Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness

De: Inger Sigrun Bredkjær Brodey

Narrado por: Inger Sigrun Bredkjær Brodey

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 Bredkjær Brodey journeys through the iconic novelist's books in the first full-length study of Austen's endings.

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. The book also illustrates how contemporary ideas of marriage and happiness have shaped Austen's popular currency in the Anglophone world and beyond.

The book is published by Johns Hopkins University Press. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

©2024 Johns Hopkins University Press (P)2025 Redwood Audiobooks

Reseñas de la Crítica

"A learned, allusive, provocative, and delightfully readable book." (Devoney Looser, author of The Making of Jane Austen)

"Recommended for newly enlisted Janeites as well as perennial re-readers!" (Janine Barchas, author of The Lost Books of Jane Austen)

"Thoughtful and lively exploration...Brodey's nuanced readings illuminate the Janeite universe..." (Susan Allen Ford, editor of Persuasions and Persuasions On-Line)