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What a strange thing love is! (EMMA)

Love conquers all; young love, at least:

When any two young people take it into their heads to marry, they are pretty sure by perseverance to carry their point, be they ever so poor, or ever so imprudent, or ever so little likely to be necessary to each other’s ultimate comfort.

PERSUASION

On the inevitability of young love, and the need for emotional occupation:

He was, at that time, a remarkably fine young man, with a great deal of intelligence, spirit and brilliancy; and Anne an extremely pretty girl, with gentleness, modesty, taste, and feeling. Half the sum of attraction, on either side, might have been enough, for he had nothing to do, and she had hardly any body to love; but the encounter of such lavish recommendations could not fail. They were gradually acquainted, and when acquainted, rapidly and deeply in love.

PERSUASION

The violence of young love:

… the tyrannic influence of youth on youth …

EMMA

Love at first sight?:

‘Will you tell me how long you have loved him?’

‘It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.’

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

On the duties of romantic love:

Marianne would have felt herself very inexcusable had she been able to sleep at all the first night after parting from Willoughby …

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

On the love-prone personality:

Harriet was one of those, who, having once begun, would be always in love.

EMMA

On getting ahead of oneself:

A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

The ideal mate … a mythical beast?:

I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter into all my feelings; the same books, the same music must charm us both … the more I know of the world, the more am I convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

On the kinship of loving spirits:

Any thing interests between those who love; and any thing will serve as introduction to what is near the heart.

EMMA

Talk as the food of love:

Though a very few hours spent in the hard labour of incessant talking will dispatch more subjects than can really be in common between any two rational creatures, yet with lovers it is different. Between them no subject is finished, no communication is even made, till it has been made at least twenty times over.

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

On love’s sickness:

This sensation of listlessness, weariness, stupidity, this disinclination to sit down and employ myself, this feeling of every thing’s being dull and insipid about the house! – I must be in love …

EMMA

At what moment can love be said to start?:

I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew I had begun.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

Love, like charity, should begin at home:

As to any real knowledge of a person’s disposition that Bath, or any public place, can give – it is all nothing; there can be no knowledge. It is only by seeing women in their own homes, among their own set, just as they always are, that you can form any just judgement. Short of that, it is all guess and luck – and will generally be ill-luck.

EMMA

On the joys of feeling just a little in love:

She was very often thinking of him, and quite impatient for a letter, that she might know how he was, how were his spirits … But, on the other hand, she could not admit herself to be unhappy, nor, after the first morning, to be less disposed for employment than usual; she was still busy and cheerful; and, pleasing as he was, she could yet imagine him to have faults; and farther, though thinking of him so much, and as she sat drawing or working, forming a thousand amusing schemes for the progress and close of their attachment, fancying interesting dialogues, and inventing elegant letters, the conclusion of every imaginary declaration on his side was that she refused him.

EMMA

Men may have to be prompted into love:

There is so much of gratitude or vanity in almost any attachment, that it is not safe to leave any to itself. We can all begin freely – a slight preference is natural enough; but there are very few of us who have heart enough to be really in love without encouragement. In nine cases out of ten, a woman had better show more affection than she feels.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

A Lakeland holiday for one crossed in love:

Adieu to disappointment and spleen. What are men to rocks and mountains?

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

On compatibility

It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy; – it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

Economy of affability:

I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.

(Letter to her sister Cassandra, 24 December 1798)

What friends are for:

Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.

NORTHANGER ABBEY

Qualified euphoria, as the heroine of ‘Jack and Alice’, written when Jane Austen was twelve, makes a new friend:

The perfect form, the beautifull face, and elegant manners of Lucy so won on the affections of Alice that when they parted, which was not till after Supper, she assured her that except her Father, Brother, Uncles, Aunts, Cousins and other relations, Lady Williams, Charles Adams and a few dozen more of particular freinds, she loved her better than almost any other person in the world.

Faint friendship:

I respect Mrs Chamberlayne for doing her hair well, but cannot feel a more tender sentiment.

(Letter to her sister Cassandra, 12 May 1801)

Nothing pleases us like the success of our friends … unless of course it’s their failure:

Mrs Allen was now quite happy – quite satisfied with Bath. She had found some acquaintance, had been so lucky too as to find in them the family of a most worthy old friend; and, as the completion of good fortune, had found these friends by no means so expensively dressed as herself.

NORTHANGER ABBEY

On the dangers of an unequal friendship:

I think her the very worst sort of companion that Emma could possibly have. She knows nothing herself, and looks upon Emma as knowing every thing. She is a flatterer in all her ways; and so much the worse, because undesigned. Her ignorance is hourly flattery.

EMMA

Sheer inertia shores up some friendships, suggests the fifteen-year-old author in ‘Lesley Castle’:

To tell you the truth, our freindship arose rather from Caprice on her side than Esteem on mine. We spent two or three days together with a Lady in Berkshire with whom we both happened to be connected. During our visit, the Weather being remarkably bad, and our party particularly stupid, she was so good as to conceive a violent partiality for me, which very soon settled into a downright Freindship, and ended in an established correspondence. She is probably by this time as tired of me, as I am of her; but as she is too polite and I am too civil to say so, our letters are still as frequent and affectionate as ever, and our Attachment as firm and sincere as when it first commenced.