A new circumstance in romance. Is Jane Austen romantic?
I repeatedly hear it said Jane Austen is romantic. I suspect that is from people who’ve seen the films but not read the novels.
OK, romanticism means different things, but how do you see her relationship to romanticism?
For starters, here is a description of the hero falling in love in Northanger Abbey:
I must confess that his affection originated in nothing better than gratitude, or, in other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought. It is a new circumstance in romance, I acknowledge, and dreadfully derogatory of an heroine's dignity; but if it be as new in common life, the credit of a wild imagination will at least be all my own.
From the thread: Jane Austen's Emma and other works
Hello:
I didn't read all Austen's novels; maybe my appreciation can't to be entirely correct, but I consider that she also writes about romance; I'm not saying that I compared her novels with the sugary stories between girls and boy flying over sugary clouds. I mean she uses the issues like the love and marriage for to touch other topics like prejudices, habits and thought her epoca.
At the present, her novels are base of the mayority of romantic novels; but few them are so original. By the way, my intencition it wasn't disparage (or the literary taste of the people) to the writer, unlike I consider she did a great job criticising the society of her time using the sarcasm.