What (Jane Austen's) Women Want

Jane Austen explores questions we’re still asking

Hello friends,

Hope all is spring, flowers, love, and beauty - wherever you are right now. 

If you’re not getting much of any of the above, well, make a cuppa tea, find a good chair, and let’s talk.

If you’re like me, you’ve many times had to explain what Jane Austen is really about - you might find yourself explaining to friends who just don’t get it, that Austen is not all about finding a man who’s wealthier and more powerful than you are, to marry. 

Sure, these novels follow the traditional Marriage Plot. These novels may have invented the plot as we know it today. As we’ve said before and will point out often in these letters, the stories also - while not technically Romance-genre stories -  introduce, build on, and play off of our favorite Romantic Tropes, from the hate-to-love or friends-to-lovers story lines, to the Alpha male, forbidden love, and proximity plots. 

But we also know that within this scaffolding of she-who-identifies-as-girl-meets-complicated-person-who-identifies-as-boy, there is a lot of meandering to get to our much-anticipated engagement, and there’s also some analysis after the Love Declaration, where Austen shows us what she’s been doing all the while. (And this post-game analysis takes place in the books, friends, not so much in the screen adaptations. That’s because Knightley and Emma apologizing to each other and explaining what they’ve learned through their experiences in the preceding scene, just doesn’t make good cinema. But it’s actually pretty sexy reading.)

The annual Jane Austen Festival, Bath. Credit: Christopher Jones | iStock

So, in this letter I thought we could discuss what all this meandering - the subtext within Austen’s actual text - is about, and where Austen is trying to take us, as her heroines, and their leading guys, wander through the wilderness of society, and customs, and class, and humiliations, to get to their unexpected (or entirely expected, by us the reader) happy ending, with a hard-won, successful match: a marriage.

So here’s a very simple question: What do Austen women want? 

For me, the question leads us to some unexpected places - places that go well beyond the Courtship and Marriage plot. Places that take us on a tour of key issues those identifying as women have even today. Or especially - you might say - today. 

1. See me

The first thing I’ll argue here that Jane Austen’s women want is simply to be seen as human.

I know that sounds a bit basic, maybe even sarcastic - but when you break down what characters like Lizzy Bennet and Fanny Price actually say, you realize they want to be seen, and they want to be seen as rational, human creatures. 

And they say as much.

When Elizabeth Bennet implores Mr. Collins, during his proposal, to see her as “rational” she is drawing, it’s assumed, from Mary Wollstonecraft’s famous treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792, when Jane Austen was 17 years old. 

This plea of Elizabeth’s to be seen as rational - and not be taken as a flattering, manipulative “lady” of fashion in search of gallantry or advantage - cannot be overestimated: It is truly central to what Austen’s heroines, and what Austen herself wanted.

In Vindication, Wollstonecraft urges women not to buy in to the roles society creates for middle- and upper-class women - to be pretty playthings who responded to gallantry, and in doing so either became victims or deployed what little agency they have toward manipulation. 

In the intro to Vindication, Wollstonecraft paints an ugly picture of the women her 18th century world had created: women who, taken in by the flattery of men, “do not seek to obtain a durable interest in their hearts, or to become the friends of the fellow creatures who find amusement in their society.”

Lucy Steele, anyone? Insert your favorite Austen mean-girl here.

To me, the entire sense vs sensibility tension that drives Austen’s characters and plots reads like a fictionalization of Wollstonecraft’s premise in Vindication. 

Wollstonecraft says - Listen up: This construct you’re putting women into is bad for women, and it’s bad for men. It’s bad for everyone. It’s just bad.

Austen says this over and over too. But she says it differently, and through fiction.

Wollstonecraft’s message is: Look what happens to us when you don’t provide women with opportunities for education and agency - you end up wasting half of society’s resources, and everyone is unhappy in the bargain.

Listen up: This construct you’re putting women into is bad for women, and it’s bad for men. It’s bad for everyone. It’s just bad.

But Austen gives us a lopsided mirror image of the bleak picture painted by Wollstonecraft, showing us: Look what happens when do you have educated women, like Elizabeth Bennet and Elinor Dashwood and Anne Elliot - what you get is strong women with authentic affections who are better supporters not only of their families, but can make meaningful contributions to society.

The difference is imagination. The difference is story. Austen creates an imagined world that forces us to see past the real one.

