Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness

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 Bredkj r Brodey journeys through the iconic novelist’s books in the first full-length study of Austen’s endings. Through a careful study 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 Bredkjær Brodey (CHAPEL HILL, NC) is a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the cofounder and director of the Jane Austen Summer Program and Jane Austen & Co. and the principal investigator of Jane Austen’s Desk.