Book contents
- The Origins of the English Marriage Plot
- The Origins of the English Marriage Plot
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction Historicising the English Marriage Plot
- Chapter 1 Church, State and the Public Politics of Marriage
- Chapter 2 Clandestine Marriage, Commerce and the Theatre
- Chapter 3 The New Fiction
- Chapter 4 The Patriot Marriage Plot
- Chapter 5 Literary Marriage Plots
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 5 - Literary Marriage Plots
Burney, Austen and Gretna Green
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 July 2019
- The Origins of the English Marriage Plot
- The Origins of the English Marriage Plot
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction Historicising the English Marriage Plot
- Chapter 1 Church, State and the Public Politics of Marriage
- Chapter 2 Clandestine Marriage, Commerce and the Theatre
- Chapter 3 The New Fiction
- Chapter 4 The Patriot Marriage Plot
- Chapter 5 Literary Marriage Plots
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Frances Burney and Jane Austen both wrote their era’s definitive marriage plot novels, yet it is obvious that their heroine-centred courtship fiction stands at a distance from Fielding, Goldsmith and Shebbeare’s clerical and gentlemanly fictions – and even from Richardson’s Pamela. Most strikingly, proper ceremony holds no interest for Austen and Burney. In their novels conjugal attachment does not express Anglican piety or natural law; rather it promotes a literary subjectivityfirmly aligned with moral virtue (and very often at odds with the commercial public sphere).Austen’s courtship narratives are widely regarded as a high point of the ‘serious’ modern realist novel, understood precisely as a secular literary mode.To acknowledge Burney and Austen’s departures from their Anglican and Patriot predecessors is not to forget the legacy that shapes their work; it is, instead, to notice that in their hands the English marriage plot undergoes a profound and enduring transformation.
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- The Origins of the English Marriage PlotLiterature, Politics and Religion in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 185 - 229Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019