Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The concept of mechanism
- 3 The Aristotelian logic of settlement in Austen's Pride and Prejudice
- 4 Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor: empiricism, mechanism, imagination
- 5 Cosmology and chaos in Dickens's Bleak House
- 6 Scientific humanism and the Comic Spirit: from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel to The Egoist
- 7 Old mindsets and new world-music in Conrad's The Secret Agent
- 8 Women in Love: beyond fulfillment
- 9 The mechanistic legacy: Lessing's Canopus in Argos: Archives
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
8 - Women in Love: beyond fulfillment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The concept of mechanism
- 3 The Aristotelian logic of settlement in Austen's Pride and Prejudice
- 4 Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor: empiricism, mechanism, imagination
- 5 Cosmology and chaos in Dickens's Bleak House
- 6 Scientific humanism and the Comic Spirit: from The Ordeal of Richard Feverel to The Egoist
- 7 Old mindsets and new world-music in Conrad's The Secret Agent
- 8 Women in Love: beyond fulfillment
- 9 The mechanistic legacy: Lessing's Canopus in Argos: Archives
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Two young women – sisters, beautiful and intelligent, trapped in an oppressive family setting – meet two men – best friends, of respectable income and social standing, apparently in need of mates. They become attracted to one another; after many setbacks, each couple reaches an understanding and fulfills its foreordained destiny. They live happily ever after.
This bare outline recounts the familiar plot of Pride and Prejudice. Excepting the last sentence, it also tells the story of D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love. The similarity both is and is not surprising. Lawrence seems to have viewed Austen's fiction as the antithesis of his own work. In “A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover” he criticized Austen's intellectual detachment, calling it unpleasant and snobbish. References within Women in Love to the world of Jane Austen are more ambivalent. In “A Chair” Birkin represents Austen's England as a place where people could be happy and productive. Ursula responds by claiming to be sick of this sort of nostalgia. According to historian Martin J. Wiener, England had by the turn of the century chosen to define itself as a rural, aristocratic, unchanging society – a land of green fields and quaint local customs. As the hierarchical, agrarian structures of traditional Britain lost force in the nation's political and economic life, they became increasingly the subject of a sentimental myth that appealed to all sectors of British society.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Mechanism and the NovelScience in the Narrative Process, pp. 135 - 152Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993