To think that most Jane Austen's heroines didn't find happiness in marriage?

[bgmama]

I am a big fan and I must have read the books a hundred times, but I am starting to realize that most heroes in her books are either assholes or idiots and towards the end of the book they stop being assholes or idiots and become worthy of marrying the heroine. I am not talking only of Mr Darcy here, but most others too. AIBU to think that this transformation didn't last very long and they went back to their usual ways shortly after the marriage was consummated? And that the heroines were miserable and were told to LTB at some point during their lives?

Just guessing - but wouldn't the size of a woman's dowry indicate her social class & wealth. Also, her husband would be able to invest the money and then live off the proceeds, so a big dowry would mean a bigger income.

I'd just love to know how everyone seemed to know so much about each other's income. I realize it was a fair amount of speculation and gossip, but so many characters seem to have an amount per annum mentioned that clearly it was a thing that people knew - but how?

Sadly the chapter on the early 19th century isn't so detailed about marriage age/birth rate/ etc. But it does have the stat that the population of England goes from 8.3 in 1801(first official census) to 13.1 by 1831. From 1780 (pre-census, so estimated figures) to 1831, the population doubled.

The interesting thing is that in the last two decades of the 18th century the population of Britain rose at a rate about 50% greater than the rest of Europe, but precisely why isn't known. The Oxford History above speculates "The death-rate fell some time before 1750 (as a result of improved food supplies and better hygiene, and a diminution int he killing power of epidemics) and this was then reflected in a rising birth-rate as the greater number of surviving children entered breeding age."

So by JA's time, infant mortality (and general mortality) in the population as a whole had already dropped off because (I'm guessing) the agricultural revolution meant a better fed, therefore healthier population. And although this pre-dates the public health acts of the 19th century (which gave one of the biggest jumps in life-expectancy in history), clearly there had been some improvements in hygiene and disease control.

Coo, I have disappeared down a rabbit hole - but I'm finding this so interesting.

The shotgun wedding theory for the Bennett’s could explain why mr b holds Mrs b in such contempt. He was a well mannered gentleman who did the right thing and married his lover rather than keeping her asa mistress, possibly because he was getting on a bit.

He isn’t a sociable type (male Mary), stays in his study so maybe had his best years disappear away without finding a suitable bride.

Fermat - Thanks for that birthrate info. Have to admit it has really surprised me. I had always had the (obviously unwarranted) idea that most people with any sort of income married fairly young, and women had a baby every couple of years, losing 70% of their offspring to various childhood horrors, before succumbing to childbed fever in their late 30's early 40's. (Their husbands, of course, fell off horses while slaughtering foxes, died in duels, or went mad from syphillis.) Just goes to show how a little knowledge really is a dangerous thing.

(And thank you for getting off your arse - I couldn't even be bothered to google it . . . lazy cow that I am )

This is all pre-industrial revolution, pre-urbanisation as well, isn't it-so while medicine isn't very advanced, there's none of the overcrowding and disease we associate with later rates of infant mortality. Funny, people don't die that often in JA-maybe she's not that kind of writer, but it does feel like a fairly healthy world her characters inhabit

Scipio - knock me out, please do. I daresay you're right, one of those lovely homophone coincidences JA would have loved and not used.

Yes, the bigger the dowry, the bigger the income for the married couple - land and cash produce income. Dowries were supposed to be kept separate from DH's money, but abuses were rife, especially in the latter centuries when things got worse (sorry to be so vague) and men could get away with it more.

The Woman in White, recently on telly, is about this - wicked Lord Skint marries rich WiW then steals her dowry and locks her in a bin on her own money. Wilkie Collins wrote it as a battlecry against Married Woman's Property restrictions. He lived in a menage a trois and thought himself a feminist, tho I daresay his GFs disagreed.

By the early 19th cent women's rights over their own property, bodies and children had been pretty battered - successively eroded by law over centuries.

Reversal, as far as I know, which is not much, began in the 1850s. Slowly. It was still not great by the 20th cent - TS Eliot, incidentally, locked his wife in an asylum on her own money. In the 70s a man had to sign your mortgage application even though you paid every instalment yourself. Shows you how bad things had got. Goes without saying that women are still paid a third less for the same job and don't inherit anything like the sums men do. Basically, society doesn't give women much money. Most of the money in the world is taken and kept by men for themselves.

Sorry I've slightly overlooked the more relevant info on birth rates!

