Romancing Jane Austen : Narrative

We celebrate Jane Austen as the mother of the English realist novel, but have you ever wondered why she insists on giving her mature heroines the perfect happiness that can only be realized in the romance? Romancing Jane Austen asks the reader to consider Austens happy endings as a prophetic rather than merely illusory answer to the contradiction that feminine subjectivity represents for history. A happy ending for the feminine subject? But that would be against all the empirical odds...