Titans of History by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Author:Simon Sebag Montefiore [Montefiore, Simon Sebag]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2013-03-23T16:00:00+00:00

JANE AUSTEN

1775–1817

Like Shakespeare, she took, as it were, the common dross of humanity, and by her wonderful power of literary alchemy, turned it into pure gold. Yet she was apparently unconscious of her strength, and in the long roll of writers who have adorned our noble literature there is probably not one so devoid of pedantry or affectation, so delightfully self-repressive, or so free from egotism, as Jane Austen.

George Barnett Smith, in The Gentleman’s Magazine, No. 258 (1895)

A parson’s daughter who completed just six novels during her short life, Jane Austen emerged from deliberate anonymity to become English literature’s best-loved female writer. Her gently ironic yet profound novels of love, manners and marriage transformed the art of writing fiction.

Acutely observed and subtly incisive, Austen’s works are acknowledged as masterpieces. Her irony conceals a penetrating gaze, encapsulated in the famous opening line of Pride and Prejudice (1813): “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” This was the world she chronicled: “The Assemblies of Nottingham are, as in all other places, the resort of the young and the gay, who go to see and be seen; and also of those, who, having played their matrimonial cards well in early life, are now content to sit down to a game of sober whist or quadrille.” Thus, in 1814, was encapsulated the purpose of the endless round of entertainments that consumed the lives of England’s gentry and aristocracy: to find matches for the new generation.

As the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft commented, a girl’s “coming out,” at the age of fifteen or sixteen, was purely “to bring to market a marriageable miss, whose person is taken from one place to another, richly caparisoned.” The market they chose was of paramount importance. One prudent clergyman advised his stepsisters not to move to rural Oxfordshire, on the grounds that the location “is but an indifferent one for young ladies to shine in.” Ambitious young women—or those with ambitious parents—would head for London.

No one was under any illusions about where they stood in the pecking order. It was unlikely that a provincial parson’s daughter, such as Jane Austen, with her modest portion and limited connections, would even meet, let alone marry, a son of the high aristocracy. The daughters of the elite, carrying substantial dowries, were rigorously protected against the adventurers who infiltrated London’s society balls in the hopes of bagging themselves an heiress.

Parents and children alike were aware that choices were determined as much by financial considerations as by inclination. “When poverty comes in at the door love flies out the window,” one gentlewoman reminded her daughter in 1801. The absolute minimum a gentleman could hope to scrape by on during this period was about £280 a year. But this would require a life, as one bride accepted, where “we shall live in a quiet domestic manner and not see much company.”

Even an esquire on £450 a year would struggle to satisfy

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