If the Dashwood sisters can find true love and Mr. Darcy can inspire a whole industry of erotic fanfiction, reading Jane Austen might really be the best thing to soothe one’s addled mind and remind us all that, sometimes, people really have adorable double marriages and miraculously recover from mysterious fevers. For soldiers returning from the World War I horror show, the bourgeois happiness achieved at the end of an Austen novel might have helped ease a despairing sense that the world is just a toilet bowl of human cruelty.
According to Dr. Paula Bryne, author of The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things and a fellow of Harris Manchester College, Oxford, soldiers returning from the ravaged European continent at the end of the World War I were sometimes prescribed a few Austen novels, which were supposedly able to “provide comfort” in a world seemingly out of joint. After all, Jane Austen did manage to gloss over some of the most violent European conflicts of the 19th century by not mentioning the Napoleonic Wars in any of her novels, so her work would be a safe bet for a veteran searching for a more outwardly peaceful world.