ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at versions of the courtship situation in Austen, and at her presentation of love not as an internal state of feeling owned by an individual, but as a performance or event, dependent for its realization on its communicability to others or on the support of a narrator. Self-possession in this area is understood to be limiting or illusory – an ironic attitude – as the self opens out in love's performance. The inescapably social dimension of her writing, which places such evident constraints on the communication of love, is found to be also the condition of its possibility. Particular aspects of this argument include the dependence of love upon acknowledgement; the importance of being persuadable; the making of love in public spaces; the function of free indirect style as a 'speaking for' the feeling of love; and the unfailing intervention of the narrative voice in all successful scenes of proposal. Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion and Emma are discussed with some fullness (Northanger Abbey more briefly).
