Love in the time of Austen

FOLLOWING on the dainty heels of Hilary Davidson’s Jane Austen’s Wardrobe (Books, September 6, 2023) and with a canny Valentine’s Day publication date, comes another stance on the Austen age. As the writer acknowledges in the preface, all authors of such social histories owe a debt to Lawrence Stone’s The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800, published in 1977.

This challenged received wisdom by probing how the concept of ‘family’ changed over the early- modern period—in effect, from extended groups bound by economics to the ‘nuclear’ unit more familiar today—as well as signalling that intimate, personal or ‘domestic’ relations at all levels of society could, indeed should, be the subject of academic study. Since the 1970s, university courses in ‘gender studies’ and ‘women’s history’ have highlighted other yawning gaps in our under- standing of the past and, in the past decade, ‘emotions’ have become a popular sub-category in UK history departments.

As a renowned military historian and author of the weighty two-volume biography of the Duke of Wellington (Yale, 2013), the subject of the present study may seem, on the face of it, a bit of a departure. In fact, Rory Muir’s first incursion into Austen territory, to which Love and Marriage is clearly a companion, was in 2019 with Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune: