Thursday, November 27, 2025

The Familiar Suitor Problem in Jane Austen's Novels

Pride and Prejudice & Sense and Sensibility Desk Organizer

"You will meet a tall, handsome stranger." That fortuneteller style promise is what many consider the epitome of romance. You meet a stranger, your eyes lock, and you take a fatal hit from Cupid's bow. Popular films and paperback novels have made that standard.

Stranger danger and fascination

In Jane Austen's novels, things work a little differently, though she does also play with the fascination people, especially romantically inclined young women, have with the attractive outsider. If familiarity breeds contempt, than its opposite breeds fascination. As the person is not a fully known quantity like the members of the "four and twenty" families one may dine with regularly in the country, there is the introduction of a spark of intrigue in getting to learn more about them and what their lives consist of elsewhere.

The mystery of their lives may also include a scandal or even a crime, which Catherine Moreland considers in her flights of fancy. But that hint of danger can add an extra frisson that a heroine may find attractive as we see in Marianne's response to Willoughby. Emma, on the other hand, decides to have a kind of controlled crush when Frank Churchill enters the picture and engages in a flirtation with her to conceal the fact that he has entered into a secret engagement.

Breaking out of the friend zone

Of course, Emma ends up not marrying a stranger at all but her brother-in-law, who has been a regular in her house for years. In fact, making that transition from from the brotherly relationship one has in the friend zone to romantic interest is a challenge for both the hero and heroine of Emma, as it is for Mansfield Park.

In the first chapter of Mansfield Park, the general rule that boys and girls who grow up in proximity to each other like brother and sister are much less likely to be attracted to each other than they would be if they meet as grownup strangers is explained by Mrs. Norris when prevailing on Sir Thomas to give a home to Fanny price:

You are thinking of your sons—but do not you know that, of all things upon earth, that is the least likely to happen, brought up as they would be, always together like brothers and sisters? It is morally impossible. I never knew an instance of it. It is, in fact, the only sure way of providing against the connexion. Suppose her a pretty girl, and seen by Tom or Edmund for the first time seven years hence, and I dare say there would be mischief. The very idea of her having been suffered to grow up at a distance from us all in poverty and neglect, would be enough to make either of the dear, sweet-tempered boys in love with her. But breed her up with them from this time, and suppose her even to have the beauty of an angel, and she will never be more to either than a sister.

Mrs. Norris is mostly correct. Edmund does seem to regard Fanny as another sister but not as anything more than that. It takes some revelations about the moral failings of the strangers who bring down his actual sister to make him realize that the steadfast Fanny will serve him better than the attractive and sparkling Mary Crawford.

Emma & Mr. Knightley Ceramic Tile

In Emma, Mr. Knightley never makes the mistake of falling for anyone other than Emma (at least as far as we see in the novel). However, it takes Emma's fear that it might happen -- when Harriet admits to being in love with him -- to jolt her into acknowledging how she really feels about Mr. Knightley (chapter 47).

A mind like hers, once opening to suspicion, made rapid progress; she touched, she admitted, she acknowledged the whole truth. Why was it so much worse that Harriet should be in love with Mr. Knightley than with Frank Churchill? Why was the evil so dreadfully increased by Harriet’s having some hope of a return? It darted through her with the speed of an arrow that Mr. Knightley must marry no one but herself!

Here Cupid's arrow finally marks Emma but only many years after she first met Mr. Knightley. This is a love born of a spark maintained over time rather than a burst of flame that strikes all at once. And there's the rub because the pattern of their relationship has been set as brother and sister for so long. In fact, the dialog brings that up when they dance 10 chapters earlier in the book:

'Whom are you going to dance with?' asked Mr. Knightley.

She hesitated a moment, and then replied, 'With you, if you will ask me.'

'Will you?' said he, offering his hand.

'Indeed I will. You have shown that you can dance, and you know we are not really so much brother and sister as to make it at all improper.'

'Brother and sister! no, indeed.'

So they established that there is no fear of regarding their relationship as incestuous. But there is still the obstacle of breaking out of the friend zone, which Mr. Knightley grapples with just before he declares himself in chapter 49. Emma had just stopped Mr. Knightley from speaking because she really fears he will confess his love for Harriet. Then she realizes that he was pained by her response and lets him know she will listen:

'I stopped you ungraciously, just now, Mr. Knightley, and, I am afraid, gave you pain. But if you have any wish to speak openly to me as a friend, or to ask my opinion of any thing that you may have in contemplation -- as a friend, indeed, you may command me. I will hear whatever you like. I will tell you exactly what I think.'

'As a friend!' repeated Mr. Knightley. 'Emma, that I fear is a word -- No, I have no wish -- Stay, yes, why should I hesitate? I have gone too far already for concealment. Emma, I accept your offer, extraordinary as it may seem, I accept it, and refer myself to you as a friend. Tell me, then, have I no chance of ever succeeding?'

Watch on Totally Jane Austen

He then communicates even without words, and Emma finds herself speechless, and that leads to the most romantic line in this book, "If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more."

Yet they dream of Darcy

Yet women still tend to swoon far more over Darcy -- the outsider hero -- than they do over Mr. Knightley -- the familiar suitor. There are also far more film and television adaptions of Pride and Prejudice than there are of Emma. That would indicate that while Jane Austen was able to center a romantic novel around the more modern type of relationship that bring together two equals who marry their best friends, people still fall for the fairytale plot of the outsider coming in and rescuing the heroine to earn her love.