What Jane Austen Thought Marriage Couldn’t Do
Spend any amount of time searching for the villainous mastermind behind the marriage plot in Anglophone literature and inevitably Jane Austen’s name comes up. With all six of her novels ending in highly desirable unions for her protagonists, she leaves herself open to several justifiable criticisms: for one, that novels like Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility focus too much on younger women at the expense of making older ones either irrelevant or ridiculous. For another, they don’t leave Austen’s readers much idea about how to conduct themselves once the rice is swept up and the bill for the reception comes in.
On the latter charge, however, Austen deserves at least a measure of exoneration. She does depict many post-happily-ever-afters: It’s just that in most cases, they’re not very happy. She’s already made quick work of the marriage of her beloved heroine Elizabeth Bennet’s parents by the end of the first chapter of . “Mr. Bennet,” she notes, “was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three and twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character,” although hers is “less difficult” to grasp: Silly, vain, and
