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 Bredkjær Brodey journeys through the iconic novelists books in the first full-length study of Austens endings. Through a careful exploration of Austens 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 Austens surprising choices in her endings are an essential aspect of the writers own sense of the novel and its purpose. Austens 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 Austens 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 Austens work, the book also offers new interpretations while illustrating how contemporary ideas of marriage and happiness have shaped Austens popular currency in the Anglophone world and beyond.