ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author examines the implications of the contrast, demonstrating David Nokes's greater willingness to hypothesize about Jane Austen's elusive feelings on the basis of her fiction. For Claire Tomalin, the un-Romantic Austen's novels are dissociated from her 'real' life. 'The difficulty with discussing Jane Austen in relation to romanticism', writes Susan Morgan, 'is initially one of critical method'. In general, references to Romantic works in both Austen's novels and her letters are fleeting, sometimes irreverently so. Yet it is with the heroine of Austen's supposedly most Romantic novel that Nokes sees the closest connections between art and life. Nokes's biography is in fact full of such 'insights' about Austen's life from the evidence of her novels, and particularly from the thoughts and feelings of her fictional heroines, who he often treats, in William Hazlitt's words, as 'modifications of her own being'.
