Inside Mr Shepherd 
James Wood
- Jane Austen and the Morality of Conversation by Bharat Tandon
- Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style by D.A. Miller Buy this book
Comedy is the disguised priest who weds every couple, the German writer Jean Paul Richter said, and in the English novel the greatest of all disguised priests, the comic celebrant of happy unions, is Jane Austen. For the puff of marital harmony that ends every one of her books, among other things, Austen’s comedy began to be called ‘Shakespearean’ soon after her death. But there has been disagreement about the ideological price of that harmony. Do Emma and Mr Knightley, Elizabeth and Darcy, Anne and Captain Wentworth, Fanny and Edmund, represent ideal or merely idealised marriages? Do Austen’s novels foreclose their own vitality by choosing the safety of proper settlements? Are romance and marriage at odds – politically, stylistically, generically?
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James Wood’s How Fiction Works is just out. He is also the author of The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief and is a staff writer at the New Yorker.
Other articles by this contributor:
Addicted to Unpredictability · Knut Hamsun
Fundamentally Goyish · Zadie Smith
Nothing in a Really Big Way · Adam Mars-Jones
A Frog’s Life · Coetzee’s Confessions
Damaged Beasts · Peter Carey’s ‘Theft’
Puffed Wheat · How serious is John Bayley?
Gossip in Gilt · John Updike’s Licks of Love
The Slightest Sardine · a literary dragnet
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