Austen and the Cultural Logic of Late Toryism

Abstract

This chapter revises accounts of the early nineteenth-century rightward turn in Britain by emphasizing that shift’s Tory character and affective dimension. Examining how the cultural logic of this ‘late’ Toryism took shape in and beyond political culture, the chapter takes up Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) as its central case. Austen’s novel was not only compatible with the reinvention of royal prerogative and increased emphasis on order but actively sought to bolster their operations. Rather than aligning Austen’s authorship entirely with this shift, however, detailed attention to the novel reveals challenges (in the guise of characters who exceed their ‘place’) to the harmonious workings of this wider cultural-political system. The chapter concludes by reflecting on how those elements of Mansfield Park that threaten to elude these channels of control—and the ‘wayward’ heroines of her novels, beginning with Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice—call the political status of Austen’s own writings into question.