…continued..

Years later, after Anne has secured a hard-bought sense not of happiness but of contentment with her place in life and the fulfillment of her duties to friends and family, she continues to believe she would have been happier married to her young naval officer, but not at the expense of violating the forcefully expressed views of her godmother. How much more conventional can you get? How less free to follow your star?
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..continued..

So Woolf’s delight in Austen’s confident style and rancor-free mind is tempered by her feeling that, after all, there is something slight and unweighty about Austen’s work, so that her significance, though real, may owe much to her role as a Missing Link between Fanny Burney (a great early success story among female novelists in the generation before Austen’s, and still a good read) and, well, Woolf’s own more open, enlightened, liberated generation.
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Was there a soupc,on of sapphic yearning when heroine Fanny Price — playing a vicar in a home theatrical! — was caressed by Miss Crawford in the new movie version of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park?

Jane Austen is one of those women from the past who has both been co-opted by feminists and patronized for her lack of geopolitical interest. Of course, her unmarried state is a hopeful sign to feminists, and the injection of at least a hint of lesbianism into an Austen movie was inevitable.
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