Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Winter 2023
Abstract
"The famous first lines of Pride and Prejudice, 'It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife' (3), alert the reader to a story about marriage. This 'universal' truth is presented ironically, of course, since it is the women without a good fortune who are in want of husbands. Remember that Emma Woodhouse indicates that she does not need to marry since she does not need “‘fortune’” or “‘consequence’” (E 84). But the Bennet sisters have neither, so '[t]he business of [Mrs. Bennet’s] life was to get her daughters married' (5); she is well aware that once her husband dies, she and her five daughters will be homeless since the estate is entailed to the closest male heir. Marriage for the Bennet girls—any kind of marriage—seems to be the only way to alleviate this problem. As I established in Women and “Value” in Jane Austen’s Novels, the fate of the Austen heroine can be understood as the exception to the norm. We might view marriages in the novels in a similar way: Elizabeth Bennet is not the 'normal' match for Fitzwilliam Darcy, which is why he fights his attraction to her for the first half of the novel.
Secondary or 'minor' marriages in this novel, such as the Collinses and the Wickhams, however, do represent the norm. This essay focuses on how inheritance and marriage laws and practices affect these 'normal' marriages, revealing that the marriage of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy is truly exceptional.1"
Recommended Citation
Hall, Lynda. "Entail, Elopement, and Marriage Law in Pride and Prejudice." Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal On-Line, vol. 44, no. 1, 2023. https://jasna.org/publications-2/persuasions-online/volume-44-no-1/hall/
Peer Reviewed
1
Copyright
The author
Comments
This article was originally published in https://jasna.org/publications-2/persuasions-online/volume-44-no-1/hall/Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal On-Line, volume 44, issue 1, in 2023.