And in Whit Stillman’s delicious adaptation (here entitled Love & Friendship, after an unrelated juvenile short story by Austen), sex is arguably the major ordering cog in the narrative, although much of it happens, once again, without being expressly worded. Like all of Austen’s works, Lady Susan is about courtship and marriage, but it is also very much about sex. In Austen’s novella, Lady Susan (first written around 1794 but published posthumously in 1871), sexual desire has an ordering effect. As well as the tension between Anne and Wentworth, you see this disordering of temperaments take place, most memorably, between Elizabeth and Darcy in Pride and Prejudice (1813) and between Marianne and Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility (1811).

There may be little of it actually taking place on the carefully manicured pages, but the desire for it generates heat, prolonged yearnings manifest in disruptive behaviour, attachments are formed despite characters’ better judgments. There’s a similar buzz throughout much of Austen’s work where sex is powerfully present through its absence. Rather than suggesting that Austen wasn’t more explicit about it because she didn’t know anything about it first hand, Jacobson points to this discretion as a deliberate artistic choice, reminding us that “Just because Anne Elliot’s skin is not described as ‘buzzing with excitement’, doesn’t mean it isn’t.” If the spirit is perturbed, so is the flesh.įor Jacobson, putting sexual desire into words effectively kills it.

Is Anne Elliott’s agitation, on being helped into the carriage by Captain Wentworth, any less materially present to us, is her disarrangement any less sensually felt, because there’s no mention of where Wentworth puts his hands in relation to her bra strap? Isn’t the fact that he puts his hands on her at all, that “he had placed her there” – sufficiently electrifying to explain Anne Elliot’s perturbation? Don’t be misled by the decorousness of the language. He based his case, in part, on a scene in Persuasion (1818), Austen’s masterpiece of thwarted desire and longing, when Captain Wentworth helps Anne Elliott into a carriage. In a lecture at the 2013 Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts, the novelist and journalist Howard Jacobson addressed the sexual tension in Jane Austen’s novels, arguing that they are sexy because of what they omit and repress.

Love and friendship summary jane austen