Someone mentioned earlier that women's rights went through the floor on C18/19 and wondered why...the obvious correlation would be with the rise if capitalism, empire and the global economy /socialist face

Fermat / Schadenfreude - there's a good and accessible summary of population statistics for this period by Pat Thane, called Happy Families. I can't link via my.phone but if you Google it comes up. This suggests the average woman had 6 children. It also suggests that, by some estimates, around half of all first children were conceived out of wedlock. Not sure if that would hold true for elite families.

Scahdenfreude - fascinating. So JA was writing about a time when people had loads of children who all lived...which creates financial problems for their adulthood. It happened in her own family.

AFAIK only one of her siblings died and one was given away to a rich family (think Frank Churchill in Emma) - so there were loads of junior Austens and zero to inherit once the eldest DS scooped the pool.

JA's DM lived till she was 91, which was not that unusual for the times either. She was a terrible hypochondriac and would have been the source of many a AIBU re DM thread.

Elinor - women's rights steadily eroded partly because of the nineteenth century ideal of 'separate spheres', which held that men should handle all public business (so law, finance) and women should be the supportive 'angel in the house'. Domestic violence was discussed but seen by the elite as a working class problem. Lack of access to money made it very difficult for abused wives to leave their husbands. Some slow improvent from 1850s but not much until the twentieth century.

Yes, I think it would be fascinating to dig out some sources on differential rates of birth and infant mortality between rural and urban areas, and different classes.

For instance, things like extended lactation to control fertility are no longer available to women mill workers - they're back at work in no time (I seem to remember reading stories of infants being weaned onto "pap", which I think was a form of gruel, asap, and horrible tales of mill girls sneaking off on their breaks and trying to feed their infants through holes in the wall!)

IIRC, one of the reasons for the prevalence of wet-nurses in the upper classes was to get women back to peak fertility quickly! But that one could be apocryphal.

Lana, ‘dowry’ can be traced back to Latin roots (via French), to the Latin word for a dowry which is ‘dos’ (connected with other Latin words for ‘giving, e.g. ‘donum’ meaning ‘gift’, ‘do’ meaning ‘I give’).

‘Widow’ (this one is more mixed, as derivatives exist in many languages) comes from an Old English word, so was hanging about in England before the Norman Conquest, unlike ‘dowry’, and comes originally from Proto Indo European root ‘weidh’ which has a meaning ‘divide’ or ‘separate’.

As you say, it works beautifully to link them together but I don’t believe they are. I only recently discovered that ‘theos’ and ‘deus’, the Greek and Latin words for ‘god’, do not come from the same root, which has rather blown my mind!

thejeangenie36 - yep, in the middle classes in Tudor times and for some time afterwards, it was common to marry only once you were pregnant. Why? Because you wanted to be sure your DH/DW was fertile and could continue the family line that ran the business, etc. As ever, the merchant class was practical, sensible and put the needs of business first.

Upper class marriages were arranged for reasons of cash, politics and status, abundance of which outweighed the requirement for progeny - most contracts were done and dusted by age about 8, so no need for any of that awf'ly common frolicking in the hay barn. Men didn't get the choice of who they married any more than women did, and both sexes were allowed lovers once they had a couple of DCs who looked like survivors.

Fascinating thread.

I did a class on victorian literature in harvard extension school a while back that looked at P&P, WH, Jane Eyre and North and South in particular (my final paper was on the role of houses in each novel).

What was interesting to me was the class discussion around Pride and Prejudice. It was an adult class including people age 20 to 60. Every single one of us had already read the book for pleasure at least once and every single one of us when reading it again were struck by how useless and even cruel Mr. Bennet was and how realistic Mrs. Bennett was being in pushing her daughters into economically viable marriages.

It is also ironic that Mr. Bennett could leave nothing to his daughters - it is expressly said that he always meant to save something but didn't because the son who would overturn the entail might arrive. But the silly and derided Mrs. Bennett will leave a provision to her daughters - the money that was settled on her by her family on marriage was settled on her and her children so they would at least not starve.

I think Jane Austen is razor sharp about economics and how they work in particular for women. Her sister, Cassandra, was left some money by her fiance who died before they could marry, so she had an tiny but independent source of income that Jane didn't have until she was published.

Someone mentioned earlier that women's rights went through the floor on C18/19

I think the line in Persuasion where Captain Wentworth is saying how a ship isn't equipped to carry ladies and his sister Lady Croft says something like "I hate to hear you speak like that, Frederick, as if all women were delicate creatures unable to bear a little hardship" is the last call of womanhood before the suffocating cloak of the victorian age came upon it,

Thanks for the tip jeangenie - I'll have a look at that.

