How did Romanticism influence Jane Austen?

How did Romanticism influence Jane Austen? Not much if at
all. The author of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and
Sensibility lived from 1775 to 1817. The Romantic Period of English
literature is usually dated from 1798, with the publication of Wordsworth and
Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, to 1850. One biographer notes
that

she
didn't sell a novel until 1803, her first actual publication was in 1811, and all of the
novels whose first drafts had been written before 1800 were revised by her after 1809
before they were published -- so that her most important period of literary activity was
1810-1817.

So Romanticism was
too new a "movement" to have much of an influence on her writing. In a letter to her
sister, Austen states that she has just finished reading a poem by Byron, so she was
aware of the literature.

The term "Romantic" does not refer
to love and romance, but to a ideal of looking to imagination as the greatest mental
faculty; we not only see the world around us but we create it when we think back on it
and imagine it. Nature was important to the Romantics as well. They were the first "back
to nature" buffs and believed that the "noble savage" was the happiest of all
people.