To have just realised that Mr Collins got Mrs Collins in the family way.

[squoosh]

Have just re-read Pride & Prejudice for the first time in yonks and at the end Mr Collins mentions 'dear Charlotte’s situation, and his expectation of a young olive-branch. How had I not noticed that before?

I'd always imagined dear Charlotte avoiding that messy business by keeping him occupied with his sermon writing and his gardening and his pash on Lady Catherine.

But she was a woman who knew what she wanted so I wouldn't be surprised if she was the one who took conjugal matters in hand.

Good old P&P, the book that keeps on giving.

Supposing that's true then pigs -imagine that poor old Charlotte Lucas doesn't do her duty and produces 5 Female Olive Branches - who is the next heir of Longbourne esp. if there's a Charles Darcy and Fitzwilliam Bingley on the scene - another rando Collins cousin, working IN TRADE like Matthew Crawley - how are these cousins more "Bennett line" than Mr Bennett Snr's own great grandsons?

I guess I'd just never thought about the reason for the feud songbird.

I 'think', but I may be wrong, that entails normally follow down a male line:

'Patriarch' inherits from his father, he then has 3 sons, inheritance goes to
Eldest son down his male line. If no sons then to
Middle son down his male line. If no sons then to
Third son down his male line. If no sons then to
Patriarch's younger brothers (by right of also being sons of Patriarch's father) by age and their heirs male. If none then to
Patriarch's uncles and their male progeny (IIRC that's where Matthew Crawley came into play as he and Lord Grantham were cousins, not uncle and nephew)

I would expect that somewhere between all those generations there would be a male to inherit. Which brings us back to Mr Collins' last name!

It's all a bit fascinating, isn't it? And thank God it's not that way anymore except, I expect, among the remaining aristocracy.

An entailment could be made in favour of a specific line of descendants , not necessarily the next male line, unlike titles which (with a very few exceptions) must descend in the male line.

If the whole thing isn't enough to turn you into a raging feminist, I don't know what is. It's so unfair.

Also, Matthew Crawley, was not the original intended recipient of the Downton entail, the dude who went down with the Titanic was. Not sure exactly what his relationship was to Robert - nephew? Or just another cousin? I don't remember....

Vita Sackville West adored Knole, the huge, rambling stately home where she located Orlando. But she was a daughter, so when her father died the estate went to some male cousin. She was bereft and never felt able to revisit her home. It was desperately sad and unfair.

Exactly dowager! And, as a side note, it's also pretty rough on second, third, fourth (etc) sons.

The idea was to stop family wealth and influence from being dispersed via division (land was a political as well as an economic power base). Entail achieved this by ensuring there was only one, clear heir. I think part of the point in the book is that the family are bound up in these historical shackles that no longer really apply in a more sentimental, middle class world with very different, more moral and individualistic, ideas of power.

Indeed. Somerville and Ross, the late 19th/earth 20thc Anglo-Irish female cousin writing duo (best known for The Irish RM stories, despite having written a masterpiece The Real Charlotte) spent their entire lives shoring up crumbling Big Houses they weren't able to inherit, on behalf of less enterprising male family members, while also writing prolifically, being masters of fox hunts and breeding pedigree cattle .

I think part of the point in the book is that the family are bound up in these historical shackles that no longer really apply in a more sentimental, middle class world with very different, more moral and individualistic, ideas of power.

Yes, and ditto ideas about individual choice and love matches (with economics still there too, of course). The parental/strategic 'we planned it from their cradles' Lady Anne de Burgh/Darcy form of old landed alliance giving way to the love match of Darcy and Elizabeth being seen as a more fitting match despite their social disparity and her embarrassing relations.

Earlier eighteenth-century novels often offer a cousin marriage as some kind of solution; Austen, with (I think) only 2 exceptions, always rejects them as possibilities for her characters. And even in MP, there's a constant underlying suggestion that a marriage between Fanny and Edmund is unnatural, almost incestuous, perhaps even psychologically stunting for them both.

Malvolia And of course, Austen consigns the big house to history at the end of Persuasion. Anne doesn't marry into anything fixed (landownership, the Church), instead, she gets a carriage.

As a solution to entails, I mean.

Yes, it's always interesting what JA chooses not to say, like how long it took Edmund to stop glooming around Mansfield after discovering that Mary Crawford had feet of clay and awoke to the charms of someone he has clearly considered as a little sister for most of his life.

She so flags up the fact that she's not telling us (in a similar tone to the way she doesn't tell us how a heartbroken Marianne gets over the charming cad Willoughby and transfers her affections to a middle-aged man not much younger than her mother who wears flannel waistcoats) that it's hard not to think that she was aware of the slight oddity in both cases.

Not that I think she or her culture has in any way the 'ewww' response to cousin marriages amply demonstrated on a recent Mn thread, but she's clearly very much more interested in marrying out of your group. But Edmund and Fanny's relationship has been so fraternal for so long that it's quite hard to envisage his feelings becoming (in some sense) sexual.

Mind you, same issue with Emma and Mr Knightley, I suppose, only there it's paternal rather than brotherly.

What I find interesting in PP and other books is that the heroines quite often have to retire to their rooms to recover from some conversation or other, and are quite often fatigued at the end of the day. Speaking as an introvert that constant socialising and having to be witty and pretty etc must have been knackering.