Do Jane Austen novels truly celebrate-or undermine-romance and happy endings? How did Jane Austen become a cultural icon for fairy-tale endings when her own books end in ways that are rushed, ironic, and reluctant to satisfy readers' thirst for romance? In Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness, Austen scholar Inger Sigrun Bredkjaer Brodey journeys through the iconic novelist's books in the first full-length study of Austen's endings. Through a careful exploration of Austen's own writings and those of the authors she read during her lifetime-as well as recent cultural reception and adaptations of her novels-Brodey examines the contradictions that surround this queen of romance. Brodey argues that Austen's surprising choices in her endings are an essential aspect of the writer's own sense of the novel and its purpose. Austen's fiercely independent and deeply humanistic ideals led her to develop a style of ending all her own. Writing in a culture that set a monetary value on success in marriage and equated matrimony with happiness, Austen questions these cultural norms and makes her readers work for their comic conclusions, carefully anticipating and shaping her readers' emotional involvement in her novels. Providing innovative and engaging readings of Austen's novels, Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness traces her development as an author and her convictions about authorship, novels, and the purpose of domestic fiction. In a review of modern film adaptions of Austen's work, the book also offers new interpretations while illustrating how contemporary ideas of marriage and happiness have shaped Austen's popular currency in the Anglophone world and beyond.
Inger Sigrun Bredkjaer Brodey is a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is president of the Jane Austen Collaborative, a cofounder of the Jane Austen Summer Program, a regular host on Jane Austen & Co., and the principal investigator of Jane Austen's Desk.
List of Figures Introduction. "Perfect Felicity" 1. Commonplace Happiness 2. Expecting Literary Justice 3. The Limits of Romance 4. The Thin Veil of Comedy 5. The Art of English Happiness 6. Resources for Solitude Conclusion. Co-Authoring Happiness Acknowledgements Further Reading and Viewing Notes Index
Do Jane Austen novels truly celebrate-or undermine-romance and happy endings?
Brodey's interpretations of Austen's writings are subtle and penetrating, and discussions of popular Austen film adaptations shed light on how Hollywood tramples over the novels' ambivalence. Austenites will want to take a look. -Publishers Weekly That Austen might be pushing her readers to separate the ideas of happiness and marriage in favor of introspection and self-actualization is a bold idea, but Ms. Brodey defends it with aplomb in this beautifully argued and original book. -Elizabeth Lowry, The Wall Street Journal Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness is not a book for hopeless romantics... Deploying tough love, Brodey reminds us that our desires are the consequence of getting confused between the countless screen adaptations of Austen and the original texts. -Kathryn Hughes, The Sunday Times [Brodey] deepens our appreciation of Austen's abiding genius. -Rachel Mann, Church Times Brodey has written one of the most stimulating commentaries on Austen's narrative methods that I've read in a long time. -Maggie Lane, Jane Austen Society News Letter
