels are not romances at heart (gasp). To long time fans of Austen romance, my apologies for any offense I may be causing — I can see why it’s hard to view Austen novels as anything other than the epitome of great romance. But if we look more closely at the stories, their structure, and the overall purpose of the plots, it becomes clear that what Austen truly wrote about is the personal growth of her distinctly complex female characters, something that was obviously quite rare at the time (and remains rare to this day).
I am far from the first person to suggest that Austen is not a romance author; as E.J Clery writes in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, "in each generation there has been a radical mission to 'rescue' Austen from the common reader” because, to many Austen academics, it feels as if Austen's literary genius is too often obfuscated by her (dare I say, forced) conformance to the conventions of marriage and happy endings. This is to say that, to many academics, the fact that Austen’s works have been dismissed as mere ‘romance novels’ hides the fact that Austen was a true literary innovator who made great contributions to the literary canon. For instance, she was one of the few authors who "took pains" to write in their own individual style, as opposed to the styles of the established literary canon. She innovated a particular type of third person narration that blended the omniscience of the third person narrator with the subjectiveness of the first person, resulting in a seamless flow of thought that was both critical of the characters yet simultaneously limited to their understanding and perspective.
But such contributions are often overlooked. As is the ironic, almost satirical way in which she treats romance and its avid consumers by playing "with the novel-reader's addiction to the age-old conventions of closure, and [punishing] it by withholding some of the scenes that would most gratify" (which certainly defied the traditional romance novel format). In other words, if we look carefully at Austen’s novels, her happy endings rarely get more than a chapter or so of hurried wrap-ups, Austen being content to leave out the happy ending and to focus more on the gratification that her heroines get from self-reflecting on their personal growth and how far they’ve come as people. The moments of greatest joy in Austen’s novels are when the heroine realizes truths about herself, and when she is finally able to embrace her own flaws and mistakes as well as her value.
So, while Austen's wit and charm appeal to all genders (let's never forget that Sir Walter Scott was Austen's number one fan among her contemporaries, as evidenced by his glowing review of Emma), women have naturally formed the core of Austen's devoted followers. And it's not hard to see why: the depth, complexity and richness of her heroines' characterisation strike a chord in women's hearts in a way few popular authors have done. In my opinion, it is this complexity of characterisation that has allowed Austen's popularity to endure, not the romantic element of her novels.
In fact, branding Austen as the ‘mother of romance’ is an act of extreme irony when one considers that Austen never seemed to have any interest in marriage herself. Her romantic ventures were tantamount to one brief engagement that lasted less than a day, after which she ended it herself (presumably regretting having said yes). Interestingly though, Austen always had the deepest appreciation for the platonic relationships in her life, particularly the one with her sister Cassandra. This valued relationship is reflected in many of her novels, wherein the protagonist either has a much cherished sister or longs for a close female friendship. As a matter of fact, academic Terry Castle proposed that “homosocial intimacy was arguably more important than heterosexual romance in Austen's life and art," and that the "subsequent romancing" of Austen in pop culture was a retaliation to this proposal.
And it is actually really easy to trace this retaliation throughout the decades of film and TV adaptations of Austen’s works, which seem to get progressively sexier as the years pass. When the BBC’s 1995 adaption of Pride and Prejudice came out, it made headlines for showing Colin Firth coming out of a lake in wet clothes. Writer Andrew Davies notoriously had wanted Firth to dive into the lake completely naked, which Firth refused to do. But then, Davies had his wish granted in 2019 when Theo James took a cheeky skinny-dip in the ocean in Davies’ (terrible) adaptation of the unfinished novel Sanditon. And thus, Austen adaptations went from showing chaste kisses in the late 20th century and early 21st centuries — not really daring to be more implicative than showing a wet shirt — to full-nudity, explicit sex scenes and even incest in 2019. But I digress. The point is that the romance, including the physical or sexual aspect of it, is increasingly emphasised in every new adaptation of Austen, which is something that is not in line with the more homosocial leanings of the characters in Austen’s original writings nor with the more introspection-focused arc of her plots.
But while we’re on the topic of Austen’s homosocial female characters, one important factor that is more relevant now than ever (considering the progress of feminist discourse) is that Austen novels not only pass the Bechdel Test with flying colors, but in fact they fail to pass the reverse Bechdel Test (the Bechdel Test being a popular method to judge female character depth by measuring three factors: is there more than one named woman in the story, do the women talk to each other, and do they talk about something other than a man). Austen novels fail to show a single scene between two men alone. In other words, there is not a single scene in Austen's books that does not have at least one woman to lend her perspective to the narration, and there is not a single scene consisting exclusively of male characters speaking to each other about something other than a woman. Any conversations between male characters take place exclusively ‘offscreen’, as it were.
Which is why female readers are endlessly drawn to Austen's books: as a woman, it is easy to see yourself reflected in a story written through a woman's perspective. Particularly when that perspective includes your sisters and close friends as a source of support in your personal growth journey. What happens with Austen is that, as a woman at the time (in the 18th and 19th centuries), she was strictly limited in terms of the genres she was allowed to write. More specifically, her ability to publish was restricted almost solely to the romance genre, meaning that if Austen wanted to live off of her writing, she would have had to write romance novels whether she liked them or not. This means that, considering how little attention she pays to her romantic happy endings, and considering how much she values her protagonists’ personal growth and their platonic relationships, it is possible that ‘the romance novel’ for Austen was simply the vehicle through which she expressed what she truly wanted to write about, which were the things that mattered to her personally. And these things, as we know from her personal life, did not seem to include romance.
But crucially, they did include monetary and social stability. This is evidenced by the fact that economic concerns are the main conflict for many, if not most of Austen’s heroines. As academic Rebekah Hall points out, “Jane Austen uses satire, characterization, and narrative voice to explore the vocational nature of marriage for women in her society. From the first line of Pride and Prejudice, the narrator reveals her satirical approach to matrimony. If it was “a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” then the women in the novel would not have to struggle so much.” She continues, saying that “the irony of this initial sentence introduces the novel masterfully. While Austen flips this truth to provide humor in her narrative, she simultaneously sets the tone for the entire novel and tips readers off to her proposition that marriage is a type of career for the women in her society… Austen’s witty reflection on marriage is not confined to the implication that it is women who need husbands; it also indicates that financial situation plays a foremost role in the selection process.”
And this is perhaps why academics such as Terry Castle believe that the ever-increasing romancing of Austen’s works is at odds with her actual writing: when Austen wrote her novels, what she truly dreamed about, given what we know of her life and the appreciation she held for personal growth and introspection, really seems to have been freedom. She wrote about women who were rewarded with financial stability for unapologetically being themselves (even if it was through the only way available to them, which was marriage). And that was the true fantasy: to be able to grow, mature and find validation as an individual when, as a woman, you weren’t really an indivudual in the eyes of the state at all. The romance, really, is just the cherry on top. It’s the heroine’s reward for having achieved personal growth — for having established herself as an autonomous being who has needs, interests, and relationships beyond marriage.
By R. Jordan Ortiz