Jane Austen and the Almanac

Critics have often observed the temporal regularity of Jane Austen’s novels, and some have suggested that Austen arranged the events of her novels with the aid of contemporary almanacs. In this article, I argue that Austen’s representation of time is indebted to the genre of the almanac but not for the reasons that critics have assumed. By considering nineteenth-century reader responses to almanacs alongside the theme of matchmaking in Emma, I show that rather than a figure for regular and authoritative time, as the almanac has been for theorists of realism and critics of Jane Austen, the almanac acted instead as a metaphor for a recursive model of time that promoted comparisons between personal and communal time and between forecasts and outcomes. Austen expresses Emma’s matchmaking aspirations in the lexicon of the almanac, and her extended comparison between Emma and a forecasting astrologer both connects the novel’s romantic trajectories with the way contemporary readers tested and rejected their almanacs’ forecasts and alludes to the contemporary controversy surrounding almanacs’ prophetic content. My conclusion invites scholars to reconsider the traditional association between objective time, Jane Austen, and the nineteenthcentury realist novel, and I make a case for the influence of the almanac on nineteenthcentury reading practices.