LAUSR

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen's novels are about courtship and marriage. But it is a truth almost as universally ig? nored that they are also very much about sex. As a social force, as an embodiment of value systems, as an index of personal maturity, the role of marriage in Jane Austen's work has been ably and extensively examined. But as the consummation of sexual attraction between a man and a woman and as the reconciliation of "maleness" and "femaleness," her conception of marriage has seldom been discussed. One reason for the imbalance of emphasis lies in our preconceptions about her personality. Few critics consciously share Marvin Mudrick's view of a Jane Austen armored in impenetrable wit and muslin against the "personally involving aspects of sex" and the "unknown adult com? mitment of sexual love." But his vision of her as a defensively ironic "genteel spinster" does represent a popular and subtly pervasive stereo? type. The phrases he uses about her?"routed by the sexual question," "fogged in bourgeois morality," opposed to "sexual vitality," and in fa? vor of "frigidity as a standard of sexual conduct"?while inaccurate in themselves, serve to suggest the kinds of presuppositions to which Jane Austen has been subject and which have rendered the sexual aspects of her work less visible than they should be.1 A second reason that the sexual element in Jane Austen's fiction has tended to be ignored lies in her art itself. The coolness and deftness of her surface and the interplay of irony and wit have made her novels seem more purely cerebral than they are and have reinforced the pre? sumptions about her temperament. A merciless satirist of false or excess? ive feeling, she has wrongly been seen as suspicious of all feeling; and her very desire to subsume sex within marriage has somehow made her seem