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This passage is adapted from material published in 2006.[/br] Jane Austen`s relationship to Romanticism has long been a vexed one. Although her dates (1775–1817) 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 McGann, for example, insists that Austen does not espouse the Romantic ideology. Anne Mellor declares that Austen, along with other "leading women intellectuals 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 Austen`s affinities with one or more of the male Romantic poets. A special issue of the Wordsworth Circle (Autumn 1976) 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 Wordsworth`s poetry and other key works from the period. Recently, three books have appeared (by Clara Tuite, William Galperin, and William Deresiewicz) 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.

The present essay seeks to contribute to this goal of firmly integrating Austen within the Romantic movement and canon. It does so by pointing out affinities between Austen and a writer with whom she has not commonly been associated: John Keats. Most comparisons of Austen and the Romantic poets have focused on Wordsworth and Byron, whose works we know she read. Although Austen could not have read Keats`s poems, which only began to appear in print during the last years of her life, and there is no evidence that Keats knew Austen`s novels, a number of important similarities can be noted in these writers` works that provide further evidence to link Austen with the Romantic movement, especially the period of second-generation Romanticism when all of her novels were published.