To read Jane Austen's letters-with their steady consciousness of bargains, pence, and shillings-is to be aware of one small but nag- ging way in which she experienced the restrictions of being an un- married middle-class woman: she had little money, and she had almost no access to more. In 1813, for example, the year Pride and Prejudice was published, Jane Austen, her mother, and her sister, Cassandra, were dependent for their living on three sources: a small income of Mrs. Austen's, a small legacy of Cassandra's, and the £ 250 provided annually by four of the Austen brothers.1 The sum was enhanced to some degree by the money Jane earned through writing, for in July of that year she reports that "I have now .written myself into £ 250-which only makes me long for more."2 But the £140 brought by Sense and Sensibility and the £1 10 by Pride and Prejudice did not go far, and Austen's letters for that year, as for every year, are full of reference to small economies. To read Jane Austen's letters is also to be aware-to be reminded -of the privilege that belonged to middle-class men. For Austen had five brothers, and they had what she did not: access to work that paid, access to inheritance and preference, and access to the independence, the personal power, that belonged to being prosper- ous and male. In 1813, for example, all but one brother was rising in a career. James was earning £ 1100 a year as curate. Henry was partner in a successful banking firm, Frank was captain of a ship in the Baltic, Charles the flag captain of another, and Edward, the only brother without a profession, was living as a country gentle- man on one of the two estates he had inherited from the family who adopted him. The economic difference in the lots of Austen women and Austen men was certainly striking, and yet there is little indication in the letters that this difference was a source of oppression or discomfort to Jane.
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Newton, Judith Lowder. “‘Pride and Prejudice’: Power, Fantasy, and Subversion in Jane Austen.” Feminist Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 1978, pp. 27–42. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3177624. Accessed 27 June 2020.
THE CASE OF PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
JOSEPH WIESENFARTH
He's prudent, valient, just, and temperate;
In him all vertue is beheld in State:
And he is built like some imperiall roome
For that to dwell in, and be still at home.
Ben Jonson*
This is a frequent complaint against Jane Austen: that while Napoleon was doing his best to worsen life for the English she was blithely writing about three or four families in a country village. We know from her letters advising Anna Austen how to write a novel of manners and refusing James Stanier Clarke's request to write a historical romance that Jane Austen knew precisely the kind of fiction she could and could not write.1 Such letters have a larger historical significance too. They demonstrate that at the very moment that hostile forces outside and within England threatened its destruction? Napoleon's wars gave a name to an era that overlapped the corrupt manners of the Prince Regent's court2?Jane Austen's novels showed the English how, ideally, they could live. Her novels are classics because they give "an insight into what the conduct of . . . [her] own people at . . . [her] own time might be, at its best."3 Her own people at her own time had a developed myth of concern4 that insisted on a coherence of values within the family and a continuity of values from one generation to another; con? cern for marriage and advice about marrying therefore dominate her novels with a civic urgency. Sir Reginald de Courcy epitomizes such a concern for coherence and continuity in a letter to his son in Lady Susan. He urges him not to marry the lady named in the title of the novel. "In the very important concern of Marriage especially," he insists, "there is everything at stake; your own happiness, that of your Parents, and the credit of your name." Although "Lady Susan's age is itself a material objection," Sir Reginald is more worried by "her want of character": "Her neglect of her husband, her encouragement of other Men, her extravagance & dissipation were so gross [261] & notorious, that no one could be ignorant of them at the time, nor can now have forgotten them." Whereas his own fortune makes him indifferent to Lady Susan's lack of money, de Courcy is not indifferent to her impover? ished reputation. Father tells son, therefore, that "it is my Duty to oppose a Match, which deep Art only could render probable, and must in the end make wretched." Nevertheless, he writes, "I do not wish to work on your Fears, but on your Sense & Affection. It would destroy every comfort of my Life to know that you were married to Lady Susan Vernon. It would be the death of that honest Pride with which I have hitherto considered my son, I should blush to see him, to hear of him, to think of him."
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WIESENFARTH, JOSEPH. “THE CASE OF ‘PRIDE AND PREJUDICE.’” Studies in the Novel, vol. 16, no. 3, 1984, pp. 261–273. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/29532288. Accessed 27 June 2020.
APPROACHING JANE AUSTEN'S WORK chronologically, one is struck by her analogous methods of entitling Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, her preceding novel. The title Sense and Sensibility defines what is clearly the central moral conflict of that novel, but the simple and repeated opposition of the titular qualities is one of the marks of Jane Austen's artistic immaturity. The relationship between the title Pride and Prejudice and the conflicts in that novel is not so immediately apparent as in Sense and Sensibility, but the skill shown in using the titular qualities to keep the moral framework of the novel clear while presenting a novelistic world of great complexity is one of the triumphs of Jane Austen's developing technique.
Although the meaning of the title has attracted considerable comment, the qualities of pride and prejudice have been interpreted so narrowly that the full significance of the title has been obscured. Indeed, R. C. Fox, who regards the title as, primarily, Jane Austen's concession to the popularity of alliterative and antithetical titles, has warned us not to be "misled by investing the title with more significance than is warranted." I The usual interpretation is that the title is a reference to Darcy's pride, which causes him to reject Elizabeth and her family, and Elizabeth's resulting prejudice, which is reinforced by Wickham's false story about Darcy. But Fox suggests that the morally significant conflict is between pride and vanity, not between pride and prejudice. This distinction between pride and vanity is, however, based on the words of Mary Bennet, a character who is satirized, as D. J. Dooley notes, for making imperceptive comments. And Dooley also shows that the usual meanings of pride and prejudice do ex- plain a substantial number of the failings of Elizabeth and Darcy. Nevertheless, despite his demonstration of the weaknesses of Fox's arguments, Dooley does not entirely dispel all uneasiness about the title. Should it not, in the context of the novel, acquire richer and more pertinent meanings than the merely literal ones that critics ordinarily suggest? Even in the less complex Sense and Sensibility, the terms of the title, although already having complicated meanings in Jane Austen's time, are developed and modified so that they take on distinctive meanings relevant to the moral evaluations of the novel. B. C. Southam correctly suggests a parallel between the novels:
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Zimmerman, Everett. “Pride and Prejudice in Pride and Prejudice.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 23, no. 1, 1968, pp. 64–73. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2932317. Accessed 27 June 2020.