Comedy is the disguised priest who weds every couple, the German writer Jean Paul Richter said, and in the English novel the greatest of all disguised priests, the comic celebrant of happy unions, is Jane Austen. For the puff of marital harmony that ends every one of her books, among other things, Austen's comedy began to be called 'Shakespearean' soon after her death. But there has been disagreement about the ideological price of that harmony. Do Emma and Mr Knightley, Elizabeth and Darcy, Anne and Captain Wentworth, Fanny and Edmund, represent ideal or merely idealised marriages? Do Austen's novels foreclose their own vitality by choosing the safety of proper settlements? Are romance and marriage at odds - politically, stylistically, generically?

LRB 4 November 2004 | PDF Download