Happy Birthday, Jane!

(First: Today is the last day to enter the Cassandra Clare Giveaway. I’ll be picking the winner at 5 PM Eastern).

Today marks the 236th birthday of Jane Austen. Happy birthday, Jane.

Last night, I attended a performance of a play based on Austen’s novel, Pride & Prejudice. P&P is, undoubtedly, the most popular of all the Austen works, and with good reason It is the most soundly structured and tightly plotted of all her stories. Elizabeth is the most winning of all of Austen’s heroines, especially for the modern reader, due to her strength, spunk, and sense of humor. Kate Cook, the actress who portrayed Elizabeth in the production I saw last night said of the character:

“she’s beautifully drawn and virtually impossible to get right. Plus, a mythology has risen up around her, she has become something more than she is, which makes it a bit tough to find the person in there… I find her bottomless. There’s always more to discover.”

Everyone creates their own Elizabeth from what is on the page — focusing on one thing and ignoring some other that may not fit with their Elizabethan image. Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth clashes so wildly with my mental Elizabeth that I could never really like that film. I once got into a knock-down, drag-out fight with someone who insisted that Lizzie really did only fall for Darcy for the house.

Everyone also creates their own Jane. Some like to imagine for her a thwarted love story that informs the romances in her fiction:

Others eschew the love stories in her books and claim that Jane was a social satirist, full-stop, and knowing nothing of romantic love herself, could not properly express it in fiction. To this argument they like to quote a letter that Austen once wrote to the librarian of the Prince Regent, J.S. Clarke, claiming, in part: “I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter.”

Which betrays a misunderstanding in general as to what the term “romance” meant then. (Hint: it doesn’t mean what it does today.) Make no mistake: Jane Austen wrote love stories. She also wrote social satire, and stories about families. It was all of it.

In fact, novels in general then were regarded as highly suspect modes of entertainment, and people often pretended they DIDN’T like novels (ANY novels) back then, the way now that so many keep their love of romance novels or YA novels or Twilight (which is both) under wraps.

Jane’s books, when finally published (she sold one early on that didn’t make it into print) were popular with the reading public, including the aforementioned Prince Regent, who prevailed upon her to dedicate Emma to him. Sadly, she dies before her final complete novel, Persuasion, was published.

In the late 19th century, opinions on Austen’s work was divided between a readership that had an emotional and overwhelming adoration for the books (think Twihards) and one who “properly” apreciated Austen’s place in the canon. (This crap ain’t new, guys.) There began to be a noted division between Austen fans who fancied themselves admirers of the full range of Austen’s subject matter and ones who liked the books because Darcy was hawt. The division was pronounced enough that it was considered a strike against your own analysis if you spent any time appreciating the relationships in the novels.

Like I said, this crap ain’t new.

Nevertheless, it is impossible to divorce Austen’s social views from her views about love and marriage. Her books depict the lives and fortunes of a completely dependent class — women. Though Austen herself managed to make a tiny bit of money from the sale of her novels, women’s almost exclusive means of securing an income for themselves was to marry into one. The only heroine of independent fortune in the novels is Emma (Anne Elliot is supposed to have a dowry, but Sir Walter can’t be prevailed upon to cough it up.)

FWIW, here are the fortunes of Jane Austen’s heroines:

• Emma Woodhouse: 30,000 pounds (the modern equivalent of $150,000 a year)
• Anne Elliot: 10,000 pounds, officially, but she doesn’t get it.
• Catherine Morland (Northanger Abbey): 3,000 pounds
• Elizabeth Bennett: 1,000 pounds (this means her mother brought 5k dowry into her marriage with Mr. Bennett)
• Elinor and Marianne Dashwood: 1,000 pounds a piece*
• Fanny Price: zip (please note that Miss Crawford has a 20,000 pound dowry, and that her aunt secured a baronet with “only seven thousand”)

For an in-depth analysis of Austenian fortunes, see this great post, which attempts to explain the way money worked in the time, complete with a lovely chart, excerpted below.)

After her father’s death, Austen, her sister Cassandra, and their mother lived on ~450 pounds a year, which is very like the 500 pounds a year the S&S girls were impoverished on.

So what does all this mean? Well, the richest of Austen’s heroines states unequivocally that she has no inducements to marry, being a woman of independent fortune and a prominent place in society (since the marriage of her sister, Emma is the “lady” of her house). And even amongst the heroines of  lower fortune, she states very clearly, over and over in her novels when her heroines refuse proposals from men who may offer them comfortable lives, that no matter what your situation, you should not marry unless you can be happy with your husband.

This parallels Austen’s own life. She was engaged once, for a day, to a man with money she’d known for a very long time. However, she realized quickly that she couldn’t be happy in that marriage, despite the financial stability it would afford her, and she broke the engagement. For Austen, “Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection.”

For Fanny Price, that meant risking alienating her adoptive family at Mansfield Park and being sent packing home to her own impoverished relations rather than marry the immoral and licentious Henry Crawford. For Elizabeth Bennett it meant risking her family’s welfare, first by not marrying the heir to her father’s estate (though you can argue she figured she was safe with Jane and Bingley’s romance seeming assured), and then, later, by not accepting Darcy’s first proposal. (If Mrs. Bennett was going to disown Lizzie for not accepting Mr. Collins, can you imagine what she’d do if she found out her daughter was rejecting a man with $10,000 a year?). For Anne Elliott, it means not marrying Charles Musgrove even though he would have gotten her out of her father’s house and into the bosom of the Musgrove family, whom she seems to like. And then later with Mr. Elliot, Austen says that what Anne might ever have thought of Mr. Elliot (before the revelations about his true character) coudln’t really have been known, because Anne is such a one-woman man.

But affection is not necessarily the same thing as romantic love. Indeed, in S&S, one gathers that the love Marianne ends up feeling for Colonel Brandon is not necessarily a passionate and romantic one, but one of strong regard and respect. However, it is enough to make the both of them happy, and that is the point Austen is making. She also likes to create examples of happy (Admiral and Mrs. Croft, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner, etc.) and unhappy (Mr. Collins and Charlotte, Maria Bertram and Mr. Rushworth, Charles and Mary Musgrove) marriages in her books to drive the point home that unless her heroines make choices based not only in comfort/fortune (which she CERTAINLY thinks is important) but ALSO in affection, they are much better off staying single.

So the fact that Jane Austen’s stories are love stories in no way diminishes from everything else they are too. The thing I love so much about Austen’s romances is they are not destructive, they are not all-encompassing. The characters build something new with their relationships, working them into the fabric of their society, growing something made of not only of romance, but also of respect. Anne tells Wentworth it’s better that they are together now rather than when they were each young and had no place in the world. If Lizzie had taken Darcy when he first proposed, he would never have become a better person, and he would always have seen her as a prize to be won, and resented her as a fortune hunter. Could Fanny really have changed Henry Crawford’s evil ways? I don’t think so.

Where were we? Right.

Happy Birthday, Jane!

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* There is somewhat of an argument about what these ladies are living on — if you do the math from chapter 1 of S&S, they have 10k between their mother’s 7k and the 1k each that the girls got from their late uncle. That would give them an income of the modern equivalent of 50k a year, which isn’t horribly shabby. However, a 1k dowry isn’t going to help them much, as we see from the point of view of Elizabeth. It’s not “husband catching” money — they aren’t “prey for fortune hunters,” as Mr. Bennett puts it. Also, if you’ve just seen the Ang Lee movie, they make the Dashwoods much richer, reduce the widow Dashwood much more (the girls have NO dowries at all in the film), and make Brandon a good deal richer, too.