The Uses and Abuses of Imagination in Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets

The tradition of regarding Jane Austen as non- or even anti-Romantic is longstanding. In the past her novels were thought to follow an Augustan mode at odds with the Romantic ethos. In addition, Austen’s works were considered limited in scope, confined to the private affairs of a few middle-class families in provincial villages and oblivious to the major historical developments of her time such as the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. ¹ Even with the advent of historicist and feminist criticism, which challenged many previous characterizations of Austen as detached from the important social, political, and aesthetic currents of the period, she often has continued to be distinguished from her male contemporaries. Jerome McGann, for example, insists that Austen does not espouse the Romantic ideology. Anne Mellor declares that Austen, along with other “leading women intellectuals and writers of the day,” “did not” participate in the Romantic “spirit of the age” but instead embraced an alternative ideology that Mellor labels “feminine Romanticism.” ² 180To be sure, some critics throughout the years have argued for Austen’s affinities with one or more of the male Romantic poets. A special issue of The Wordsworth Circle (7.4 [Autumn 1976]) was devoted to exploring connections between Austen and her male contemporaries. Nina Auerbach in a series of articles compares Austen’s novels to various Romantic works, and Susan Morgan’s In the Meantime also frequently situates Austen within the context of Romanticism. Clifford Siskin’s historicist study of Romanticism argues that Austen does participate in the same major innovation, the naturalization of belief in a developing self, as characterizes Wordsworth’s poetry and other key works of the period. Recently, three books have appeared (by Clara Tuite, William Galperin, and William Deresiewicz) that in various ways treat Austen as a Romantic writer and together signal a shift in the tendency to segregate the major novelist of the age from the major poets. ³ The 181present essay seeks to contribute to this goal of firmly integrating Austen within the Romantic movement and canon. I argue this claim from two directions: by demonstrating that Austen shares many characteristics commonly associated with the male poets and that the male poets share characteristics commonly associated with Austen.