It is said the Comedy is and disguised priest, hardly the case as every man jack of them has
a left wing diatribe as they preach to their already converted audience.
A more likely prospect for a disguised priest is Jane Austen, that brilliantly comic celebrant of
happy unions - for she is the advocates par excellence of marital harmony that ends every one of her books.
Yet what is not unearthed in Austen is that these rational rational structures (Marriage)
are powered by an enormous and finally irreducible irrationality: love.
a left wing diatribe as they preach to their already converted audience.
A more likely prospect for a disguised priest is Jane Austen, that brilliantly comic celebrant of
happy unions - for she is the advocates par excellence of marital harmony that ends every one of her books.
Yet what is not unearthed in Austen is that these rational rational structures (Marriage)
are powered by an enormous and finally irreducible irrationality: love.
Her novels have a strong feeling of inevitability: we know that Elizabeth must get Darcy, just as we know Emma must get Mr Knightley and Fanny must get Edmund and central to that inevitability
has to do with 'love' and the irrational fatalism of love is never explored by this almost deified author.
Her characters speak the language of the sermon – they are generalisers – while the novels’ heroines learn to speak the language of the novel. For Austen’s heroines are her books’ only possessors of interior consciousness. They are the only characters we see doing any thinking. They are thus heroic, in some sense, precisely because they possess the secret of consciousness, which is their inwardness. Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, tells Edmund that ‘we have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.’ At the end of Persuasion, Anne Elliot pities everyone else because they are not in love: ‘Her happiness was from within.’ She has not the monologist’s noisy egotism but the inner egotism of love, the secret that Tolstoy shows Levin possessing when, after winning Kitty, he leans out of his bedroom window feeling sorry for the passers-by because they are not in love
has to do with 'love' and the irrational fatalism of love is never explored by this almost deified author.
Her characters speak the language of the sermon – they are generalisers – while the novels’ heroines learn to speak the language of the novel. For Austen’s heroines are her books’ only possessors of interior consciousness. They are the only characters we see doing any thinking. They are thus heroic, in some sense, precisely because they possess the secret of consciousness, which is their inwardness. Fanny Price, in Mansfield Park, tells Edmund that ‘we have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.’ At the end of Persuasion, Anne Elliot pities everyone else because they are not in love: ‘Her happiness was from within.’ She has not the monologist’s noisy egotism but the inner egotism of love, the secret that Tolstoy shows Levin possessing when, after winning Kitty, he leans out of his bedroom window feeling sorry for the passers-by because they are not in love
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