To think Charlotte Lucas had the right idea

[GreenPillows]

With marrying Mr Collins?

I reread P&P recently through less romantic/more cynical eyes after a bit of age and life experience. I used to think what she did was awful but now I’ve changed my mind.

AIBU?

How very dare you, @Abhann? I would far rather marry Henry Tilney than Mr Darcy - HT has a sense of humour.

I think the point is less that she 'had the right idea' and more that she had very limited choices.

I do however think Jane Austen had the right idea. Pride and Prejudice illustrates very clearly the limited choices for even the most privileged, intelligent women at the turn of the 19th century. We have come a long way, but the difference isn't girl power, it's legislation and birth control.

There but for the grace of God go we if we take theses things for granted.

Very true merrymouse. We are lucky to have such a wide range of choices and must not allow this to be lost for future generations. They should also know how things were for women in the past which is one good reason why Jane Austen, George Elliot, the Brontes et al should be taught at school.

Heartily concur.

Too many modern books/films/adaptations portray women as having few or no disadvantages in the past. If this were the case, then why the need for any activism?!

Sorry for diversion, but the most stupidly revisionist and anachronistic book ever was The Miniaturist. Preposterous to think of an 18th-Century young woman nipping about Amsterdam and being cool with a gay husband. As if!

^^ This!

I agree. I watched Sense and Sensibility with DD and was very determined to drive home that although Lucy Steele is awful: her life options are pretty grim, so her determination to hand onto Edward at all costs is understandable if not forgivable.

Emma Thompson was something like 36 when playing 19 year old Elinor Dashwood.

She would haven better cast as her mother.

I was awake in the night thinking about Mr Bennett treating Lizzie as the golden child and how that impacted on her neglected younger sisters. Always feel sorry for Mary as she has no ally in the family.

Well we all see threads on here about toxic families- & if I think about it you could argue that’s what’s happening here:-

Mr B favours Lizzie & Jane (golden daughters)
Mrs B favours Lydia (golden daughter) - to her huge detriment & slightly Kitty

Mary - scapegoat

Interesting about Sense and Sensibility and thinking about women’s rights as I think this is the story of Austen’s that translates less effectively into the modern day as they are all so vulnerable and engagements/marriages aren’t as set in stone - Edward now would have just left

I like this exchange from the movie:

Elinor Dashwood : You talk of feeling idle and useless. Imagine how that is compounded when one has no hope and no choice of any occupation whatsoever.

Edward Ferrars : Our circumstances are therefore precisely the same.

Elinor Dashwood : Except that you will inherit your fortune. We cannot even earn ours.

By the standards of the day, Charlotte was being entirely sensible.

A single MC woman with little or no fortune faced a miserable existence, either being dependent on others to take her in, or going out as a governess. Look at what Jane Fairfax faced in Emma - IIRC it was referred to as akin to slave trading.

Having said that, I could never help thinking of poor Charlotte closing her eyes and thinking of England....

Too many modern books/films/adaptations portray women as having few or no disadvantages in the past.

Yes! Think of the adaptations of Mansfield Park - Fanny Price in the 1999 one laying into Sir Thomas about the slave trade and being portrayed as a very vocal feminist. Austen's character was wholly dependent and subservient to the Bertrams, and only ever challenged Sir Thomas on one thing (marrying Crawford) and that was at great emotional cost to her.

Re the lifestyle of vicars, Trollop's Barchester series is later than P and P, but you only have to look at the Stanhope family - the Rev. Mr Stanhope swanning off with his family literally for years to the Italian lakes, leaving his much lesser paid underlings to do the work of his parish.

His family are hilariously irreverent.
Small wonder that Mrs Proudie, the ghastly bishop's wife, was outraged.
And for really ghastly clergy, I defy anyone to find a more repugnant example than Mr Slope. Trollope's description of him is a classic IMO.

Given general religious sentiment at the time, I find it interesting how both Austen and Trollope evidently had no,problem taking the right royal piss out of (some of) the clergy. Presumably that's because at the time, it was largely seen as a profession like any other.

When you think about it the sizes of vicarages are huge by today’s standards. They are not ordinary homes at all.

True, because clergymen were gentlemen, so expected to live in a gentleman's house.

But the church was very unequal in its rewards. Trollope tells us about some very well paid jobs, but also some very poorly paid ones. Mr Crawley at Hogglestock is the most obvious. And in Sense and Sensibility, Col. Brandon offers Edward the living of Delaford, and apologises that as it is worth only £200 a year it won't be enough to allow him to marry.

To the postet who suggested Mrs Bennett would be a pushy tiger mum i have to disagree. Given her pushiness, lack of tact and sensitivity and most of all lack of class or familial privacy, combined eith a taste for the limelight, i suspect she'd be promoting all the girls on social media, running a blog called 'bringing out girls', encouraging them to do provocative photo shoots for IG. Lydia and kitty would be trout pouting all over the place. Mary would be posting pious memes and elizabeth and Jane would be desperately blocking their mothet and sisters to try and maintain professionally appropriate accounts!

For sure @PickYourselfUp

Mrs Bennet now would be the Kardashian mum. (Don't know her name)

Oh, yes, she'd [Mrs Bennett] be sat at Netherfield but wistfully wittering about what "merry" company Lydia and Wickham are...

I've wondered if Lydia's marriage lasted. I could well imagine Wickham doing a bunk before long, particularly if children started to come along with their extra costs or if the shine came off enough that they couldn't stand each other any more. Mrs Bennett and Lydia might well have ended up living together, not unlike Maria Bertram and Aunt Norris.

Actually her letters demonstrate her growing admiration for the Evangelical movement peaking during the writing of Mansfield Park

I always saw MF as a rather moral novel. That's not a criticism as it's my favourite after P&P and I love the character of Fanny Price, but morality underpins the whole novel and the behaviour of the characters is reflected further in the use of "Lovers' Vows" as the play they perform. And it has the "correct" moral ending in that Maria is cast out when her infidelity to the god-awful bore that is Mr Rushworth (I mean, I know Mr Collins was bad but could you imagine being married to Rushworth banging on about his "two and forty speeches"?). Was the new evangelism an influence on the novel?

Mr B favours Lizzie & Jane (golden daughters)
Mrs B favours Lydia (golden daughter) - to her huge detriment & slightly Kitty
Mary - scapegoat

I feel sorry for Mary. Not bright or talented enough to interest Mr Bennett and not interesting or social enough for Mrs Bennett; she's just 'the other one'. No wonder she threw herself into music (however disastrously; I expect she craved some of the attention her other sisters got) and piety. I doubt she was as shrewish as the BBC adaptation portrayed her, but it must have been a miserable experience to grow up in the shadow of everyone else.

Talking of adaptations, did anyone else find that 1999 Mansfield Park adaptation absolutely bloody awful? Slave porn, intimations of lesbianism, Fanny remonstrating with Sir Thomas and a twee moral ending where they gave up the slave trade. I read recently that the adaptation of Sanditon has been 'sexed up' which fills me with despair...