Passionate Educations John Locke, Aphra Behn, and Jane Austen

Abstract

This article connects John Locke’s concept of uneasiness to Aphra Behn’s poem “On Desire: A Pindarick” and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. Behn and Austen offer a corrected reading of Locke’s overtly rationalist ideas. This comparison suggests the importance of passionate engagement as related to knowledge. This article uses a contemporary understanding of the long eighteenth-century passions to argue for how passionate experience and knowing might have occurred through the literary examples of Aphra Behn and Jane Austen.