Pride, Prejudice and Persuasion

The title of this conference is obviously a play on Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, and I’m afraid I have picked up shamelessly on the titles of her two other novels that don’t just have a proper name as the title, not just to show that I come from an English teaching background, but because Pride, Prejudice and Persuasion are in fact what I want to talk about. I also rather like the notion of building an address on sexuality around Jane Austen, not because I am going to make a revelation that in fact she was lesbian or that there is a gay sub-text in any of the novels, but because there is a nice piquancy in bringing together an author who many, rightly or wrongly, see as the epitome of gentility and manners, with the notion of sexuality. I actually have a good precedent for doing this. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who some of you will know as one of the founders of Queer Theory, wrote a notorious article entitled “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl ” (Sedgwick, 1993, pp. 109-129). In fact, she hadn’t even written the article, only announced it in a conference program, when the press picked it up and it became a major scandal. It was seen as an example of the ludicrous extremities to which recent theory could go. It is not so much wha