For the many readers who would prefer tidy and romantic endings, the brief, complex, and costly conclusions to Jane Austen’s novels can seem like disruptions to purportedly pleasant diversions. Bereft of instant uplift, they interrupt what might otherwise be a satisfying crescendo to the narrative by introducing what seems to be Austen’s own voice commenting wryly, and even sometimes dismissively, on the fate of her characters. These conclusions resist the schemes of contemporary filmmakers whose adaptations, in various ways, run against the grain of her exacting artistry, which only heightens the disjunction between readers, whose expectations are often formed by these popular films, and the actual books. This is not to say that Austen’s novels are moralistic or melancholic tracts. And perhaps, when understood from a certain perspective, her conclusions are not actually out of place. The thesis suggested by the title of Inger Sigrun Bredkjær Brodey’s book brings us closer to the truth: Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness.
Brodey, a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, draws out Austen’s efforts to purify the sentimental sympathy readers might feel by immersing them in an ethical outlook that could be described as comic realism. After Austen teases us toward unreal expectations, her “anti-romantic details puncture but do not ruin the romance.” Rather, she courts the reader into inhabiting real estate with a realistic view. Looking out from the spy holes of her house of fiction, we discover that marriage alone is no sure recipe for resolution—that friendship and extended family and “resources for solitude” are essential elements of a flourishing future. Some critics, of course, have dismissed the novelist as little more than a spurned spinster who vents her scorn in reactionary reconfigurations of the conventional marriage plot. Brodey resists such ready-made psychoanalytic diagnoses, contending instead that “her genius was in creating realistic characters that simultaneously provide us with fantasy outlets for the lives we would wish to lead, remind us that real life usually does not live up to our ambitions, and teach us how we as readers perpetuate” idealistic projections.