Critics chide Austen for mentioning money so much in her novels...

Well said @Dappy777

Historical context is so very important

It's such a silly, reductive way to approach literature. You have to understand any work of art in its historical context. It's absurd to constantly reduce things to the standards you happen to live by. I totally agree with Harold Bloom on this. Believe me, many of the things that feature in contemporary novels will disgust future readers (eating meat, for example). Great art is great because it is timeless. People will still be reading Austen long after those silly critics are dead.

They go bust frighteningly easy. There were a number of bank crashes, and plenty of examples of financial agents going bankrupt while holding other people's money

The period of the French Wars, 1793-1815, which covers the time when JA was writing, was a time of quite substantial inflation, which people weren't accustomed to.

If you invested in a canal project, for example, because a lot of people were doing well out of canals, you might find the cost of construction kept rising so you had to choose whether to invest more and more money and hope for the best, or say goodbye to your original investment.

the dissipated youth of the era were astonishingly talented at dissipating fortunes.

Hence the entailed estate so the dissipated youth could only fritter the income, not the real property.

Then after the end of the war there was a major economic downturn with the return to peacetime conditions and people who had been doing well out of farming/landed estates found themselves in difficulty. (A Civil Contract ends on a positive note, but I think Adam wouldn't have found things as easy as he hoped after 1815 and Papa Chawleigh might still have needed to help out.)

While it's completely true that Austen was surrounded by families who benefitted from ownership of W Indies sugar plantations, it's not true that it must take generations for such fortunes to be frittered away.

My current historical research coincides approximately with the period of Austen's life, and is full of plantation owners, naval officers, people making their fortune in the East Indies, and land-owning gentry & aristocracy.

They go bust frighteningly easy. There were a number of bank crashes, and plenty of examples of financial agents going bankrupt while holding other people's money; fortunes were made and lost developing the new industries of the period; and the dissipated youth of the era were astonishingly talented at dissipating fortunes.

Such an interesting thread!

I've read little Wollstonecraft, but was aware Austen repeated her phrase that women are "rational creatures", eg in Persuasion. So I'm very interested to learn Austen drew so heavily on Wollstonecraft in Sense & Sensibility as well.

Piketty made the point in Capital - although Richard Murphy said he made it first that almost everyone's money was in Government Stock and as the interest rates were fixed saying that Mr Jones was worth £5000 a year was the same as saying that he had a total capital of £25000

Who are these "critics"?

They are a sterling example of why idiots should not be allowed to publish their thoughts, as they will influence other idiots and so we will, as it was in the beginning, end up swinging from the trees and speaking in grunts.

Jane Austen was very concerned with the plight of the middle class woman and that involved money. She knew the limited choices available to a middle class woman without money and had experienced it herself.

Other female writers (Gaskill and Charlotte Bronte to name but two) cover the same field.

This is what happens when you package Austen in pretty covers, make her work into Mils and Boons TV productions and tell people with no knowledge of history or literature that their opinion will be heeded. They think they are entitled to an opinion based on ignorance.

They should be paid no heed and certainly not sent any regards.

I've not heard this critique, but I think that's just how things were then among the class of people she's talking about. Women couldn't have any money of their own, so their future husband's income or inheritance was extremely germane to what your future looked like. And, as has been said, marriage was usually a transaction - you wouldn't probably know him well enough to know if his character would make you happy, but you could at least know how much comfort you could basically expect to live in if you knew his financial situation or prospects.

Because she was a woman. No doubt many male novelists did the same, but hey - it was okay for them to do it, but how very dare a woman do the same?!

Who are these dullards critics anyway?

And I've just enjoyed his "Love and Marriage in the Age of Jane Austen"

I've read the John Mullan book and I've made a note of the Roy Muir one.

I don’t think Balzac is such a strange comparison - he was younger than JA (24 years) but they overlapped and he set some of his novels in Napoleonic times. While JA wasn’t involved in financial speculations herself, her brother Henry was (his bank failed). JA was close to Henry’s wife Eliza, whose first husband was French, and at least some of her books were translated into French so culturally there was some connection. Writers at that time did influence writers of other countries - Scott being the great UK example.

Some of Balzac’s plots are more flamboyant and dramatic, but he is also very interested in how society functions and how money is made / lost / transferred by marriage etc. so they do have overlapping interests.

Thanks to previous posters for the book recommendations.

I think some modern critics miss the importance of money and financial security in Jane Austen's time when women were dependent on men. The only possibilities to feed themselves for the women in JA books are marriage, the charity of relatives or employment as a governess or ladies companion - all of which were very risky prospects for women.

Marriage as pps have said were often business contracts - JA exemplifies with Charlotte Lucas and her practical attitude to secure Mr Collins to have a home and financial security. However it was risky - you might end up with an abusive husband with little prospect of divorce (required wealth and an act of parliament as Mr Rushworth was able to do) but women had no right to money or property of their own until the Married Women's Property Act of 1882.

