Jane Austen's happy endings have strings attached

The Austen Connection

Hello, friends!

So: Does Jane Austen even do happy endings?

It’s a very fair question! And one we’ve explored at the Austen Connection - and now diving deeply into this question is a fascinating new book: Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness is just out, from Hopkins Press.

Professor Inger Brodey is the founding director and co-host of the marvelous conversation, dialogue, and seminar program Jane Austen & Co., and many of us here at the Austen Connection have engaged with their conversations series such as Race & the Regency, and also their seminars from the Jane Austen Summer Program.

And now with this new book Dr. Brodey has produced a deep study on Jane Austen’s endings: How happy are they really, and what’s she doing with them?

The answers are surprising: They involve token survivors, metafictions, ambiguous resolutions, and crashing the fourth wall where Austen’s narrators slow down the pace of the narrative, peer behind the veil of fiction, and talk to us. The reader.

If that all involves aspects of Jane Austen’s stories you’ve never thought about before - stay tuned. Author Inger Brodey is a highly original thinker and scholar, and this conversation explores Jane Austen as not only a young woman of the Regency, and as a weaver of these classic, iconic stories we know, but also as: an Artist.

This is all in the conversation we’re honored to have with Inger Brodey in our latest podcast episode. You can listen here and wherever you get your podcasts - and if you prefer reading, here’s a transcript of the conversation, lightly edited.

Enjoy the conversation!

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You can find more discussion on this podcast episode at the Austen Connection, at austenconnection.substack.com.

Links and mentions:

Jane Austen & the Price of Happiness is by Inger Brodey, from Hopkins Press.

More on Jane Austen & Co - Many of you here already know Dr. Inger Brodey from Jane Austen & Company’s wonderful research and conversation series, or you may have engaged with the popular Jane Austen Summer Program.

Also discussed in this conversation - Dr. Brodey’s favorite Austen film adaptations, which are explored in her book, including: Autumn de Wilde’s EMMA. 2020 film, Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility, Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (of course!), and an unexpected favorite, Pride and Prejudice: A Latter-Day Comedy, by Andrew Black.

You can listen to this conversation and all our conversations at the Austen Connection podcasts right here, and wherever you get your podcasts.

The late scholar Alison G. Sulloway’s book is Jane Austen and the Province of Womanhood - it’s a big fave here at the Austen Connection.

Professor John Mullan’s book is What Matters in Jane Austen.

Further discussion- here are some Austen Connection archive posts on Austen’s HEAs, Austen’s Token Survivors, and Austen’s Fleabag-style breakage of the fourth wall. Enjoy.

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