Conservatives should relish Austen, while Leftist loathe her.
Unmarried youth were expected to be chaste, respectable, subordinate to elders, religious, and productive.
Marriage was pursued with great seriousness & urgency. Leeching off parents, or loitering about with amusements, was frowned on - not because for casual accusations of idleness, but because survival depended on either productivity or familial wealth.
Fornication, if discovered, ruined one’s prospects.
Marrying up was encouraged; marrying for basic sustenance was a minimum. It wasn’t about feelings, it was about survival.
Austen’s heroines _did_ pursue feelings into marriage, but only because the available prospects ensured survival whichever choice she made; falling in passionate love for the guy who was filthy stinking absurdly rich was a bonus on top of adhering to all other social requirements.
The supporting characters who went after gambling & fornication were quickly cut off, while paid enough to get their lives straight long enough to politely get out of everyone else’s.
The saddest cases still managed to achieve union and self-sufficiency, coupled with someone who while maybe not affectionate did act with respect & responsibility.
That’s all quite “conservative”.
Leftists would be understandably outraged that society would press so hard for of-age children to seek out a permanent heterosexual church-sanctioned union, with women hoping for an economic step up and men seeking a submissive helpmate with desirable appearance. Furthermore, they would (and by their own axioms, should) be aghast at the severe rejection of anyone engaged in promiscuity, gender fluidity, unproductive occupations, etc.
Heck, as a “so conservative I’m to the right of the Tea Party” & “I’ve got a knife, let’s go camping” male, _I’m_ an Austen fan.
That’s a very good analysis. It’s interesting that if you watch modern Asian television shows - even those from “Communist’ China - you see most of these same virtues rewarded and vices punished. But American television, in its obsession with celebrating deviance, seems to go out of its way to reject even the slightest hint of Austen-like culture.