Because Austen was first and foremost an artist - and she continuously deploys her imagination to fashion a better world through art, through fiction. And often, still more than 200 years later, we don’t see it.

But the way Jane Austen does it is a lot more fun. 

2. Just call me Human

Jane Austen’s women are not just intelligence that is forcefully conveyed - think Emma Woodhouse, Elizabeth Bennet, and Fanny Price who, as we’ve said, are in their various ways the Smartest Person in the Room.

But Austen’s stories flip the script, with feeling - the radical interiority of her characters that is urged on every reader also forcefully puts upon the reader the feelings, the cares, the loves, the doubts, the triumphs, of these young women characters.

We empathize. And empathy leads to understanding.

This is the powerful thing Austen is doing - that Wollstonecraft is doing too, but again Mary is doing it through political writing and Jane is doing it through storytelling. (And specifically one way she’s doing this is through her celebrated stylistic technique of free indirect discourse.)

Rather than Wollstonecraft’s “enfeebled” women - women weakened by frippery, and romance - Austen’s women want to be seen not as Females, but as Humans engaged in and contributing to the vast human enterprise. Not decorations, however well cared for, on the margins of that enterprise.

Sometimes I feel like all of Austen’s literary techniques and dramatic powers are rallied toward this enterprise. She deploys point of view, narration, and an intense interiority of the female perspective, to create empathy, as writers before and since have done. 

To do what Austen did in the early 19th century is still considered even today to be radical and innovative - from Toni Morrison and Elena Ferrante to Ove Knausgaard: To show our point of view, and in doing so to reveal our humanity. 

3. Let’s call it a tie (or ‘companionate marriage’)

Of all people, it is often the leading men that take Austen’s challenge to reason and humanity seriously, in her novels. 

It’s easy to dismiss Mr. Darcy, Henry Tilney, and Mr. Knightley as chivalric, powerful suitors.

But they defy - and deftly undercut - the mold: They look the part, but their “manners” are blunt and challenging in a way that throws off notions of chivalry. (Charlotte Bronte took this to the extreme with Rochester and was called a “sexual delinquent” for doing so by a 19th century reviewer - but that’s a topic for another day, friends!)

Austen’s leading men are also affectionate, understanding, and always straightforwardly candid. Austen places them in opposition to gallant falsity of the Wickhams, the Willoughbys, and the Frank Churchills. 

Knightley and Darcy, our most famous leading men in Austen, are perhaps the biggest examples of blunt, candid, challenging truthfulness mixed with genuine feeling. And it’s why they are also so appealingly - there’s no better word for it - sexy.  

Even Henry Tilney, who has lots more experience than naive Catherine Morland, treats her respectfully, even while challenging her wild, Ann Radcliffe-inspired  imaginings. 

In Emma, the character that most challenges the Female Ideal of idle useless playfulness is Knightley himself. 

So what’s going on here?

First of all, Austen is so good at her job that we always have to remind ourselves, friends, that it is not of course Knightley who makes the charge to Emma’s governess that our heroine should be more usefully employed and more often opposed - it is Austen giving him his words. 

It is always Austen, behind the scenes, putting the words into the mouths of our powerful heroes. And in doing so I think she’s showing that women just might be worth the trouble. It’s jarring to even write that last sentence in 2021 - but in Regency England this was something that needed to be said: If an astute, wealthy, independent Knightley is clear enough in his head to say that most men do not want to marry silly women, then maybe Austen’s early-19th-century readers would reconsider what after all makes a good wife, and maybe they would pay attention to her and other young women in their life.

They’re invited to do this through the words, and actions, of Knightley. This is what’s going on, friends, when Knightley invites Harriet Smith to dance with him in that infamous swoony scene that rescues Harriet and lifts her beyond the painful public condescension of the Eltons.

Austen is standing up for the women by appealing to the men - in language they understand. 

It is always Austen, behind the scenes, putting the words into the mouths of our powerful heroes. And in doing so I think she’s showing that women just might be worth the trouble.

And as we’ve pointed out in these letters and will continue to explore, all the meandering around and toward courtship and marriage in Austen has, for Regency-world readers, an unexpected destination. It is always a union between not only equals - equally strong, equally judgey, and equally flawed and feeling humans - but also it’s a union that is predicted to be intellectually challenging to each party.

This is one of the things that makes Austen, in the end, a writer of realism rather than romance. The romantic scaffolding is there for all to enjoy - but we also see, along the way, plenty of conflict and conflagration that is going to come from two real people with real passions and real opinions. And that clash is both the romance and the realism.

