by Megan Marquart

Created on: May 13, 2009   Last Updated: May 17, 2009

All of Jane Austen's novels are about, first and foremost, marriage. Well, at least they're about getting married. As Jane Austen died "an old maid" and only wrote of what she knew; readers get glimpses of other people's marriages but never of the heroines. Specifically, Austen wrote about courtship, marriage being the goal. And why do people get married in Regency England? For money. Austen didn't like that. So she wrote of women who would marry only for love ... wait a minute. Marry for love? We take such a notion for granted today, but this is really revolutionary stuff for the turn of the century, especially for young ladies of little fortune, like Jane Austen and most of her heroines. Sure, if the money were there to begin with one might have the luxury of meeting a suitable person who is truly likable, even lovable, but that is a secondary consideration.

Until the modern era, marriage was always primarily about money - the keeping and increasing of a family's fortune. Eldest sons inherit in order to keep those fortunes intact, younger sons (of the landed gentry and nobility) enter the military, study law, or join the clergy where they pray to marry well, and daughters are wed to the most eligible (wealthy) suitor. Jane Austen was keenly aware of the pressure to marry well, but when she had the opportunity to she refused, despite the fact that the marriage would have saved her from a life of total monetary dependence on her brothers, busy trying to make their own ways in the world and already supporting their mother and other sister, Cassandra.

By standards of the day, Austen had not the option to marry, but the duty to do so, as a means of providing for herself and relieving the burden she imposed on her family. I have often imagined that the words ascribed to Mrs. Bennet in Pride & Prejudice, admonishing Elizabeth Bennet after she refuses Mr. Collins proposal, were words Jane Austen heard from her own relatives: "if you take it into your head to go on refusing every offer of marriage in this way, you will never get a husband at all-and I am sure I do not know who is to maintain you when your father is dead."

But Austen raised the stakes in Pride & Prejudice. Mr. Bennet makes the unfortunate decision to marry Mrs. Bennet and their misfortune grows when, after many attempts, they find themselves encumbered with five daughters and no sons. Their estate, Longbourn, in lieu of an male heir, is entailed on a distant cousin, Mr. Collins, who is

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