Money and marriage: Pride and Prejudice

At the end of both Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility the heroines marry the men they love. In each case these happen to be men whose incomes are large enough to ensure that they will be able to live comfortably for the rest of their lives. What it means to 'live comfortably' varies according to the heroine concerned — Marianne needs rather more than Elinor to make her content — but they all end up considerably better off than they began. Money is extremely important in all Jane Austen's work and it's an aspect of her fiction which some readers find difficult to cope with. They feel that in some cases both she and her heroines are more interested in money than in more important considerations when it comes to choosing husbands, or that the novels' concern with characters who are comparatively well-off suggests a kind of snobbery. In this chapter on Jane Austen's third novel, Pride and Prejudice (published 1813; begun 1796–7), I'm going to continue my focus on plot, suggesting how this kind of response can be used to raise important questions about the relationships between marriage and money, the two essential elements in the plots of all the novels.