To think Elizabeth Bennett is shallow?

[WobblyArse]

Pride and Prejudice in reality:

He is a massive twat.

She changes her mind about him only when she sees his massive house.

The end.

It's astonishing the level of subservience required from so many just to survive prior to 1945. Maybe that's why we're such a chippy nation now and don't want to answer to anyone.

Currently have a friend over from Oz who is a JA expert and fanatic - so we had a go at answering the exam Q.

What was the exam question?

Remember that Austen had her chance to marry, too, in very similar circumstances to Charlotte Lucas. She was 27, and considered pretty much on the shelf (she writes somewhere in a letter about going to assembly balls where she is no longer expected to dance: 'I am put on the sopha near the fire and can drink as much wine as I like'), had only a tiny income, and with her mother and sister Cassandra, was entirely dependent on her brothers, living on an endless round of long visits to family and extended family, with no settled home.

Her suitor was her friends' 21 year old brother, Harry Bigg-Wither, with whom she and Cassandra were staying. Jane said yes at first presumably purely on economic grounds (she would have had a home, she could have given a home to Cassandra and her mother) and the knowledge that he was a decent young man, though stolid and a bit of a bore clearly had the horrors overnight, changed her mind, declined the proposal, and then left first thing in the morning.

It wasn't nothing to decline an offer like that, from a decent and rich man, especially when she knew it was almost certainly her only chance to marry, and when her own circumstances were so poor and unsettled.

But she also saw in her sisters-in-law and extended family the cost of childbearing to women. Her six brothers on average lived until the age of 75, her SILs to an average of 45, and childbirth was associated with three out of the six deaths. She says somewhere in one of her later letters, about a niece repeatedly pregnant -- 'Poor animal, she will be worn out before she is thirty.'

Deciding not to risk that was an intelligent decision.

Remember that Austen had her chance to marry, too, in very similar circumstances to Charlotte Lucas. She was 27, and considered pretty much on the shelf (she writes somewhere in a letter about going to assembly balls where she is no longer expected to dance: 'I am put on the sopha near the fire and can drink as much wine as I like'), had only a tiny income, and with her mother and sister Cassandra, was entirely dependent on her brothers, living on an endless round of long visits to family and extended family, with no settled home.

Her suitor was her friends' 21 year old brother, Harry Bigg-Wither, with whom she and Cassandra were staying. Jane said yes at first presumably purely on economic grounds (she would have had a home, she could have given a home to Cassandra and her mother) and the knowledge that he was a decent young man, though stolid and a bit of a bore clearly had the horrors overnight, changed her mind, declined the proposal, and then left first thing in the morning.

It wasn't nothing to decline an offer like that, from a decent and rich man, especially when she knew it was almost certainly her only chance to marry, and when her own circumstances were so poor and unsettled.

But she also saw in her sisters-in-law and extended family the cost of childbearing to women. Her six brothers on average lived until the age of 75, her SILs to an average of 45, and childbirth was associated with three out of the six deaths. She says somewhere in one of her later letters, about a niece repeatedly pregnant -- 'Poor animal, she will be worn out before she is thirty.'

Deciding not to risk that was an intelligent decision.

It's astonishing the level of subservience required from so many just to survive prior to 1945. Maybe that's why we're such a chippy nation now and don't want to answer to anyone it goes a long way to explain the election result of 1945, with Labour offering a manifesto to rebuild the nation for everyone (health, education, housing, nationalising important industries like trains and coal) and a chance for a new order of things. It still took another generation or so before the new thinking really took hold (the 1960s - lady Chatterly trial, teenagers, pop music, etc ).

Childbirth was a bit of a leveller between the classes wasn't it? It must have been amazing to have been a woman of means and to have had the luxury to be able to say 'no thanks, marriage isn't for me' and not to have to worry about depending on a man's income. Going from brother's house to brother's house indefinitely must have been so tiring for Jane, constantly living as a guest in someone else's home.

youllhavehadyourtea, I meant to respond to your Longbourn post. I did read it and yes, the description of life as a servant was the best thing about it. Christ, what an almighty slog life was for them.

Anyone like 'Cranford'? I love it's shabby gentility and the portrayal of respectable ladies living without 'men of their own'. I imagine Miss Austen would have fitted in quite nicely with a little extra kudos brought by her brother Mr Knight's 'small estate in Hampshire'.

I often ponder that if men hadn't had control of the money in times gone by, there would have been very little motive for women to marry. Your body was no longer your own, you were entirely at your husband's disposal, to do with what he chose. Death in childbirth was a very real and ever present danger, and your children were the property of their father. If women had had financial Independence I think a lot more of them would have chosen to remain single. And yet traditionally it has always been implied that men were bestowing the honour, by asking a woman to marry them.

I always think Austen’s Emma, rich and very much mistress of her own home and queen of her local society, is interesting on her apparently genuine disinclination to marry. Her dimwitted protégée, Harriet, says something about how terrible to be an old maid, but Emma says that old maids are only pitiable if poor, and that she has no particular motivation to marry as she has all the ‘consequence’ she could want and is as important to her father as she could ever be to a husband.

This is a pretty, confident, rich 21 year old with no sense she’s missing out on anything by not marrying — in fact, she seems to suggest that without an economic motive, there’s no real inducement for a woman to marry.

Obviously she does eventually marry the older-brother guy next door for love, but all the other women who marry in the novel have an economic motive as well as a love one — Jane Fairfax is penniless and about to become a governess, Harriet Smith is illegitimate, family-less and left at a boarding school, and Miss Weston, Emma’s former governess, is only kept on by Emma and her father out of affection, otherwise she will need to move into another situation.