The charity of relatives was also a risky business as Elinor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility discovered when their brother was talked out of supporting them by his ruthless wife, leaving them dependent on a very distant relative. In fact JA bases this section on Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women - in places almost word for word.

Employment is also risky for women. Being a companion or governess did not pay enough to support a woman (around £30-40 per year) and you were dependent on the whims of your employer who might be abusive or terminate your employment without warning. Paid employment also reduced your status in society - something Jane Fairfax in Emma was facing.

The second aspect of discussing money and material possessions was that Jane Austen's audience knew where everyone was positioned in society without her having to spell it out.
Mr Gardiner - we can infer he was wealthy but looked down because of being in trade and working for a living.
Mr Bennet - £2,000 - a gentleman but a wife from a trade background was a negative.
Mr Bingley - £4,000-5,000 - wealthy but "new money" and tainted by his trade background and non-landowning status
Mr Darcy - £10,000 - untitled but extremely wealthy, "old landowning money" and connections to the aristocracy as the grandson and nephew of an Earl..

We're not asking for a list of all the articles and books on Austen you've read, just one example maybe so we can understand more about how it is that Austen mentions money 'too much' as that isn't an argument I'm familiar with, and what comparison they're making, e.g. what it they think she 'should' have been writing about to make a better novel - morals/philosophy/religion/romance?

Also can you expand on your Balzac comparison to help us understand more rather than just getting annoyed we're not understanding/agreeing with you. Both Balzac and Austen are definitely very interested in class and ambition as a concept, I agree, which also of course inherently does involve discussion of money. I haven't particularly counted the explicit and implicit mentions of money in either but I daresay you're right there's more in Balzac. I'd say for me the real difference is that Balzac covers a broader social range of issues and wider cast of characters, locations, settings in his novels, whereas both the charm but also perhaps you could argue the limitation of Austen is she has a very narrow focus on small sets of people, all essentially educated upper middle class, living within small English towns or villages and in very constrained social groups. Her timelines are short, all her novels take place over a year or so and her characters don't tend to go anywhere very much or do anything much, they visit one another's houses or go to bath or London, that's about it. So in this very contained setting the nuances and relative social standing between say a clergyman with an income of less than £1000 per year and an ex businessman with an income of more than £2000 are highly significant. Whereas Balzac and other serial novelists like Dickens might have a wider range of characters with differing incomes and social classes within the same story as well as perhaps having their characters be more adventurous and cover a wider timespan. I also think Austen as a woman novelist was very particularly focused on women's economic issues and money - whereas Balzac does of course touch on this but also other perspectives too. Is one better than the other, who knows, depends how you're measuring, I prefer Austen purely as an enjoyable read but I don't think the point of literary criticism as a whole is to arrange books in a tier list one above the other or to pick holes in one writer for being too concerned with one aspect?

Well, I'm a scholar in women's writing, and reasonably well-versed in Austen scholarship, and I don't recognise this at all. Unless you're talking about very early things like the 'dear, unworldly Aunt Jane' biography by her nephew which was embarrassed about Aunt Jane not being quite as genteel as he would like by Victorian standards, and either hid or tried to downplay any indication that she was interested in fame or regarded herself as a professional writer.

I think Balzac is a weird comparison, personally. A university-educated former lawyer and professional writer, who lived later than JA in another culture, and was continually involved in (usually failed) financial speculations and doomed businesses, and an early realist/naturalist whose main subject was ordinary people struggling to get on in the world, it would be odd if money wasn't a big theme, surely?

It must have been difficult for Jane Austen that many in her social milieu were so effortlessly and extraordinarily wealthy (wealthy to the same scale as the current oligarchs). It would take generations for some of them to fritter it all away.

She was surrounded by families who benefited from ownership of sugar plantations in the West Indies, both in Bath and Steventon.

Which critics, though?

Well yes - she is a figure of fun. Not just because of wanting her daughters to marry well but because she goes about that aim in such a misguided way. To be fair the main thing she and Mr Bennet absolutely should have done (and Mr Bennet admits as much) is save from their income so that their daughters had some money to make them a marriageable prospect for the sort of men they were most likely to meet, but also to not leave them entirely destitute after Mr Bennett's death. But that's more on Mr Bennett really. What Mrs Bennett ought to have been doing for her part was educating her daughters well and teaching them how to behave/managing their behaviour, plus trying not to be off-putting and vulgar herself, both of which she fails utterly in - I think it's in Emma that someone comments that men of sense don't want silly wives and Lizzie jokes with Darcey at Netherfield about inflated expectations of 'accomplished women' but the truth is a well educated, 'naice' middle class man wouldn't want to marry a girl like Kitty or Lydia who as well as being penniless were wildly badly behaved, ignorant and had a host of equally irritating relatives in tow. Lydia obviously comes to a relatively Bad End but Kitty gets lucky in that her sisters marry well and so can 'improve' her - if it wasn't for Bingley and Darcey we are led to believe things would have got quite desperate for the Bennetts...