Marriage in Pride and Prejudice

The ladies of Meryton eagerly await the arrival of eligible young men

In Pride and Prejudice, Mrs Bennet’s pursuit of advantageous marriages for her daughters is obsessive, unrelenting and often counter-productive. Mr. Bennet considers his wife’s schemes ridiculous, while Elizabeth has, of course, decided that she will marry only for love. Elizabeth, like the first-time reader of Pride and Prejudice, is shocked and saddened when Charlotte accepts Mr. Collins’ proposal:

[Elizabeth] had always felt that Charlotte’s opinion of matrimony was not exactly like her own, but she had not supposed it to be possible that, when called into action, she would have sacrificed every better feeling to worldly advantage. Charlotte the wife of Mr. Collins was a most humiliating picture! And to the pang of a friend disgracing herself and sunk in her esteem, was added the distressing conviction that it was impossible for that friend to be tolerably happy in the lot she had chosen.

Charlotte’s decision seems so extreme to modern readers of Pride and Prejudice, and Mrs Bennet’s obsession with marriage so irrational, but what was life like for unmarried ladies in the early 19th Century? What was the alternative to marrying an idiot? Did Mrs. Bennet – or even Charlotte Lucas – have a point?

Spinsterhood in Jane Austen’s Day

In 1787, 26 years before Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was published, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote about the degradations of life for so-called spinsters. In her ‘Thoughts on the Education of Daughters’ she explained:

Few are the modes of earning a subsistence, and those are very humiliating. Perhaps to be an humble companion to some rich old cousin, or what is still worse, to live with strangers, who are so intolerably tyrannical, that none of their relations can bear to live with them, though they should even expect a fortune in reversion. It is impossible to enumerate the many hours of anguish such a person must spend. Above the servants, yet considered by them a spy, and ever reminded of her inferiority when in conversation with the superiors. If she cannot condescend to mean flattery, she has not a chance of being a favorite; and should any of the visitors take notice of her, and she for a moment forget her subordinate state, she is sure to be reminded of it.

Painfully sensible of unkindness, she is alive to every thing, and many sarcasms reach her, which were perhaps directed another way. She is alone, shut out from equality and confidence, and the concealed anxiety impairs her constitution; for she must wear a cheerful face, or be dismissed. The being dependent on the caprice of a fellow-creature, though certainly very necessary in this state of discipline, is yet a very bitter corrective, which we would fain shrink from.

The other options for unmarried ladies, like the Bennet girls of Pride and Prejudice, that Mary Wollstonecraft spells out are becoming a teacher (who ‘is only a kind of upper servant, who has more work than the menial ones’) or becoming a governess. This, she says, is equally disagreeable. Furthermore, ‘The few trades which are left, are now gradually falling into the hands of men, and certainly they are not very respectable.’

Mrs Bennet gasps at Mr. Bennet's indifference

Does this alter your opinion of any of the characters in Pride and Prejudice, for example Mr or Mrs. Bennet, Charlotte Lucas or even Elizabeth? To my mind, it certainly makes Mrs. Bennet’s motivations clearer, even if we mock the ridiculous methods she employs in Pride and Prejudice. Also, Elizabeth’s rejection of Mr. Collins – and certainly her rejection of Mr. Darcy’s first proposal – appear even bolder than before. Perhaps Elizabeth Bennet was a rebel after all?

Wishing you all felicity in marriage,

Fitzwilliam Darcy