Jane Austen (1775-1817) and Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) owe their literary fame to the same psychological insight: multiple personality.

This is widely recognized about Dostoevsky, but not about Jane Austen.

Let me quote the relevant quotes from past posts.

Dostoevsky

The Double involves “the splitting of Golyadkin’s personality and the appearance of the double: the internal process is simply given dramatic reality”…“Golyadkin’s double represents the…internal split…Dostoevsky’s first grasp of a character-type that became his hallmark as a writer. Golyadkin is the ancestor of all of Dostoevsky’s great split personalities, who are always confronted with their quasi-doubles or doubles (whether in the form of other ‘real’ characters, or as hallucinations) in the memorable scenes of the great novels…”…“The mature Dostoevsky felt that the discovery of this ‘underground’ type, whose first version is Golyadkin, constituted his greatest contribution to Russian literature…its ultimate source lay in Dostoevsky’s own psychology.” [Search “Dostoevsky double” to read the whole post and find the source of this quote.]

Jane Austen

In an article published by the Jane Austen Society of North America, Professor of English Bruce Stovel makes the case that “Emma Woodhouse is a split character, with two very different sides,” that she has a “split self,” and that she “often does not attend to, or become conscious of, thoughts and feelings that are in her mind…Most important, Emma is, unknown to herself, in love with Mr. Knightley from long before the novel starts.” Indeed, “Emma’s unacknowledged love for Mr. Knightley provides the novel with its comic plot, much as Elizabeth Bennet’s unconscious love for Mr. Darcy does in Pride and Prejudice and as Captain Wentworth’s unacknowledged love for Anne Elliot does in Persuasion.” [Search “Austen Emma” for full past posts.]

As I explain in the past posts, you have to distinguish ambivalence about loving someone from already being truly in love with someone and truly not knowing it. The only way to already be in love with someone and truly not know it is to have one personality who is not in love, and another personality who is, with the former not knowing what the latter is thinking and feeling. In ambivalence, you know you have mixed feelings, you resolve them in favor of love, and you may have some residual ambivalence, which you choose to ignore. But in multiple personality, as soon as circumstances shift the balance of power to the personality who already fully loves, that personality takes right over, and love is full and immediate, because it was there all along.