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Now that everything costs more than it ever has, are our romantic relationships more impacted by class than those in a Jane Austen novel?
If you’re at all aware of Jane Austen, even if you’ve never read one of her novels, I won’t be giving away any spoilers by revealing that they get married in the end.
Edward and Elinor. George and Emma. Edmund and Fanny. Frederick and Anne. Henry and Catherine. And, of course, Fitzwilliam and Elizabeth. It’s always a happy ending… for them at least.
Despite portraying women as potential wives on the marriage market in all of her novels, Austen is still lauded as one of the most prolific feminist writers of her time. Come on, it was the regency era after all.
While this could be attributed to the sharp wit and independent thought of her heroines, it’s their autonomy, demonstrated in their rejections of undesired suitors, that enables all of her protagonists to engage in a “love match” on their terms.
Again, you do have to take this with a pinch of salt, especially with regards to the wet wipe that is Edward Ferrars. Nevertheless, in each love story “it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
Conveniently for the women they have their eyes on, by the time the wedding season comes round, each of these men has gotten over their concern for the wealth disparity between themselves and their wife-to-be.
That is to say, Austen’s usually middle-class protagonists usually end up in a socially mobile love marriage with the heartthrob of the gentry. Never, ever, do they marry someone of a lower class than themselves.
Indeed, for poor Austen herself, it’s speculated that she didn’t end up married to her sweetheart, Tom Lefroy, in part because neither of them had any money. Unfortunately, it would have been too impractical of a match.
finally a safe place to share my austen memes
byu/Classic-Carpet7609 injaneausten
Taking a class in romance
We might like to think that class restrictions no longer play such an important role in our romantic relationships.
However, research published in 2019 found that most people tend to go for partners with a similar phenotype, genotype, and background to themselves. This pattern is known as “assortative mating” and includes, you guessed it, educational, financial, and economic factors.
Thanks to the streamlined marketisation of people as products on modern day dating apps, as Serena Smith writes, dating consolations like “opposites attract” have become all but redundant.
Instead, the ability to describe – and subsequently find (supposedly) – “exactly what you want” in a bio means that people are looking not for someone they can learn from, but who is already exactly like them.