It’s also what makes people - actually human ones - stronger.

Austen repeatedly shows - and we’ll explore this in more depth in future conversations - that marriage between two people is an opportunity to improve, or not: The Bennets’ marriage make each of them worse; marriage between John and Fanny Dashwood makes each more selfish and weaker; marriage between Emma and Knightley will make each more generous and engaging. 

Marriage in Austen can be a living nightmare or a benevolent dream. And it is not romance - but education, intelligence, and integrity, mostly of women - that decides it.  

The romantic scaffolding is there for all to enjoy - but we also see, along the way, plenty of conflict and conflagration that is going to come from two real people with real passions and real opinions.

So in Austen, a spouse can improve you, and improve your life and that of your family. It can even increase your status and popularity, which in this Regency world is a tool for survival. 

So, in Jane Austen’s world, an equal, candid, challenging marriage is a survival skill, and also a lot more fulfilling and fun.

4. Take me home

Here’s the most unexpected thing that Austen’s women want - but it’s one of my favorites because we often just don’t see it, because it’s too basic to talk about: Home. 

As Claire Tomalin has shown in her beautiful, page-turning biography of Jane Austen, home was something that was elusive to our beloved writer. (And check out, friends, this conversation with Claire Tomalin!)

While, again, we prefer to think of Austen - and Bronte after her, and you can throw in Dickens here too - as sitting comfortably writing in her cottage with a nice cuppa, the fact is that class status, security, and home were at times elusive to her. 

As Tomalin has pointed out in this old C-SPAN Book TV talk, for a period of nearly a decade, between her first and her last novels, Austen didn’t write much. Tomalin suggests that this is likely because she did not have a stable home. She was forced to move between uncertain residences in “fashionable” Bath (while her family were displaced at least twice because of expenses), and other residences that weren’t suitable. There was not a male relative who could or would choose to provide stability and security for her during this time. 

Eventually, in 1809, Austen, her mother, and her sister Cassandra were able to take up residence at Chawton Cottage, which was comfortable, stable, and allowed Austen to finish, write and rewrite her novels, assertively pursue publishing deals, and live out her too-short life.  

But I want to point out how important the comforts and securities and trappings of Home is to Austen’s stories, and also to always keep in our minds that this entangling of property and residence with status and happiness and love in Austen comes from her own experience (as it does for Wollstonecraft, and then Bronte and Dickens, after her) with a sense of deprivation. 

For me, one thing that animates Austen’s stories is this desire born of deprivation. 

It’s a powerful force in Austen, and it’s often overlooked, perhaps because critics and scholars are not usually themselves worried about room and board. 

But many of us, dear reader, are concerned about room and board. 

And perhaps today, after a year of crises of health, pandemic and economic disparity that many of us are experiencing - forcing us to consider the elusiveness of shelter and comfort - it’s good to know that Austen worried about these things too. 

This is a powerful force in Austen, and it’s often overlooked, perhaps because critics and scholars are not usually themselves worried about room and board. 

That’s perhaps the most important place we get to in Austen’s meanderings toward the Happily Ever After. She takes us through the discomforts, the doubts. Our family home may be “entailed” like the Bennets. It may be chaos like Fanny Price’s noisy Portsmouth sitting room. It may be the worry of a neurotic parent like Mr. Woodhouse, or the snobbery of a Mrs. Norris or a Catherine de Bourgh putting us in our place.

But this lack of basic stability and security, and the powerful gale forces of class and neglect and society is there to be found, and felt, in Austen. 

And that’s why when Austen’s women, after all their meandering, reach their engagement, it’s a destination that comes with a challenging, equal partner, and it’s one that comes with property. 

These are the things that make up a fulfilling, safe, healthy life - being seen, respected, equal reciprocity in love, and a secure home. 

It’s pretty much what we all, to this day, want. And it’s why we, to this day, read Jane Austen. 

But what do you think, friends?

What are you worried right now, coming off a year of crisis and pandemic, and maybe still in it? Do you find your worries - your fears, your dreams, your passions, your paranoias? - reflected in the stories of Austen?

Let me know what your worries are, what your dreams are, and what you’re reading right now - and what it all, if anything, has to do with the world and the stories of Jane Austen.

Meanwhile, please take care of yourselves, friends. If all else is failing, make yourself a cup of tea and write to me.

Yours truly,

Plain Jane

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