Isabel Dempsey takes a look at the ongoing messages of love and loss we can take from the writer’s work

Jane Austen may be turning 250 this year, but her tales of love, both gained and lost, are still as relevant as ever. While she is best (mis)remembered by Colin Firth’s see-through shirt as a soaking wet Mr Darcy, her novels aren’t all loving gazes and certain happiness. Knotted in between are heartbreaks, grave errors and plenty of woe. 

Breakups, both past and present, have always been messy and confusing affairs. How much grieving is too much? Have I just lost my one chance of future security? Is my life literally over? But never fear, there are still many lessons to be learnt from the trials and tribulations of Austen’s heroines today. 

Lesson One: Don’t overindulge in your emotions

Utter the words “Austen” and “heartbreak” together and the first image that will pop to mind for most is Sense and Sensibility’s Marianne. When her father’s death leaves her without sufficient income, Marianne believes that Willoughby will be the answer to her romantic and financial prayers, only for him to cruelly abandon her for a much wealthier wife. Learning of her lost love’s engagement, Marianne is so distraught that she almost dies of grief. 

According to Heather Thomas of the Jane Austen Society, Austen doesn’t approve of Marianne’s overly emotional displays. Much like how your friends grow bored of you whining about your ex, there is a limit to the amount of dramatics those around you can take until they start to lose interest. For Thomas, the main lesson the books can teach us is that: “It doesn’t do you any good to indulge yourself. It’s not only a risk to you, but it’s an imposition on everybody around you. One of the things I think Austen admired in her heroines is stoicism.”

Marianne’s distress is heightened by the social embarrassment she has brought upon herself and her family. Gallivanting around the town with Willoughby as if the pair were engaged (when they were very much not) would’ve been the height of social impropriety.

Thomas believes that humiliation still plays a role in heartbreak today. “You’ve been rejected, you’ve misjudged the whole thing, and you’ve let yourself in for this relationship to a greater extent than turns out to have been sensible.”

Lesson Two: But don’t hold all your emotions inside either

Austen fan and student, Asmaani, however, disagrees with Thomas’s black-and-white interpretation. While Marianne spends her time moping after Willoughby, her sister Elinor is contending with a lost love of her own when she discovers that her beloved Edward Ferrars is secretly betrothed to another. 

Unlike Marianne, Elinor keeps her emotions locked firmly inside. So firmly, in fact, that she almost threatens to break. “They’re both on such extremes that neither is really the appropriate response to heartbreak. I felt that it was about finding a middle ground,” says Asmaani. 

Freya Johnston, author and professor at the University of Oxford, adds that there are points where Elinor’s attempts to keep her emotions locked inside border on “excessive control”. She believes that Austen saw much more of herself in the volatile Marianne than the ever-stoic Elinor: “It isn’t necessarily saying that Elinor is the model to follow.”

Lesson Three: Love doesn’t always conquer all… sometimes money matters

For Austen’s heroines, it can be just as dangerous to hide the matters of the heart from the world as it is to reveal them. In Pride and Prejudice, the eldest sister Jane, makes the mistake of keeping her feelings for Mr Bingley too close to her chest. Bingley is not convinced she truly loves him and so is persuaded to move to London in pursuit of a wealthier wife. 

Upon the death of their father, daughters were entirely reliant on the charity of their male relatives for their survival. While these socioeconomic concerns may be less relevant to the 21st century career woman, that doesn’t mean they are entirely divorced from modern matters of the heart. 

Finance and family were certainly a concern for Austen fanfiction writer Natasja Rose, when she was persuaded not to date a man from a lower socioeconomic background. Rose, who intensely embroiders during break-ups (“mainly for the fact that I get to stab something thousands of times”), thought her ex was fine but his family was not. She would’ve had to sign a prenup if things went any further. 

While Austen’s protagonists are lucky enough to receive the full package, the women on the sidelines are often forced to make sacrifices for their survival. Austen herself accepted a proposal from her former neighbour Harris Bigg-Wither – and with it the chance to solve all her financial worries – only to reject it the next day. It seems that she couldn’t bring herself to wed when matrimony might take her one true love: her writing. 

Lesson Four: Sometimes second chances do work

In Persuasion, the 27-year-old Anne Elliot has all but given up on love. Her family persuaded her to ‘breakup’ with her first love, Wentworth, because they did not consider him to be of a high enough socioeconomic status. Eight years later, however, Wentworth is back in her life – as a high-earning naval captain. But is there any chance he would take her back? 

Compared to the flighty Marianne, Heather Thomas sees Anne as a much more Austen-approved example. She shows that “you could be heartbroken, but you could carry on”. While Anne isn’t exactly warbling All By Myself with a bottle of wine in hand (à la Bridget Jones), fans may contest that she doesn’t exactly “carry on” either. She quite literally spends the entire book unable to move on.

For modern Austen fans, this struggle to get over past loves is equally enduring. Asmaani was so inspired by Anne’s inability to move on that she decided to give her now boyfriend a second chance. 

She met him during Freshers Week and the pair got together. Feeling embarrassed she warned him “don’t talk to me again”, a request made all the more difficult by the fact that they were tutorial partners. A few days later he came back, asking her to give it another shot, and the pair are still together years later. “I guess what Anne Elliot experienced in eight years I experienced in eight days,” she jokes.

Lesson Five: There is always hope

As the BBC’s new Miss Austen mini-series shows us, Austen’s own sister Cassandra delayed marriage so that her fiancé could earn more money for their nuptials, only for him to die from yellow fever while on a military expedition to the Caribbean. 

Johnston explains that some people have even interpreted Persuasion’s Anne as a portrait of Cassandra. “Austen dwells so intensely inside her,” she says, “and that itself is kind of consoling, that someone is paying attention to a character that no one else is taking any notice of.” 

Anne is lucky enough to discover that Wentworth has not forgotten her as readily as she presumed. And while the same may not always be true of real-world heartbreaks, it does provide hope. “I think the most consoling thing about Austen,” says Johnston, “is that people tend to get second chances. Austen is a very forgiving writer and maybe that’s what helps readers feel better.” 

Andrea Gibb, the screenwriter of Miss Austen, agrees: “I think what she’s shining a light on, is the capacity for people to fall in love with the wrong person. What is so fantastic about Austen’s novels and why they have endured is because she shows that characters learn lessons from these experiences, good or bad, and that they use them in order to carry on.”