![]() ![]() Each of the six novels she completed in her lifetime are, in effect, comic cautionary tales that end happily for those characters who play by the rules and badly for those who don't. To flout these rules was to tear at the basic fabric of society, and the consequences could be terrible. Certain rules applied to who was eligible and who was not, how one courted and married and what one expected afterwards. ![]() ![]() In Austen's ordered world, the passions that ruled Gothic fiction would be horridly out of place marriage was, first and foremost, a contract, the bedrock of polite society. Though Jane Austen was writing at a time when Gothic potboilers such as Ann Ward Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto were all the rage, she never got carried away by romance in her own novels. ![]()
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