The Wit and Wisdom of Jane Austen

THE WATSONS, begun 1804; abandoned incomplete on father’s death in 1805.

MANSFIELD PARK, begun 1811, published 1814.

EMMA, written 1814–15, published 1815.

‘Plan of a Novel’, written 1816.

PERSUASION, written 1815–16, published posthumously 1818.

NORTHANGER ABBEY, written as ‘Susan’, 1797–8; revised, renamed version published posthumously 1818, together with Persuasion.

SANDITON, begun 1817, left uncompleted on Jane Austen’s death.

Love and Friendship (#ulink_e0932785-50c3-50d8-9daf-9d4bd60d9dbf)

What a strange thing love is! (EMMA)

Love conquers all; young love, at least:

When any two young people take it into their heads to marry, they are pretty sure by perseverance to carry their point, be they ever so poor, or ever so imprudent, or ever so little likely to be necessary to each other’s ultimate comfort.

PERSUASION

On the inevitability of young love, and the need for emotional occupation:

He was, at that time, a remarkably fine young man, with a great deal of intelligence, spirit and brilliancy; and Anne an extremely pretty girl, with gentleness, modesty, taste, and feeling. Half the sum of attraction, on either side, might have been enough, for he had nothing to do, and she had hardly any body to love; but the encounter of such lavish recommendations could not fail. They were gradually acquainted, and when acquainted, rapidly and deeply in love.

PERSUASION

The violence of young love:

… the tyrannic influence of youth on youth …

EMMA

Love at first sight?:

‘Will you tell me how long you have loved him?’

‘It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.’

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

On the duties of romantic love:

Marianne would have felt herself very inexcusable had she been able to sleep at all the first night after parting from Willoughby …

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

On the love-prone personality:

Harriet was one of those, who, having once begun, would be always in love.

EMMA

On getting ahead of oneself:

A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

The ideal mate … a mythical beast?:

I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter into all my feelings; the same books, the same music must charm us both … the more I know of the world, the more am I convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

On the kinship of loving spirits:

Any thing interests between those who love; and any thing will serve as introduction to what is near the heart.

EMMA

Talk as the food of love:

Though a very few hours spent in the hard labour of incessant talking will dispatch more subjects than can really be in common between any two rational creatures, yet with lovers it is different. Between them no subject is finished, no communication is even made, till it has been made at least twenty times over.

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

On love’s sickness:

This sensation of listlessness, weariness, stupidity, this disinclination to sit down and employ myself, this feeling of every thing’s being dull and insipid about the house! – I must be in love …

EMMA

At what moment can love be said to start?:

I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew I had begun.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

Love, like charity, should begin at home:

As to any real knowledge of a person’s disposition that Bath, or any public place, can give – it is all nothing; there can be no knowledge. It is only by seeing women in their own homes, among their own set, just as they always are, that you can form any just judgement. Short of that, it is all guess and luck – and will generally be ill-luck.

EMMA

On the joys of feeling just a little in love: