Why did marriage become central to the English novel in the eighteenth century? As clandestine weddings and the unruly culture that surrounded them began to threaten power and property, questions about where and how to marry became urgent matters of public debate. In 1753, in an unprecedented and controversial use of state power, Lord Chancellor Hardwicke mandated Anglican church weddings as marriage's only legal form. Resistance to his Marriage Act would fuel a new kind of realist marriage plot in England and help to produce political radicalism as we know it. Focussing on how major authors from Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen made church weddings a lynchpin of their fiction, The Origins of the English Marriage Plot offers a truly innovative account of the rise of the novel by telling the story of the English marriage plot's engagement with the most compelling political and social questions of its time.

The Origins of the English Marriage Plot: Literature, Politics and Religion in the Eighteenth Century

In Jane Austen’s works, the role and expectations of women in the 18th and 19th centuries are both reflected and questioned. My thesis outlines how Austen used her novels to represent the society in which she lived and how that society placed a sense of duty on women, specifically in terms of family, education, and marriage. Along with the representation of these duties, I also focus upon on how Austen uses her protagonists, primarily in the novels Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, and Mansfield Park, to question those standards and provide for her readers examples of women whom they could relate to and learn from as well. My major point of focus is how Austen challenges her readers to learn from the example set by her countercultural female protagonists. Finally, taking into account the ways which Austen reflects and challenges the roles of women, I conclude with a focus on how Austen emphasizes the importance of novels within her society, while also considering the impact that novel reading has in both the society in which Austen lived and in the 21 century.

/pdf/more-than-a-lady-how-jane-austen-s-works-impacted-the-role-51bfhaf7vn.pdf

More Than a Lady: How Jane Austen’s Works Impacted the Role of Women in English Society in the Late 18th and Early 19th Centuries

Der Heiratsantrag stellt in vielen englischen Romanen des 19. Jahrhunderts einen zentralen Aspekt dar, sowohl im narratologischen, als auch im stilistischen Sinne.
Da, gemas dem Prinzip der feme covert, die rechtliche Existenz der Frau nach der Eheschliesung von der ihres Mannes uberlagert wurde und Scheidung nur auserst begrenzt moglich war, hing ihr emotionales und korperliches Wohlergehen in hochstem Mase von der Wahl des richtigen Ehepartners ab. Die durftigen und starren Bestimmungen der Brautwerbung waren in diesem Zusammenhang keine grose Hilfe, in vielen Fallen stellt die Antragsszene in den Romanen die erste tatsachliche Aussprache zwischen den beteiligten Charakteren dar, in denen sich den Frauenfiguren die seltene Moglichkeit bietet, als ebenburtige Akteure aufzutreten.

The marriage proposal in selected nineteenth-century English novels

This study analyses the oscillations between realism and romance in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out. In these novels, the shift from realism to romance is often mediated by scenes of female reading. This thesis explores the relationship between female reading and genre and argues that the conventional story patterns of past texts exert a strong influence on a woman’s ability to conceptualize her own identity and shape her life story.

Seductive Convention: Reading, Romance and Realism in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss and Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out

In order to answer two specific questions (“Do the plots of Jane Austen’s novels match the plot of Cinderella?” and “Do Austen’s novels include a comic or happy ending, defined as one where the author employs more pleasant language at the end of the novel than she did at the beginning?”), Jane Austen’s six major novels and Cinderella were scored for the pleasantness of their language with the Dictionary of Affect (Whissell, 2009). The answer to both questions, based on results of regression analyses and means comparisons, is negative. Austen’s novels are not variants of the Cinderella story, nor do they have the type of endings that characterize comic romances. Cinderella is very pleasant and has a distinct happy ending. In contrast, Emma, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey are less pleasant and have equivocal endings, while Mansfield Park and Sense and Sensibility have tragic (relatively unpleasant) endings. Persuasion employs the least pleasant language overall but has a happy ending.

/pdf/according-to-their-plots-jane-austen-s-novels-are-not-comic-4ts8cdvn96.pdf

According to Their Plots, Jane Austen’s Novels Are Not Comic Romances with Happy Endings

tions of late eighteenth-century novels of courtship and romance, this omission is en tirely understandable, for they obviously bear what Ludwig Wittgenstein called "a family" resemblance (17). What distinguishes the plot of the courtship novel is its depiction of the entrance of a young woman into adult society and her subsequent choice among competing suitors. The choice is not without its anxieties, however, for one of the unstated conventions of the courtship novel is that the lovers must un dergo a traumatic experience, a violent shift from innocence to self-knowledge be fore their union can be consummated.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/20107392.pdf

Charles H. Hinnant

Papers

Jane Austen's "Wild Imagination": Romance and the Courtship Plot in the Six Canonical Novels