POPULAR culture has dubbed Jane Austen queen of “happily-ever-afters”. Dozens of self-help books use her authority to give advice on dating, courtship, and marriage, promising success on a par with Elizabeth Bennet (or Fitzwilliam Darcy). Modern reworkings of her novels — both in film and fiction — take this reputation to new levels. They tend to ignore another side of Austen, the Austen that satirises many aspects of society, including societal expectations of finding romantic “happy endings” in real life.
Austen’s endings are key to her complex craft, her characteristic union of realism and fantasy, satire and celebration, as I show in my new book on the subject. In these endings, Austen uses several innovative narrative techniques to teach an observant reader that happy romantic unions are far from inevitable and are ultimately out of individual control.
The endings are ambivalent, puncturing suspension of disbelief when readers wish to luxuriate in romance. When her heroines achieve moments of self-knowledge, it is always when they believe that their love is unrequited or out of reach. Austen purposely and poignantly separates these moments from the romantic conclusions to show that self-improvement is necessary, but far from sufficient, for achieving the happily-ever-after.
Instead, she teaches readers about the moral integrity and intellectual fortitude that are “resources for solitude” when things don’t quite work out. She separates her romantic happy endings from other forms of resolution, showing that, among other things, restoration of familial bonds is more in our control and ultimately more important than finding one’s ideal romantic partner.
Austen was also a clergyman’s daughter. Is her position as granddaughter, daughter, sister, and cousin to clergymen relevant to her stance on the happy ending? The marriage plot has, since its Western inception, been associated with a Christian world-view, and, even in her own time, the novelist Samuel Richardson grew sententious over the moral and religious lessons afforded by his novels. His blockbuster epistolary novel Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded provides an example that, I believe, influenced Austen.
Pamela, a servant in the wealthy Mr. B’s household, spends the entire novel fending off the amorous advances of her employer: advances that involve abduction and attempted rape. Her overriding virtue is chastity; her reward? Marriage to her attacker. Austen reacted against this trope of redeeming villains and rakes at the expense of the women whom they marry, just as the novel of sensibility remodelled rakes into “men of feeling”.
Critics who claim that Austen’s happy endings explicitly celebrate divine Providence are missing Austen’s critique of approaches resembling Richardson’s. Pamela calls on Providence no fewer than 35 times, invoking God’s name 177 times, confidently claiming that “Providence never fails to reward [ . . .] honesty and integrity.”
In a final commentary on her own “happy” ending, Pamela writes: “Let the desponding heart be comforted by the happy issue which the troubles and trials of PAMELA met with, when they see, in her case, that no danger nor distress, however inevitable, or deep to their apprehensions, can be out of the power of Providence to obviate or relieve.” For the complacent Richardson, God’s Providence is on display in earthly riches and position.
FOR THE most part, Austen rejects such expressions of certainty and sentimental morality (the closest of her characters to Pamela is Fanny Price). She steers away from references to the sublime, claims of divine knowledge, or boastfulness about the order of things. Just as, in Persuasion, Anne Eliot recommends for Captain Benwick less romantic poetry and a good dose of moralists, letters, and memoirs, Austen tends to douse her reader with the occasional cold shower of realism. Treating marriage as a divine reward for obedience to the status quo can risk limiting the heroine’s agency and responsibility.
Instead, Austen dislodges complacency in the reader, encourages doubt and ambivalence, and introduces complexities, contingencies, and uncertainties shared by readers and protagonists alike. Whereas Richardson seems to suggest that Pamela earns her marriage through her virtue, Austen works hard to separate those things. For her, romantic happy endings involve a degree of fantasy: they are rare, improbable, and a gift rather than an earned outcome. Her fictional uncertainties make her resolutions even more precious.
Austen has a history of being herself called a moral lodestone. The American writer Eudora Welty called Austen’s novels “that constellation of six bright stars”, never reachable, but always guiding our appreciation of the unchanging aspects of human nature. “There is nothing in Jane Austen’s work”, Welty continued, “to let us imagine we have learned any more about human character and behavior than she knew; indeed, part of what we know today may well have come to us through reading and rereading her novels.”
When Reginald Farrar and Samuel Beckett each called Austen “the Divine Jane”, they had in mind her burgeoning popularity in inter-war England. They would no doubt have been surprised by the ways in which the deification has intensified in the 21st century.
In their time, Austen’s “divinity” was due to her newly discovered superiority in style, whereas her dominance of romance was established much later. In the century since Farrar and Beckett wrote these words, philosophers, theologians, counsellors, leadership trainers, and psychologists — even economists, neurologists, biologists, and actuaries — have looked to Austen for data to confirm their models of human behaviour. “Philosophers tend to be obsessed with the theory of flames,” says Dr Cornel West, “but Jane Austen is the fire.” Austen has achieved celestial status.
Austen has become a quasi-religious figure, particularly among American Evangelicals. If you encounter a WWJD bumper sticker on a car in Texas, it is at least as likely to mean “What Would Jane Do?” as “What Would Jesus Do?” “She’s my life coach,” writes Haley Stewart, author of Jane Austen’s Genius Guide to Life: On love, friendship, and becoming the person God created you to be. The fact that Austen died more than 200 years ago doesn’t bother her. “I consider her to be a very close personal friend.”
The podcast Jane and Jesus gives Austen pretty high billing as a source of moral guidance, but it is far from alone in doing so. Professor Alasdair MacIntyre places Austen among august company in the history of virtue systems. He describes how Austen radically combines Shaftesburian, Aristotelian, and Homeric ideals with Christian virtues in her novels. Beyond that, he says, she innovates by “continuously extend[ing]” these traditions.
How has her perceived championing of “happily-ever-afters” contributed to her semi-divine status? In the context of the marriage plot, her happy endings have helped transform her into a cultural self-help guru and lodestone for advice on modern dating and marriage. The same aspect has also encouraged her semi-religious standing in certain circles. This phenomenon invites consideration of the connection between Christianity and the comic marriage plot more generally.
In stark contrast to Jane West and other “enthusiastic” and Evangelical writers of her time, Austen rarely shows characters in prayer and very rarely mentions God in her novels. Taking this together with her corrupt clergymen, some have seen this as a sign of her lack of religiosity. While Austen expressed mixed messages about happy romantic endings, this should not be taken as a mixed message about Christianity.
Austen leaves the door open for Providence in her plots, and frequently shows concern about the heavy responsibility of authorship, including the dispensing of judgements and fates that correspond with the culmination of a domestic novel. Unlike some of her fellow novelists, who gloried in their own power (Henry Fielding comes to mind), Austen was wary of the allure of the godlike power in authorship. (A title for God is, after all, “author of creation”.)
The doubt that Austen expresses about the happy endings of her novels — the way in which she hesitates to allow readers to indulge in the romantic details of the resolution — is a revision of Shakespeare’s approach to the place of romance in comedy, but not a repudiation of Providence itself. Writing her comedies of manners, then, Austen focuses on the manners that can only hint at the unbounded secrets of her characters’ souls.
Inger Sigrun Bredkjær Brodey is the author of Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness, published by John Hopkins University Press at £23 (Church Times Bookshop £20.70); 978-1-3998-0754-8. The theme of the 2025 Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature is A Truth Universally Acknowledged, in acknowledgement of Jane Austen’s 250th birthday. Tickets are on sale at: faithandliterature.hymnsam.co.uk