Austen's Literary Time

In this essay, Amit Yahav examines what Austen’s novels tell us about the value of spare time for fiction readers. Such value, she argues, is various. This essay considers how Austen’s Persuasion, Mansfield Park, and Northanger Abbey develop these various options, but it focuses on the cases made by the latter two for literature’s pure entertainment value. Austen-studies, as much as novel-studies more generally, tend to focus on the professional craft, the didactic mission, or the practices of knowledge conveyed in fiction. This essay highlights, by contrast, Austen’s positive valuations of a kind of leisure reading that leaves few long-term traces, provides only temporary pleasures, and solicits its effects less on the mind or on the heart, than on the body.