Austen is therefore not ‘powerless’ in the presentation of ‘strong feelings’, but is instead engaging in a sustained exploration of her heroines’ intense emotional experiences and their need for sublimation through various means, including non-linguistic interactions with different bodies. 3 Such critiques fail to understand the broader aesthetic and social limitations preventing such feelings from being fully conveyed in her novels. Julia Kavanagh’s description of Austen’s ‘delicate mind’ attempts to render her as a conservative writer, whose satiric, detached prose (also lamented by Charlotte Brontë and Mark Twain) is supposedly unable to manifest ‘strong feelings’.

Characters who express insincere emotions or speak too freely (such as the Crawford siblings and Louisa Musgrove) are shown to bring about dangerous unrest in their disregard for established social customs and are contrasted dramatically with Fanny and Anne, who are capable of deeply felt, genuine emotions. Austen explores the societal pressures acting on her heroines, specifically the restrictive early nineteenth-century cultural norms surrounding courtship and decorum, which render the protagonists unable to express their true ‘strong feelings’ for fear of transgressing societal boundaries. 2 In contrast to earlier more wilful protagonists, such as Emma Woodhouse and Elizabeth Bennett, the two heroines Fanny Price and Anne Elliot are painfully socially repressed. 1 Frequent references, made by both the narrator and the characters themselves, to various Romantic poets and conventions (such as an exaltation of nature’s beauty) show an understanding of how particular sublime emotions cannot simply be ‘clothed with words’. This is expressed most notably by the Moral Sentimentalists and the Romantic poets, the latter of which posited the nature of literary inspiration as emotion initially ‘recollected in tranquillity’, which is later ‘contemplated’ to produce a ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’.

Through exploring the limits of language, and its inability to function at times of intense feeling, Austen refers to and engages with contemporary eighteenth-century philosophical and literary debates. Jane Austen’s central concern in her two later novels Mansfield Park and Persuasion is the means by which ‘strong feelings’ can be reliably communicated by characters and presented within literature itself.

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