"We acknowledge and celebrate Jane Austen as the mother of the English realist novel, but have you ever wondered why she insists on giving her mature heroines the 'perfect happiness' that can only be realised in the Romance? Romancing Jane Austen asks the reader to consider Austen's happy endings as a 'prophetic' rather than a merely 'illusory' answer to the contradiction that feminine subjectivity represents for history. Austen is still the most popular, enduring, and respected female writer in the English tradition. Her narrative formulas persist in various forms of adaptation and recirculation under the quite different representational conditions of contemporary literary and visual cultures. This admittedly romantic analysis claims that the six narratives we know and love have still more delightful surprises to yield to the open-minded reader. A happy ending for the feminine subject? Surely not - that would be against all the empirical odds."--Jacket.