Abstract

"Pleasure is now, and ought to be, your business": Stealing Sexuality in Jane Austen's Juvenilia

Austen's Juvenilia, seen as a whole, represents a world in which young women consistently display excessive appetites--for food, drink, erotic pleasures, and material objects. While comic, such narrative excess also constitutes a pointed critique of the constraints Austen's society placed on women, constraints she not only exposes but also subverts by her young heroines' exuberant, even criminal refusal to deny their appetites and their demand for gratifications of all kinds. This essay appears in _Historicizing Romantic Sexuality_, a volume of _Romantic Circles Praxis Series_, prepared exclusively for Romantic Circles (http://www.rc.umd.edu/), University of Maryland.