Jane Austen’s novels are filled with marital mismatches. Clever, sardonic Mr. Bennet treats Mrs. Bennet with thinly veiled disrespect. In Sense and Sensibility, Mr. Palmer has discovered “like many others of his sex, that through some unaccountable bias in favor of beauty, he was the husband of a very silly woman.” The long-dead mothers of Anne Elliot and Henry Tilney seem to have suffered in their marriages to selfish, difficult men. As we close each novel, we trust that our heroine and hero will be happy together, but the specter of marital failure lurks everywhere. Nevertheless, nearly a quarter-century of swoony screen adaptations of Austen’s novels have persuaded the non-Janeite public that she is the embodiment of all things romantic. Two examples of this phenomenon crossed my desk this week: * “Derbyshire is the most romantic place in the UK,” declares the no-doubt-completely-impartial website DerbyshireLive, the online home of the Derbyshire Telegraph newspaper. The area “is visually stunning and has inspired love stories which have bewitched the world.” Cue mention of Pride and Prejudice; unverifiable claim that Derbyshire landmark Chatsworth was the inspiration for Mr. Darcy’s Pemberley; and mention of other local sites featured in various filmed versions of the novel. (Jane Eyre merits a cameo, too.) Derbyshire looks gorgeous, so don’t let me discourage anyone from proposing there. (Indeed, Among the Janeites includes the story of a man who proposed to his Austen-scholar wife at Chatsworth, which played Pemberley in the 2005 movie of Pride and Prejudice.) I’m just a little leery of this “Austen=lifelong happiness” equation. * “Make the love of your life fall for you all over again with these 50 beautiful love quotes that say ‘I love you’ in different ways,” urges YourTango, which bills itself as “the leading online magazine dedicated to love and relationships.” I must admit that whenever my Jane Austen Google alert highlights listicles like this one, I experience a certain all-too-familiar sinking sensation. I fear I am about to enter the Land of Faux Austen Quotes, that zone in which any line ever uttered by a character in an Austen movie is automatically attributed to the novelist herself. Alas, YourTango has indeed harvested its beautiful love quotes from this same barren field. Amid the lines credited to the likes of Virginia Woolf, Maya Angelou, and Ed Sheeran – plus a selection from Lolita*: how creepy is that? – are two attributed to “Jane Austen.” Brace yourself. At #25, we have “My heart is, and always will be, yours.” And at #27, we have that hoary classic “You have bewitched me body and soul.” I loved hearing Hugh Grant sweetly deliver #25 to Emma Thompson in the 1995 movie of Sense and Sensibility. I was less enamored of Matthew Macfadyen delivering #27 to Keira Knightley in the 2005 P&P, but to each her own. Neither line, however, appears in the Austen novel on which the film is based. Indeed, there’s a reason that romantic sayings from Jane Austen are so seldom drawn from the actual novels of Jane Austen: She didn’t write many swoony love scenes. Her novels are as determinedly un-swoony as it’s possible for courtship novels to be. But hey: If you want to go around saying these things to the love of your life, perhaps while proposing in front of Chatsworth, be my guest. Just don’t blame Jane Austen if the marriage doesn’t work out.
* Which is, IMHO, one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, but not my go-to choice for healthy expressions of romantic love.
4 comments
Oct 2 2018 05:25AM by Christina Boyd
Jane Austen on writing romance books: “I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my Life, & if it were indispensable for me to keep it up & never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first Chapter. – No – I must keep to my own style & go on in my own Way; And though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.” (1 April 1816, to James Stanier Clarke, an enthusiastic admirer of romances).
Oct 2 2018 02:15PM by Deborah Yaffe
Yes, but in context, it seems clear that JA and Clarke were probably using "romance" in an older sense than we do, something more akin to our term "melodrama," or even just as a synonym for historical fiction in general. But of course I agree that JA wasn't writing romance novels in our sense of the word!
Oct 4 2018 07:04PM by A. Marie
As usual, I rejoice to see you're still swinging the ax on Faux Austen Quotes. And I'm sorrier than I can say not to have been able to join you and the rest of the gang for the Kansas City AGM--but personal circumstances beyond my control make it very unlikely that I will be able to attend an AGM for the foreseeable future. (As my sainted mother once needlepointed on a cushion I wish I'd kept, "Old age is not for sissies.")
Oct 4 2018 07:18PM by Deborah Yaffe
Rest assured, I have no plans to put down the axe! So sorry about the circumstances that restrict your travel -- crossing my fingers that things improve for you soon.
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