Family Resemblance: Displacement and Loss in Jane Austen’s Novels

Abstract

The news that her family were to leave Steventon to live in Bath has often been thought a key moment in Jane Austen's life. She is said to have fainted in distress. This essay does not mine Austen's novels for clues to the author’s personal history, or suggest that the loss of a beloved home is directly reproduced in any of her novels, though this has been suggested, but argues instead that Austen’s fictions do show the impress of this traumatic experience in a more elusive and in-depth mode. In all of her novels, the motif of the loss of home plays a role, though quite differently in each. I draw on the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘family resemblance’ to provide a conceptual framework, and to illuminate the affinities between the novels and the author's life.