As the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft commented, a girl’s “coming out,” at the age of fifteen or sixteen, was purely “to bring to market a marriageable miss, whose person is taken from one place to another, richly caparisoned.” The market they chose was of paramount importance. One prudent clergyman advised his stepsisters not to move to rural Oxfordshire, on the grounds that the location “is but an indifferent one for young ladies to shine in.” Ambitious young women—or those with ambitious parents—would head for London.
No one was under any illusions about where they stood in the pecking order. It was unlikely that a provincial parson’s daughter, such as Jane Austen, with her modest portion and limited connections, would even meet, let alone marry, a son of the high aristocracy. The daughters of the elite, carrying substantial dowries, were rigorously protected against the adventurers who infiltrated London’s society balls in the hopes of bagging themselves an heiress.
Parents and children alike were aware that choices were determined as much by financial considerations as by inclination. “When poverty comes in at the door love flies out the window,” one gentlewoman reminded her daughter in 1801. The absolute minimum a gentleman could hope to scrape by on during this period was about £280 a year. But this would require a life, as one bride accepted, where “we shall live in a quiet domestic manner and not see much company.”
Even an esquire on £450 a year would struggle to satisfy the social requirements of his class: a country household, lodgings in London, visits to the theater and the opera, attendance at balls and pleasure gardens. One impecunious suitor complained to his beloved that: “Every parent takes utmost care to marry his child [where there] is money, not considering inclination … your papa no doubt may marry you to one [that] will make large settlements, keep an equipage and support you in all grandeur imaginable.” Prudence ruled as much as passion. The lurking specter of spinsterhood propelled many young women toward a match offering little but financial security.
Austen’s amused restraint was in marked contrast to the romantic melodrama in fashion at the time, and the historian Macaulay thought that her well-constructed comedies of manners were the closest to perfection that writing could ever hope to reach.
The seventh child of eight, Austen spent her life among a large and affectionate family in Hampshire and Bath. “Her life passed calmly and smoothly, resembling some translucent stream which meanders through our English meadows, and is never lashed into anger by treacherous rocks or violent currents,” wrote George Barnett Smith in 1895. She wrote about ordinary lives, about the petty dramas of lively provincial society, about the preoccupations, the squabbles, the complexities and the exhausting difficulties of unexceptional people. Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), the best-selling author of
Along the way, Austen produced some of literature’s most memorable characters, drawn with her typical precision and intricacy. Aloof Mr. Darcy, obsequious Mr. Collins, flustered Mrs. Bennet and her wry and long-suffering husband, Mr. Bennet, populate
