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40. Jane Austen Jane Austens relationship to Romanticism has long been a vexed one. Although her dates place her squarely within the period, she traditionally has been studied apart from the male poets whose work defined British Romanticism for most of the twentieth century. In the past her novels were thought to follow an Augustan mode at odds with the Romantic ethos. Even with the advent of historicist and feminist criticism, which challenged many previous characterizations of Austen as detached from the major social, political, and aesthetic currents of her time, she continued to be distinguished from her male contemporaries. Jerome McCann, for example, insists that Austen does not espouse the Romantic ideology. Anne Mellor declares that Austen, along with other leading women intellectual and writers of the day did not, participate in the Romantic spirit of the age but instead embraced an alternative ideology that Mellor labels feminine Romanticism. To be sure, some critics throughout the years have argued for Austens affinities with one or more of the male Romantic poets. A special issue of the Wordsworth Circle was devoted to exploring connections between Austen and her male contemporaries. Clifford Siskin in his historicist study of Romanticism argued that Austen does participate in the same major innovation, the naturalization of belief in a developing self, as characterizes Wordsworths poetry and other key works from the period. Recently, three books have appeared that in various ways treat Austen as a Romantic writer and together signal a shift in the tendency to segregate the major novelist of the age from the major poets. | 
