The book was written from a female POV, in a time when women had limited options. Marrying for money is not the norm like it used to be, now that women are allowed to hold jobs. But ISTM gold-digging still very much exists, and the book’s premise is still easily understood.
I’d say marrying for survival isn’t necessary like it used to be. In Austen’s time, an unmarried gentlewoman MIGHT be able to get a job as a companion or governess - where she might be abused or raped - but there were fewer positions than unmarried women. If she wasn’t that lucky, she might find work at a school. There were some other minor professions, she might make a little money doing botanical illustrations or writing - but probably not enough to live on. Or she lived with her brothers - if she had any - or maybe one of her sisters’ husbands would take her in - if they managed to marry well, but that created a burden on her family.
If you look at the real lives of Austen, or Wollstonecraft, or the Brontes or even, sixty years later in the U.S., Louisa May Alcott - their lives were not easy - for each of them there were periods of poverty and dependence - and these were some of the most independent and talented women of their times. Austen wrote romantic comedies - the tone of desperation underneath them is hidden and needs a historical context to see.
It betrays a paucity of knowledge about the era and the writer. It conflates the late Georgian/ regency era where these books were written with the stereotypical late Victorian one.
I think this is completely false to Austen. It is a very male-centric and I think quite modern view – men in Austen’s time had total control over every single economic aspect of life, women had no economic power whatsoever, although they were expected to of course manage the housekeeping with their allowance.
She was sly all right – the intended meaning of the first line is, I think, is more or less, that a young man in possession of a fortune was the focus of every eligible young woman’s hopes and dreams, fully supported by the hopes and dreams of their families, who otherwise would have to somehow support them for the rest of their lives.
This is because young gentlewomen had zero other good options, and Austen thoroughly explores how awful those other options are, from marrying a poor man (vividly described desperation and squalor – see Mansfield Park), hiring oneself out as a governess (described brutally in Emma), and living out one’s life as a despised spinster (Miss Bates in Emma).
The “marriage ordeal” as some Austen essayist put it, is Austen’s main source of plot in all her books. She describes many bad marriages and a few memorably good ones (the Admiral and his wife in Persuasion, for example). She is romantic but at the same time so clear-sightedly realistic that her stories have endured remarkably, though the society she wrote for and about has vanished.
Um, exactly how? Still waiting for a detail or two. Austen was indeed writing during the Napoleonic Wars, an era when the influence of agricultural and industrial advances along with colonial opportunities were increasingly affecting, even destabilizing, the class of landed gentry about which she wrote. But she was very much a Tory, a voice for rural values, which she consistently contrasted with “city” values and new money gained by, horrors, trade. That’s decidedly part of her writing. But it doesn’t really affect that first line, does it?
I know both the era as a historian fairly well, and I know the writer well, and I’ve spent time studying Austen academically as a reflection of the social and economic history of women during the Regency and Georgian periods, and I see neither a lack of knowledge of the writer or era in Ulfrieda’s post.
:dubious:
Austen’s mother was from a cadet branch of an aristocratic family. Her father’s family were manufacturers. Her brothers (the non-insane ones anyway) earned their fortunes either in the Navy or the Militia and later in Banking.
Hell, Wentworth in *Persuasion * is very obviously a i) new man and ii) pretty much lifted from the real life of her brothers. As is William Price from Mansfield Park.
Austen while occasionally sympathetic to a particular member of the gentry was most certainly not a voice for “rural values”.
Huh. His last sentence–“Now, from a man, that’d be sad; but from a woman, it’d be downright disturbing”–makes it sound to me like he’s not in any way supporting the bulk of his post, or even offering it as failed humor, but rather is portraying what he thought Austen was snarkily saying. Do you read his last sentence differently?
(Edit: one of my personal failings is that I’ve never managed to get more than a few pages into Austen, so I have no informed opinion on what the sentence actually means–I’m reading the thread with interest for the different interpretations).
I would disagree with that. She didn’t like town life. She makes fun of town values - most notably in Sense and Sensibility. She didn’t like social climbers (see Walter and William Elliot). The values she holds up are very much rural English values of the Georgian era - the values that didn’t approve of the marital affairs of the ton, those that believed a person had a responsibility to be useful in a very 18th century gentry way - the way Mr. Knightley takes care of and admires the farmers on his land, that Anne Elliot visits the poor. Her heroes and heroines display those rural virtues - those she satirizes (the younger Mr. Dashwood and his wife, Sir Walter and his daughter) don’t.
