Is Jane Austen a romance novelist? Discuss.
Or, if you’re not interested in revisiting your test-taking days, you could just travel to Bloomington, Indiana, where Indiana University’s rare-books library is hosting what looks like a fantastic exhibition on the history of the romance novel.
“Love in the Library: The Romance Novel in English,” which opened at the Lilly Library last month and runs through February 15, features dozens of rare or not-so-rare examples (disputed or otherwise) of the genre, from Sense and Sensibility to The Kiss Quotient. A local news channel reported on the exhibition and offered a sneak peek at the Jane Austen display case (starting at 1:09), which includes a nice-looking copy of the famous “Peacock Edition” of Pride and Prejudice, among other volumes.
The curator of the new exhibition, Rebecca Baumann, has intelligent things to say about why the romance genre is so often disrespected or overlooked (hint: it’s written primarily by and for women) and why it shouldn’t be (same, among other reasons). In 2021, the Lilly acquired a significant romance collection from rare-book dealer Rebecca Romney, becoming, it claims, “the first major American special collections library to take romance seriously.”
Alas, the Lilly—which really should know better, being a library and all--leads off its exhibition publicity with the following quote attributed to “Jane Austen, Mansfield Park”: “There are as many forms of love as there are moments in time."
Sigh. As blog readers know, this quote does not come from Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park; it comes from Patricia Rozema’s screenplay for her 1999 film adaptation of Mansfield Park.
I’d still love to see the exhibit–but I do wish the library took sourcing Jane Austen quotations as seriously as it takes romance novels.
sigh. if we can't depend on a library to confirm its sources, how can we expect anyone else to do so? that explains so much...
I came of age during second-wave feminism and it was the feminists who vehemently decried romance novels. It is interesting to me to see how they are held up as a mode of female empowerment now. And ouch, that misquote hurts.