While the author stayed single, Austen used her keen powers of observation to fill her novels with juicy insights into how the gentry flirted, courted, and coupled in 19th-century England
Sense and Sensibility
While being the firstborn son usually meant inheriting the family estate, younger brothers needed to find themselves a profession. Manual trades were unthinkable for the upper classes and the gentry. Trade, though potentially lucrative, was seen as vulgar. A man might well become rich through it, but he would never be considered an equal by the members of the nobility.
Austen and her sister remained unwed, a situation that she herself recognized as unenviable. As she wrote with her usual irony and wit in a letter to her niece Fanny: “Single Women have a dreadful propensity for being poor—which is one very strong argument in favour of Matrimony.” Professional opportunities for a single genteel woman were quite limited.
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