At any given time, I can usually be counted on to be reading a Jane Austen novel. It doesn’t matter how many times I’ve read them before; every time I find something new to enjoy.
And let me tell you something: Jane Austen is perfect for Valentine’s Day.
Her books are often seen as a satire of gentrified country life, or rom-com love stories.
Which they are.
But, I think I am versed enough in her work to be able to say that Miss Austen was very astute not only in her observations about life and people, but about love. She was a practical person, and she believed, rightfully so, that there was more than just one person out there who was capable of making someone else happy. She believed that love was not always perfect, but that it makes us strive to be our best selves, even though there will be times we will fail.
That being said, she was also a romantic. Anyone who has read Persuasion will know that.
So on this day of romance, my gift to you, Dear Reader, is a little collection of some of Austen’s most romantic moments in her novels. Enjoy, and a happy Valentine’s Day to you.
1) Sense and Sensibility
“If I could but know his heart, everything would become easy.”
“I come here with no expectations, only to profess, now that I am at liberty to do so, that my heart is and always will be yours.”
“What do you know of my heart? What do you know of anything but your own suffering? For weeks, Marianne, I’ve had this pressing on me without being at liberty to speak of it to a single creature. It was forced on me by the very person whose prior claims ruined all my hope. I have endured her exaltations again and again whilst knowing myself to be divided from Edward forever. Believe me, Marianne, had I not been bound to silence I could have provided proof enough of a broken heart, even for you.”
“I can feel no sentiment of approbation inferior to love.”
2) Pride and Prejudice
“A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”
“In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
“There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well.”
“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 that I had begun.”
“To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love.”
“Her heart did whisper that he had done it for her.”
“I have been meditating on the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow.”
“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.”
“We neither of us perform to strangers.”
3) Emma
“I may have lost my heart, but not my self control.”
“If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.”
“Men of sense, whatever you may choose to say, do not want silly wives.”
“She was one of those who, having once begun, would be always in love.”
“it’s such a happiness when good people get together.”
4) Mansfield Park
“But there certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world as there are pretty women to deserve them.”
“No man dies of love but on the stage, Mr. Crawford.”
“Good-humored, unaffected girls, will not do for a man who has been used to sensible women. They are two distinct orders of being.”
“You must really begin to harden yourself to the idea of being worth looking at.”
5) Northanger Abbey
“I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”
“To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.”
“Beware how you give your heart.”
“Where the heart is really attached, I know very well how little one can be pleased with the attention of anybody else.”
“A young woman in love always looks like Patience on a monument smiling at Grief.”
“Friendship is really the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.”
6) Persuasion
“You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope… I have loved none but you.”
“There could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison.”
“All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one: you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.”
“A man does not recover from such devotion of the heart to such a woman. He ought not; he does not.”
“Anne hoped she had outlived the age of blushing; but the age of emotion she certainly had not.”
“We certainly do not forget you, so soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit.”
“Their union, she believed, could not divide her more from other men, than their final separation.”
“Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant.”
“She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older.”