Jane Austen’s Guide to Good Relationships

Really? Jane Austen? A woman who died in 1817? What can she tell us about relationships today? Our world is so different from hers. Her characters speak in what almost seems like a foreign language. And the romantic relations between partners back then were so restricted . . . how can their problems be relevant to us? Yet the men and women in her novels struggle with the same passions we have, and they ask the same questions: Is this person the one? What is love anyway? Do I want to spend my life with him (or her)? How can I nurture a satisfying relationship? A significant amount of our happiness in life depends on how good our relationships are. Just as in Jane Austen’s time, learning to love and be loved and having truly close and committed partners are major goals in life, regardless of our material station. Austen had a keen insight into the ways we can create and maintain good relationships. In her books, she shows that to have good relationships, people need to have good character arising out of emotional maturity and a strong sense of themselves. In this book, Ronald Richardson draws on his experience as a marital counselor to unpack this knowledge for us, using examples from Jane Austen’s stories to reveal how you can make your own relationships better.