Yes, I did. I stand corrected, if the above is indeed what he meant.
Austen’s biography was not always the mirror of her fiction. For example in Mansfield Park you might get the idea she thought amateur theatricals were immoral, but in life she delighted in them. Although the upheavals in France had an enormous impact on her life, you’d never know they existed if you just read her novels.
Gaining a fortune as a successful naval captain was a time-honored way for younger sons of the gentry (who did not inherit the land) to make their way. It was not new. The military and the clergy were the traditional professions for younger sons.
Mansfield Park in particular is an example of how she contrasts the landed, conservative, rural way of life, which she clearly approves of despite painting landowners as all too fallible, and the shallow, rootless, immoral way of life of London.
Again in Emma, Mr.Knightley, the landed but cash-poor rural squire, is the model of the right sort of manliness, while the more frivolous, callous, and/or selfish men are from the city or spend much of their time there.
Indeed there is not one scene of city life in Austen I can readily recall which she doesn’t use as an example of impoverishment, debauchery, or frivolity often leading to immorality, while her country scenes are the places where moral values can ultimately rise to the top.
Getting late here, I’ll just rebut this now, and deal with the rest later.
Military service was not a time honoured way in Austen’s time, as it would become in later Victorian times. The very idea of a standing Army was an anathema to many Brits and was treated with suspicion by most. The Army only became a professional organisation during the lengthy American/French/Napoleonic wars, something which happened in Austen’s lifetime. Before, the Army was not a place where you could earn much glory unless you were a senior commander like Marlborough.
As for the Navy, that is complete nonsense. The Navy had been professionalised by the reforms of Samuel Pepy’s 150 or so years earlier. To become a Naval officer you had to earn an appointment as a midshipman and then pass your Lt exams, which entailed passing examinations in Mathematics and navigation and a host of other technical subjects. For this reason, the recruitment of Naval officers was mostly from the professional classes, traders and more clever country boys; the gentry or the aristocracy did not join.
Again, you seem confused as to the difference between the Victorian era and Austen’s.
I’m here to learn. So far you haven’t convinced me that Austen was not a staunch advocate for rural conservative values.
There you are quite wrong. Wellington was the son of an Earl (he was a lowly Baron earlier in life), his mother the daughter of a Viscount. Admiral Elphingstone (the predescessor to Lord Nelson and Admiral of the Mediterrian Fleet) also the son of an Earl. Cornwallis was the son of a Baron. Charles Hay the son of a Marquess…
(Heck, you can’t get much more Regency than Farmer George’s son’s - Clarence served in the Navy - actually aboard ships under Nelson and in the American War for Independence. And York was a soldier - Had a 20 plus year (completely incompetent) career - Clarence was apparently not a bad sailor or officer)
Although the navy offered more social mobility than the army, it was still essentially a gentleman’s profession, as one could have all the necessary skills and still lack the patronage necessary for a commission.
Yes. I think AK84 may be inadvertently mixing up the concepts of “rural” and “landed elites”. There wasn’t a neat binary division between rural aristocrats and urban “new men”/bourgeoisie. There were plenty of blue-blooded aristocratic metropolitan rakes and so forth, and there were plenty of country-dwelling gentleman-farmers and brewers and clergy and so forth. The whole class spectrum of English society was represented in both the country and the towns, and it’s very clear that Austen liked the country version of it better.
Moreover, I don’t quite understand AK84’s assertion about military service not being “a time-honored way for younger sons of the gentry […] to make their way”. Purchase of commissions in the Royal Army goes back to the seventeenth century and was definitely an upper-class thing.
Two years ago, the front cover of half of the grocery store tabloids was some version of “Is Harry Getting Married?” and the two years before that it was all about George. And apparently we want to know what’s happening with Brad & Ben (now that they’re single again)
Yes. Yes, it is still universally acknowledged.
ETA:
The point of the quote is not about the men’s actual wants. The point is that “society” sees a highly eligible bachelor and starts pairing him off.
I guess I am taking a little exception to the “universally” part. It’s not as universal as it was. It’s still an impulse. Cultural habits can be extremely tenacious.