Yes, the “role” of women was something I was highly conscious of in writing Pride and Prejudice, although I didn’t have a political programme as such. It was said of Mr Darcy by Elizabeth to her father Mr Bennet when he has proposed a second time and been accepted, that Darcy had “no improper pride”. Darcy has been referred to as “proud” in a critical way throughout the novel, and as a ‘keyword’ it is usually supposed to apply mainly to him. Indeed, it’s assumed that the title of the book implies that he (Darcy) has the pride and she (Elizabeth) (most of) the prejudice.

However, it is important to the theme of the book that I did feel there was a “proper feminine pride”, even, or perhaps especially, if most of the ladies in the book and those I encountered out of it aren’t aware of this or don’t possess it. Elizabeth obviously feels that her best friend Charlotte should have had more pride than to succumb to Mr Collins, who is merely proposing to everyone in sight, or even on sight, because his pompous patroness Lady Catherine thinks it’s time he got himself a wife. Charlotte is “accepting the first offer” despite the fact that his professions of love and esteem are no great compliment.

Again, it is also interesting that Mr Collins, Charlotte and Mr Darcy share common ground in agreeing that Elizabeth must accept a marriage proposal in accordance with patriarchal arrangements which put pressure on her to do this. Collins thought she must accept him as she had little money and might not receive another offer. Her feelings about him were scarcely relevant, he thought. Charlotte at Hunsford thought that the sheer knowledge that a rich and powerful man like Darcy ‘wanted’ Elizabeth would win her over to him despite her previous dislike. And Darcy thinks she will accept him as he thinks highly of himself and knows that her acceptance of him will constitute a kind of social ‘promotion’ (to something like ‘First Lady of Derbyshire’, presumably). Elizabeth’s proper pride (as well as prejudice) are at work in her refusal of Darcy at the first time of asking. She knows that both men had the power to offer her social security, but she does not feel any affection for them (disapproves of Darcy in particular for spoiling her sister Jane’s chance of happiness with puppyish Bingley, and had also been deceived as to his character by Wickham). So her course is clear and her resistance absolute at this point.

Elizabeth is clearly a standard of “what a woman should be” here: she disapproved of Charlotte, who gave herself to a man without feeling any affection, but also of her youngest sister Lydia, who follows her desires and simply pursues men without reference to her own self-respect, which would entail some self-restraint. Formally, I did not challenge the system: Darcy as a great estate owner is assumed to represent a pure good because he is a responsible person. And Elizabeth’s joke to Jane about falling in love when she first saw Darcy’s house and grounds at Pemberley has always been felt to be a little bit suspect, somehow. However, I did attack the arrangements which entailed away the Bennet estate at Longbourn to Mr. Collins simply because Mr and Mrs Bennet had only had daughters. Perhaps one of my mistakes (I didn’t make too many here!) was embodying the insolence of rank mainly in a woman, the bossy Lady Catherine de Bourgh. In that sense, when it came to patriarchy I did perhaps pull my punches a little.

With best wishes.

Jane Austen.

I think I believed in love and my major novels certainly end with marriages assumed to be happy ones because based on mutual affection, though also because they all seem to be on a sound financial footing – for example, Jane and Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice marry Darcy and Bingley, the richest young men in [their] sight(s). Oh, and Elizabeth did say she fell in love with Mr Darcy when she saw his beautiful estate at Pemberley, which might just make the cynical reader think she meant she fell in love with his estate. Catherine Morland, the heroine of Northanger Abbey tells John Thorpe that “one great fortune looking out for another” in order that each party may marry money is “wickedness”, but ladies in my day were quite commonly “advertised” with reference to the fortune they would bring with them. This was something I definitely opposed.

Fanny Price, the quiet heroine in Mansfield Park, feels how “wicked” it would be to “marry without affection” for prudential reasons (she’s being courted by a rich young rake, Henry Crawford and already secretly loves her cousin Edmund Bertram!) (I myself turned down a rich young landowner, Harris Bigg-Wither because I didn’t like him well enough to marry him.) I thought then that one should marry for love, but I think I learned “romance as I grew older”, like my last heroine, Anne Elliot in Persuasion. When Anne and Wentworth are united in Bath at last, we hear of “hearts dancing in private rapture”.

This romantic note is unlike the tone of the early Northanger Abbey in which Henry Tilney marries Catherine only because she is so obviously fond of him, and she can hardly have had the opportunity to meet many other young men (the only other one she meets in Bath is stupid John Thorpe). My earlier novel, Northanger, is closer to the spirit of the anti-romantic Dr. Johnson, who was so influential earlier in the eighteenth century. He thought marriages might as well be arranged through the Lord Chancellor of England as through personal choice.

