Claudia Johnson, “Pride and Prejudice and the Pursuit of Happiness” [from Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel]

Claudia Johnson’s Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel has had a formative influence on Austen studies since its publication in 1988. While Austen criticism prior to the late 1980s had tended not to recognize her work as political, Johnson’s Women, Politics, and the Novel is mainly interested in the political context surrounding the novelist herself as well as her women characters. In its political focus, Johnson’s book was slightly preceded by Marilyn Butler’s Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1987), which situates Austen primarily in an old-fashioned, conservative tradition. Johnson takes a different position, arguing that Austen cannot be read exclusively as a conservative, and placing her also in an anti-Jacobin, feminist tradition of political novels. This chapter, which focuses on Pride and Prejudice, argues that happiness functions in the novel as a kind of social criticism that engages with and transforms conservative myths.

Claudia Johnson, “Pride and Prejudice and the Pursuit of Happiness”