In her essay Jane Austen and John Keats: Negative capability, Romance and Reality, Beth Lau connects the two Romantic writers previously not commonly associated. Most comparisons of Austen and Romantic poets are with Wordsworth and Byron, as it is known she read their works. Alas, even without her reading works of John Keats, parallels between ideas in their works can be made (Lau, 2006). The fact remains that concepts of Romantic period, canon and ideology are based on the assumption of shared characteristics among key writers of the era (Lau, 2006).
The term negative capability was first used by a Romantic poet John Keats. As a concept used in literature it draws to the necessity of the creative process, and alludes to Coleridge’s formulation of
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But as Duane also explains later on, the novel deals with issues much bigger and less socially acceptable than that of unwanted adopted sister who slaves for her rich family. Austen’s novels are generally not to be taken literally, as most of them deal in metaphors and parodies of “situations of modern women”. Mansfield Park starts very innocently, a wealthy family taking a poor relative, a young girl, under their wing and ends up on a “scandal”, a social taboo. With that follows that the novel is far from conservative and actually deals with copious amounts of guilt. Of course, Austen herself lets us know of the guilt, and her personal lack of care at the notion of it, as a voice of the narrator in the last chapter, which begins with