REVIEW: Love and Marriage in the Age of Austen

Falling in love with Austen all over again

Love and Marriage in the Age of Jane Austen by Rory Muir. Yale University Press, 2024. 432 pp., $24.00 (paperback).

It is a truth universally acknowledged that ever since the 1811 publication of her first novel, Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen has shaped our understanding of love and marriage in the nineteenth century. Now Rory Muir’s new book reminds us that it behooves researchers and readers alike to consider the specific social and cultural contexts that shaped Austen’s characterization and themes. It is these contexts that helped create the composite vision of romance she provided to the world—a vision that continues to enthrall us today. 

Muir promises at the outset that he will not simply show that patriarchy was prevalent in the early nineteenth century and that marriages were on unequal footing. We know this already. Instead, he states that he “aims to give a richly textured account of what courtship and marriage felt like for people of this class time and time in all its variety, with an emphasis on the ordinary rather than the extraordinary, and to allow readers to make their own comparisons and to draw their own conclusions.”

He succeeds on every count. Seventeen short, readable chapters proceed through every stage of courtship—from “Meeting” to “Hesitations and Heartbreaks” to “Growing Old Together.” He discusses the joys and sorrows of courtships, easy proposals, proposals that never came to be, adultery, death, children, and everything in between. Throughout, Muir provides examples from Jane Austen’s own family, which served as the inspiration for much of the content for her novels. Additional examples range from men who became prime ministers to women who were governesses. Muir weaves stories of everyday romances with stories from the novels themselves, demonstrating how historical facts lend themselves to Austen’s fictional accountings.

One of my favorite anecdotes from the book comes from the chapter “Getting Along,” which details how couples would figure out their roles in marriage—how they would “get along” in their everyday lives. This includes managing money, frequency of attending religious observances, and participation in politics (or not). One major factor in “getting along,” Muir notes, has always entailed figuring out what to do with one’s free time. Put another way, he talks about how to deal with boredom. As an English professor, my heart leapt when I saw reading noted as a source of particular pleasure and connection during courtship and marriage. 

John and Maria Stanley are one couple Muir profiles that bonded over reading. Muir shares that Maria was “disappointed that her husband John would not finish Lady Morgan’s novel St. Clair or the Heiress of Desmond, lamenting that ‘my sober old fellow has so lost his taste for these kinds of things . . . He is a very different kind of animal to which used to read poetry, pick off thorns from sweetbrier, and sing French songs.’” 

Although Muir does not mention Austen specifically at this juncture, I was immediately reminded of Marianne in Sense and Sensibility. Marianne’s passions for the rakish Willoughby are inflamed in part by their shared love of literature. Austen writes that upon meeting her potential suitor, Marianne “proceeded to question him on the subject of books; her favourite authors were brought forward and dwelt upon with so rapturous a delight, that any young man of five and twenty must have been insensible indeed, not to become an immediate convert to the excellence of such works, however disregarded before. Their taste was strikingly alike. The same books, the same passages were idolized by each.” Love of literature bonded Marianne and Willoughby, just as it did Maria and John Stanley.

Luckily, for the latter real life couple, their bond was stronger than any passing infatuation. Muir shares that a few years after complaining about her husband’s change in reading practices, Maria Stanley wrote to her daughter that she and her husband rekindled their passion for reading together over Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. She describes them sitting by the “dining room fire” (a literal flame), where the two “fancied themselves young people.” Her husband became so entranced by the poetry that he even put down his paper and begged her to “Read more!” This ordinary real-life moment of love that grows stronger over time makes Austen’s fictional account of bonding over reading too quickly and “rapturously” feel even more jarring. Austen’s depiction of Marianne and Willoughby is a cautionary tale, yet it is not necessarily a common outcome. Austen was wise and measured, but she was still a novelist.

Therein lies the majesty of Muir’s book. We think we know Austen through splashy adaptations or scholarly interpretations—and, of course, through her own astute literary gaze. Still, Muir offers a broader historical perspective. He reminds us that as today, so in the past, the allure of vice and scandal in the media can skew our perceptions. We might be tempted to believe that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were particularly rife with licentiousness, but the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Love and marriage in the age of Jane Austen, however, were surprisingly mundane, time-bound by particular historical conventions. “Most couples of whatever class quietly lived together, some happily, some not, in a way that attracted little outside attention—neither saints nor desperate sinners.”

Throughout the book, I appreciated the fluid connections Muir draws between history and literature. His energetic prose and meticulously researched narrative invite readers to step into the real historical world that shaped Austen’s ideas. It’s a world worth entering.

LuElla D’Amico is Associate Professor of English and the Women’s and Gender Studies Coordinator at the University of the Incarnate Word. She is the editor of Girls’ Series Fiction and American Popular Culture and co-editor of Reading Transatlantic Girlhood in the Long Nineteenth Century.