Valentine’s Day, the celebration of lovers, dates back to the Middle Ages. Yet Jane Austen – often described as the mother of the romance novel, albeit by people who haven’t read her very carefully -- never mentions today’s most romantic of all holidays.
Or does she?
At least as far back as R.W. Chapman, the legendary editor who brought out the first scholarly editions of Austen’s work in the 1920s and -30s, Janeites have scoured Austen’s novels for hints to the dates on which events are supposed to be taking place.
Sometimes these are explicitly provided, as when Mr. Bingley reminds Elizabeth Bennet that the Netherfield ball took place on November 26. More often, however, they must be inferred from subtler clues that link a particular novel’s chronology to the almanacs for specific calendar years.
In 1986, the Austen scholar Jo Modert noted that if we take Emma – published at the end of 1815 – to be set in 1813-14, then internal clues indicate that its major events correlate with church holidays. Modert’s sleuthing uncovered fascinating evidence of Austen’s cleverness -- for instance, the fact that it is Shrove Tuesday, traditionally the religious holiday on which Christian believers were supposed to confess their sins, when Frank Churchill nearly tells Emma about his secret engagement to Jane Fairfax.
But the best known, and most delightful, of Modert’s discoveries is Austen’s hidden reference to Valentine’s Day – which, it turns out, marks the arrival of the piano that Frank secretly sends to Jane. And as the crafty Frank tells Emma in chapter 26, “Your reasonings carry my judgment along with them entirely . . . . now I can see [the gift] in no other light than as an offering of love."