i love you - most ardently. please do me the honour of accepting my hand. sir, i appreciate the struggle you have been through, and i am very sorry to have caused you pain. believe me, it was unconsciously done. is this your reply? yes, sir. are you...are you laughing at me? no. are you rejecting me? i'm sure that the feelings which, as you've told me have hindered your regard, will help you in overcoming it. might i ask why, with so little endeavour at civility, i am thus repulsed? and i might as well enquire why, with so evident a design of insulting me, you chose to tell me that you liked me against your better judgement.
imo, many of jane austen's novels do not easily lend themselves to generously queer readings but i do think there's something intrinsically queer about women writing romance novels. like, conceptually. jane austen was a woman writing novels that were being primarily consumed by women. this reality of the romance genre has not changed. and yet, when you think about it, romance novels that center on relationships between men and women are abstractions by women for other women's pleasure.
the most beautiful (and sometimes heartbreaking) aspect of romance novels, fanfiction, and other forms of writing associated with women and queer people is how generously they characterize men. i mean, just take a second to compare the stories women tell about men to the stories men tell about each other. we live in a world that beats emotion out of men. we live in a world that teaches them that love, affection, and vulnerability are defects, not gifts. but in pride and prejudice, darcy is a man who betters himself after lizzie rejects him and he does so with no expectation of romantic reciprocity. he changes because he loves her and because loving her in the way she deserves requires self-betterment. in emma, mr knightly volunteers to absolve himself of land and property because he knows that emma's happiness is intrinsically linked to caring after her (imo, disabled and/or disability-adjacent) father and that their marriage would necessitate that emma abandon him. instead, knightly denounces what is socially and legally entitled to him because her supreme happiness is infinitely more important.
in romances, men are generous with love. they speak in poetic terms. in all of austen's novels, she gives men the most romantic and immortalized lines ("if i loved you less, i might be able to speak about it more", "in vain I have struggled, you must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you"). in these stories, men love tenderly, to the point where love might very well be their unmaking. i cannot tell you how many fanfictions i've read where men cry during sex or where they yearn to the point of heartache.
so many romances are a matter of women imagining men behaving in a way that is more in keeping with feminine socialization (except, of course, that's bullshit. women aren't inherently more attuned to emotions or expressions of love. with these stories, we're imagining men allowing themselves the full breadth of human experience, gender norms be damned). in our stories, we imagine men for all they could be. these fantasies are so generous. they're so kind. they imagine more for men in fiction than some men imagine for themselves in real life.
i worry this makes absolutely zero sense. but i think there's something queer about that. there's something queer about a woman offering a fantasy of a man who can behave, feel, and speak in ways that are more associated with women. and there's something queer about women saying: this is the fantasy of a man that would melt me. i know it isn't real. i know such men are nearly impossible to find. i'm offering this to you anyway, so we can delight in this projection together.
okay I just need to state for the record that several of the people I'm following have been Jane Austen posting for a while, but I've never read any of her books except P&P.
(nothing against them, I've just never gotten around to it.)
so I've been finding myself playing this game where I read the whole post about mister such-and-such and lady crimblywaffle and all their romantic drama and I try to decide if it's a Jane Austen book or if this is some new player in the Kate Middleton scandal.
The purest form of love is consideration. When someone thinks about how things would make you feel. Pays attention to detail. Holds you in regard when making decisions that could affect you. In any bond, how much they care about you can be found in how much they consider you
Someone on Reddit keeps getting recommended the Jane Austen subreddit despite knowing nothing about Jane Austen, so they posted an Ask Me Anything. Best response so far:
Sorry JA, no longer a truth universally acknowledged.