The Trouble with Mary: Curtis Sittenfeld’s Eligible and the Single Woman

Abstract

Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was published two decades before Pride and Prejudice (1813) went to print, but to talk about feminism is to name a qualitatively different attitude than anything that was contemplated by Jane Austen’s society. In the twenty-first century, the choices available to women have dramatically expanded and yet it still seems as if the only permissible ending for a fictional work involving a single female character is to marry her off.

Curtis Sittenfeld’s Eligible (2016), an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, updates Austen for the modern world. In Sittenfeld’s novel, drawing rooms have been replaced by fast food outlets, entails by double-mortgages, handsome militiamen by buff-chested Crossfit instructors, and the horror of impending spinsterhood by the ticking of fertility clocks. But it is not until the book’s last chapter that the marriage plot is finally addressed and the question that has long been a focus for Mary Bennet fan fictions gets asked—namely, how to narrate the possibility of a socially, economically, and emotionally fulfilling existence for Austen’s most famous unmarried female character.