Jane Austen and the Happy Fall

Jane Austen’s novels commonly include falls, both moral and physical; indeed, Austen’s “imagination of disaster” seems curiously linked to the notion of falling. But her books positively radiate happiness, a concept both central to and contested in the philosophical debates of her day. These two categories of experience come together in the idea of the Happy Fall. By looking at how Mansfield Park (1814) and Persuasion (1817) respond to the model of the Happy Fall, we can better comprehend Austen’s understanding of the relationship between the happy and the good.