Pride And Prejudice
(Jane Austen)
What sort of a world are Jane Austen's characters living in when the whole object of their lives is to get a man. I am, of course, talking about Jane Austen's women characters; they are the only ones who count, the men are grotesques, cardboard cut-out archetypal guys who have money and deign to think, occasionally, of settling down.
Naturally the woman must have charm, beauty and more than anything else class. English society was then, and to a certain extent still is, a functioning system that was structured on class: there was the upper class, the middle class and the working class. Needless to say, the working class does not appear in Jane Austen's books; the upper class do but not with much affection payed towards them. No, Pride and Prejudice is all about young middle class women doing their best to marry above their station.
In most romantic fiction (most often written by women) there are certain standard types: the young woman of a lowish middle class family who falls in love with a cad, a brute, who she thinks she can make respectable. Sometimes she succeeds (as in Pamela by Richardson - A MAN!); sometimes she feels she has, by the conventions of her time, to marry the local padre or someone equally respectable, good and boring. Jane Austen's Elizabeth resists the pompous attentions of Mr Darcy telling him in no gentle tones what she thinks of him and his snobbish values but later, realising how inwardly and morally strong he is, succumbs to his charm (and wealth).
If it wasn't for Jane Austen's wonderful ability to write about these people with an overarching compassion in a style that makes most romatic "literature" appear soppy and often coarse, she would have to be put in the compartment of all those Mills and Boon writers.
So it is a story of how daughters of a middle class family succeed in "getting their man". What else could they have done in those days? Work? Heaven forbid.
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