Historically, the Romantic era has come to symbolize a time of change and desire in a social and political sense. In a time of revolutions abroad and reforms at home, one can see the importance of desire as a vehicle for change. Examining Byron, Austen, and Edgeworth in a new historicist style, different views on desire, its effect on fiction, and its inferred comments on society are presented. In Byron's "Manfred", the theme of desire concerns mainly knowledge and in the last acts, a need for forgiveness. In the opening scene, Manfred is presented as a Freudian character who seeks knowledge from supernatural forces. From this first scene one could «accuse Byron of having written Manfred with Faust open before him». However, Manfred's quest for Faustian knowledge is subverted into the desire to forget, which is ultimately satisfied with Manfred's death.MANFRED. The spirits I have raised abandon me, the spells I have studied baffle me, the remedy I feared has tortured me; I no longer rely on supernatural help, it has no power over the past and the future, until the past is swallowed up. in the darkness, […]If it were life to wear this sterility of spirit within me and be my grave, since I stopped justifying my actions to myself. This illustrates Manfred's transformation from a Faustian character into a Byronic hero. By sacrificing his desire for knowledge, Manfred questions himself, causing his character to detach himself from nature and desire death. If we apply Byron's life to this analysis we find parallels between Byron and his protagonist. In the context of exile and suspected incest, it might be suggested that Manfred's desire to be forgiven... in the center of the card... is supposed to represent "probable" characters and incidents of contemporary, especially "fashionable" life . or polite society, while the latter was thought to feature eccentric characters in unlikely circumstances and exotic or unusual locations. […] Because "romances" were believed to inspire a taste for the improbable and sensational, some accused them of exposing naïve readers to the allure of "speculation" and revolutionary violence. Therefore, from Kelly's critique we can see that "Romanticism" is believed to incite violence and rebellion against established orders, just as Byron would have hoped. However, it also allows us to demonstrate that Austen's conservatism shows desire as negative, romantic and un-British, so the importance of desire in Sense and Sensibility is that it allows for an allusion to the ideological differences of the time..