TITLE:
Beyond the Words: Jane Austen and the Happiness Problem
AUTHORS:
Cuifeng Ouyang
KEYWORDS:
Jane Austen’s Novel, Happiness, Love, Economic Condition
JOURNAL NAME:
Creative Education,
Vol.16 No.11,
November
18,
2025
ABSTRACT: Happiness is an important theme in Jane Austen’s novels. In this study, the author points to how social, economic, and cultural conditions of the nineteenth-century Britain worked together to create a complex phenomenon of happiness. Focusing on Jane Austen’s works, this study analyzes how happiness is explored through the lenses of love, economic security, personal growth, and socially appropriate marriage. I argue that Jane Austen’s novels construct an “ideologized discourse” on happiness, which is a narrative framework that naturalizes societal norms while masking their constructed nature through literary narration. This study concludes that the discourse in Jane Austen’s works plays a part in shaping the collective British psyche and notions of Britishness by codifying a middle-class ideal of happiness related to moral virtue, economic prudence, and social integration.