Abstract
When Jane Austen was writing the novels that would ultimately establish her own enduring value as a literary artist, the economy of England was rapidly developing from agrarian to consumer based with an unstable currency structure to represent value. Gold and silver coins were gradually being replaced with paper notes, and these forms of representative value were not perceived as secure since they were not fully regulated by the government. Although Jane Austen was not likely writing her novels about the political economy per se, the world she created within those novels mirrors the social and economic experiences she was observing around her. It is with these snapshots of the life she observed, therefore, that Austen is able to reveal the struggle between the expressed and intrinsic value women experienced on the marriage market. Austen’s heroines might ultimately find satisfying marriages that portend a happy future life, but the other women in her stories reveal the complicated problems that persisted within that marketplace.
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Notes
- 1.
Carolyn Kellogg, “Austen’s Currency Might Still Be Rising,” Los Angeles Times, June 30, 2013, E2.
- 2.
Pioneering nurse, Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) was on the £10 note from 1975 to 1992. Social reformer, Elizabeth Fry (1780–1845) recently has been replaced on the £5 note by Winston Churchill. All other women depicted on the notes have been monarchs.
- 3.
Sheryl Craig, Jane Austen and the State of the Nation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 2.
- 4.
Citations for Jane Austen’s fiction and letters are made in the text by following quotations with a title abbreviation and page numbers. For the six published novels as well as the “minor works” of Jane Austen, The Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen edited by R. W. Chapman, 6 volumes, 3rd edition, 1988, has been used. For Austen’s letters, Jane Austen’s Letters, edited by Deirdre Le Faye, 3rd edition, 1985, has been used. Where a number of consecutive references to a particular work is made, the title is omitted after the first reference.
- 5.
Historians often refer to the long eighteenth century as extending roughly from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the battle of Waterloo in 1815 as a more “natural” historic period than calendar dates.
- 6.
Walter Scott, “An Unsigned Review of Emma,” Quarterly Review Dated October 1815, issued March 1816, xiv, 188–201, in Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, Volume I: 1811–1870, ed., B. C. Southam (New York: Routledge, 1979), 64, 67.
- 7.
Elsie B. Michie, The Vulgar Question of Money: Heiresses, Materialism, and the Novel of Manners from Jane Austen to Henry James (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 6.
- 8.
Marie Nedregotten Sørbø, Irony and Idyll: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park on Screen (Amsterdam, NY: Rodopi, 2014), 25.
- 9.
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1967), 253.
- 10.
Although almost any character other than the protagonist might be considered “minor” in the narrative structure of a novel, I use the term “minor” here to refer to those who play an important, albeit secondary role within the plot.
- 11.
Five editions of Chrysal were issued between 1760 and 1763. Kevin Bourque, introduction to Chrysal; or, The Adventures of a Guinea, by Thomas Bridges (Kansas City, MO: Valancourt Books, 2011), viii.
- 12.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Books I-III (1776), ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 131. (Emphasis added.)
- 13.
Katherine Sobba Green, “The Heroine’s Blazon and Hardwicke’s Marriage Act: Commodification for a Novel Market,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 9, no. 2 (1990): 275.
- 14.
The novel we now refer to as Roxana was published anonymously in 1724 and attributed posthumously to Daniel Defoe in 1775.
- 15.
Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 13.
- 16.
Ibid., 25.
- 17.
- 18.
Ibid., 38.
- 19.
See Laura Fairchild Brodie, “Society and the Superfluous Female: Jane Austen’s Treatment of Widowhood,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 34, no. 4 (1994): 700; Cynthia L. Caywood, “Pride and Prejudice and the Belief in Choice: Jane Austen’s Fantastical Vision,” in Portraits of Marriage in Literature, eds., Anne C. Hargrove and Maurine Magliocco (Macomb, IL: Western Illinois University Press, 1984), 36.
- 20.
Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 381.
- 21.
Sometimes referred to as the “Chawton Novels,” as they were conceived of and written after Austen settled into her final home in Chawton Cottage, these three novels (Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion), were presumably conceived of and written there, and show a higher level of maturity in both the style and the subject matter.
- 22.
W. R. Greg, Why Are Women Redundant? (London: M Trübner & Co., 1869), 17–18.
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Hall, L.A. (2017). Introduction. In: Women and ‘Value’ in Jane Austen’s Novels. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50736-1_1
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