My later novel, Persuasion, is closer to the spirit of Romanticism itself – I lived in the time of the Romantic poets in England, of course. A later critic of mine found a wonderful line in the poet Tennyson -- who followed me, and admired me. Tennyson’s “Northern Farmer” in the poem of that name, advises: “Don’t you marry for money, but go where the money is”. The critic suggests I would have approved of the sentiment. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps.

Oh, and best of luck with China. No doubt they ordered these things better there.

With best wishes.

Jane Austen.

Well, your tall order as usual, I suppose! Part of the fascination of an author like me is the combination of repetition and innovation (newness) as we move from novel to novel. The marriage plot is constant as a handy point of resolution and a recognition of the confined role for women, even brilliant and strenuous or sedulous ones who also have personal integrity like Marianne and Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility and Jane and Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. One of the major themes is the contrast with people who don’t have their special qualities and who therefore solve their problems in ways we aren’t expected to admire -- the Steele girls Lucy and Anne in Sense and Sensibility, for example, intent on toadying their way to the top, or Charlotte Lucas of Pride and Prejudice, who gets her meal-ticket in the form of the unalluring Mr. Collins of Hunsford. But there is sympathy for women generally in the light of their social position.

In my fragment of a novel, The Watsons, the girls of that family are poor and know they must get husbands or face ultimate horrors like governessing. Their faces are sharp and anxious, they eat a dinner consisting entirely of fried beef, and they seem to be thoroughly patronised by those about them, especially men of rank, fashion or wealth.

In Mansfield Park my heroine Fanny Price is a poor girl exiled from Portsmouth to Mansfield, timid and priggish, but also kindly and affectionate, secretly in love with Edmund Bertram, the younger son of the house, thanks to his own kindness and principled character. She rejects the ethos of the worldly-minded Crawfords, corrupted through their upbringing, mercenary and designing. Fanny is particularly indignant over the sexual power play of young and rakish Henry Crawford, and part of the fun of a novel often held to be deficient in it is that Henry falls for Fanny herself and becomes ardently reformed and idealistic for her sake until his sexual attention is diverted once more. Mansfield Park exhorts to reform, retrenchment, an ethos of struggle and endurance which country house culture will in fact always negate (the actual work’s being done by slaves in Antigua, apparently).

In Emma, my next novel, I specifically chose a lively, beautiful, spoilt, and somewhat arrogant heroine who was specifically the opposite of timid Fanny. I critique’d Emma’s uncritical attachment to the snobberies of gentry society: her deification of the Knightleys of Donwell almost seems that of an outsider rather than a gentry person like Emma herself with her Hartfield estate and investments, but her insecurity is determined by the death of her intelligent mother, the survival of her almost idiotic father Mr. Henry Woodhouse, her spoilt disposition and, once more, the disadvantages of her gender, which leave her socially exposed in various ways. Her gentry ways are challenged by the new arrival in Highbury, the commercially successful arriviste Mrs Elton, formerly Miss Augusta Hawkins of Bristol. To add to her just possibly just torments here, Emma is rebuked and humiliated by her hero Mr Knightley for her arrogance towards the poor but respectable Miss Bates at Box Hill (oh what a deadly picnic!), and her moral reformation “re-insures” a gentry society confirmed in its hegemony by the marriage of Emma and Knightley himself. Part of Emma’s lesson may also be that landowners participate in the capitalist process and are not simply “above” it, as practical Mr.Knightley knows, engaged in the practical activity of actually running an estate in a way Emma is innocent of. But the novel seems to say that she’s right in assuming that people should “know ‘their’ places” (Clergyman Mr. Elton forgot his in aspiring to Emma, but Emma also forgot it in her assumption that he was a dish fit for a Harriet, a silly little parlour boarder she has taken on board.)

This idea is partly negated in my last complete novel, Persuasion, in which Anne Elliot, the genteel but unsnobbish heroine, has been dissuaded from marrying by traditionalist Lady Russell, and her snooty but incompetent father has had to evict himself from his country seat. Meanwhile, Anne’s poor but dashing suitor Wentworth has enriched himself in the Napoleonic wars, and the contempt of Sir Walter for such nautical types, saviours of their country, is shown itself to be itself rather contemptible. Allie, she married him (Wentworth, I mean).

My love-interests and marriage plots are always involved with such political and ideological considerations! I didn’t know the word ‘ideological’ at the time but picked it up later!

With best wishes.

Jane Austen