A fairly long time ago now a brilliant critic named Anne Righter made an interesting suggestion about Shakespeare.
If we try and imagine Shakespeare sitting down to right a play, we might imagine him saying, "Well, I'm going to write a tragedy so how do I make this story fit the form of a tragedy?" So he'd come up with a plot and then imagine a hero to fit that plot.
Righter suggests, and I think she is correct, that Shakespeare didn't see life like that at all. He thought human lives tended to be stories. That my story is either a tragedy or a comedy, or maybe even a romance. Deciding who and what I am is a matter of seeing what my story is really like.
I think Jane Austen saw things the same way. She was only interested in comedies because she was interested in providing instruction. If you want to be a good woman, then you need to emulate the heroine of a comedy. And the heroine of a comedy got married.
Not to anyone. It had to be the right sort of marriage.
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