I can recall reading that for working class families for several centuries marriage was often "common law", and the engagement/ betrothal gave the couple "bundling" rights ie, they could sleep together. Pregnancy wasn't then regarded as a bad thing, but rather evidence of fertility. When you needed children to work your smallholding or do the odd jobs in your tannery, this was an important factor.

Where there was money and social status involved, legal marriage was much more important because it protected assets. Trollope's books suggest that large families were not r=particularly welcome among the upper classes because there were then a lot of daughters to dower or sons to provide for - once the heir was sorted out (he got everything, obviously), the others were left to go into the church, or their family would buy a commission for them in the army, politics, or possibly went into the law. Quite difficult really, when your position in society meant that you couldn't actually get a job, but you still had to maintain at least the illusion of wealth.

Scipio that must mean Grendel is a widow! I will go and look her up. Gor, I love Old English. We had to learn it conversationally at college, just beautiful.

Makes sense now. My theory: fr./Lat. for widow is Veuve - that never caught on here, did it. In the wartorn Middle Ages when these words took root in modern English, more men from the poorer classes would have died as adults than rich ones; ie there were more widows in the cannon-fodder classes who spoke Old Eng.. OE word would have been used more and stayed around, rather than the French word which the longer-lived & richer upper classes who spoke French used.

Whereas 'dowry' is Latin, and stayed in Latin/French because a) Latin was the language of law b) dowries were a rich person's thing and Latin and French were rich people's languages.

Schadenfreude - agree, legal status around inheritance and social status makes marriage far more important to the middle and upper classes.

Pallisers - I love that Austen is sharp on women's economic status too. In fact she's razor sharp on a lot of things. I think people often have the impression that they are just romantic piecespieces, when they are actually full.of social commentary - something this thread makes clear and a fact not lost on contemporary readers.

Lana - Yes! I think that must be why there are ‘dowagers’ and ‘dowager houses’ - essentially the widows of rich people got to have the rich (French) word for widow and the poor did not, post-Normans.

I wish I knew more about Old English - it sounds beautiful.

Once again I want to thank the OP for this thread - I’ve learned so much (esp Tudor times sex before marriage, thank you Lana) and been rethinking Mrs Bennett a lot!

As an aside to the bundling/only marrying when the child was on the way thing, I believe at one point in Scotland (middle ages again, I think) they had "fixed term try-it-out" marriages, for a year and a day, at the end of which the couple could decide to make it permanent or go their separate ways. (Must check this out...)

Follow up- my other recollection (again, someone who knows about Medieval history can probably confirm or deny this), marriage was something the aristocracy did to preserve property rights, and it was essentially a secular institution. The church took a line inherited from the very early Christians (who were a kind of apocalyptic sect who thought the end was nigh and therefore there wasn't much point in marriage) that marriage was a kind of second-rate state compared to celibacy, defensible only as a "remedy against fornication" (Paul's "better to marry than to burn"). So to start with marriages weren't done in church at all, then when priests started celebrating marriages, initially they were performed outside the church at the lych-gate. It was only fairly late on in the middle ages that ordinary people started getting married in church. Most people just drifted into common law marriages.

Best. Thread. Ever.

This is a great thread and the reason why I’m still awake! Just been reading through all the posts, but will probably need to read it again in a less sleepy state! I definitely agree that Austen was a clever woman who gave an insightful social commentary on many things, especially the institution of marriage. As a PP said, there is also the allusion to slavery in Mansfield Park, but it is never developed. Maybe Austen knew that this would never be an acceptable issue to write about in a repressive society where the subject was very much a taboo. She must have felt so constrained. Also, much of her criticism i.e. about marriage & society is veiled & delivered through humour so it appears to be more superficial & lighthearted than it might actually be on a closer reading. I wonder if she felt constrained in her writing & actually wanted to be more political, but knew that her gender & status meant that she had to conform to some extent. Mansfield Park is much more serious in comparison to her other texts - wasn’t this one of her later books, written towards the end of her life? I find it fascinating to think of her writing (in her parlour?) which in itself would have been seen as an act of rebellion, when she was presumably supposed to be doing some form of needlepoint/embroidery instead. Her freedom of expression must have been curtailed, but she still managed to criticise the social norms & expectations albeit in an indirect way. Would she be classed as a feminist for her time (if such a thing existed?) or a feminist if she was alive today....?

Oops - paragraphs might have been useful

I think people often have the impression that they are just romantic piecespieces, when they are actually full.of social commentary so true. I think you need to read between the lines a lot of the time because it wouldn't have been acceptable at the time to state these things directly.