ABSTRACT
The family spirit and even the affection which creates family cohesion are transfigured and sublimated forms of the interest specifically attached to the membership in a family group, or the participation in a capital whose integrity is guaranteed by family integration. Lord Byron and Jane Austen—apparently chalk and cheese—have two things in common: their survival in popular culture as icons of romantic love, and their use of irony. As ironists, they used to be thought backward-looking. The focus of Austen’s bourgeois realism was the reinvention of romantic love in contemporary England as a precursor and accompaniment to companionate marriage amongst the middling sort. Austen, like Byron, created strong ‘interest’ by requiring the female reader to decipher the motivation and surprising actions of handsome, powerful, mysterious men: Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, Frank Churchill in Emma, General Tilney in Northanger Abbey, Mr Elliot in Persuasion.
