Neveress all Austen's happy endings are due to the magical alignment of respect and love with security and social alliance. Jane's heroines are playing a (relatively, see below) high risk/high reward game of not wanting to sacrifice _anything_, which leads to their triumphs in the novels but most often led to loneliness and economic insecurity in the real world.

Similarly, all people have choices, but these choices are often pretty agonising ones, and Jane almost never has her protagonists or us confront such life-and-death, very-bad-vs-infinitely-worse choices. And this was a conscious choice since the novels of the 18th century had been more or less filled with them.

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fellowniusmonk 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

That's because Austen had sense and not sensibility.

She herself never married, she absolutely rips on the state of affairs in her time but she wasn't going to advocate in her pop fiction that the women of the time make a move that would almost certainly ruin their prospects.

Austen was insanely clever and pragmatic at making her point and having it shared, as much credit as she gets it isn't nearly enough. In some of her other works you can see certain of her points presented with less nuance and memetic potential, she worked at it.

Let me make an outlandish assertion because I'm feeling froggy as I do truly love Austen. If we assumed that Jesus was God and was like a boring Mr. Roger's type and intentionally embedded his message in the most controversial wrapper possible to ensure that the real message was propagated into eternity, then Jesus narrowly edges out Austen in cleverness and only because he didn't have to put pen to paper, I don't think Austen can be overrated.

	▲	gabriel666smith 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		She was such a good marketer of ideas, and at sneaking them into more palatable constructs. The opinion you replied to frustrates me when I encounter it. She was only doing "magical thinking" in her narratives so much as her novels are marriage comedies, and this is required. The reality of her life was that she was incredibly uncompromising. She had to publish her early work under an androgynous pseudonym to profit from it. She didn't marry cynically despite having opportunities to. She was a realist, and a strain of that runs through her work. There are many moments where she anticipates the great Russian realists. She managed to turn a good profit on her art in spite of her period's circumstances. She genuinely advanced the idea of who is allowed to make art, and who is allowed to profit from it. Generally the novels have nuanced but happy endings. She was writing for an audience. She was a shrewd businessman at a time when there weren't businesswomen. In her personal life, she was genuinely uncompromising. She's a GOATed artist. You can't ask much more of a human!

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neaden 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Agreed but I think "The best marriage is one where the spouses respect each other and the man is able to provide a comfortable and secure economic life for the woman." wasn't like, a counter-cultural ideal, while the author of the post has Jane set up in opposition to her societies ideal of what a marriage should be. She was willing to reject the certainty of Bingley for a chance at something better, but I also think Elizabeth would have rejected a poor suitor who she did feel respect for. She wouldn't have married a farmer like Robert Martin for instance.

Edit: And even on risk, the big risk is that if Elizabeth's dad dies the family would have to live on Mrs. Bennet's income of just 200 pounds a year, which to put in perspective was about what Jane Austen's father made as a clergyman when she was born, though he would go on to make more money later in life. It wouldn't be poverty and still put them in the upper few percent of English people at the time.

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mft_ 3 days ago | parent [-]

I think it’s strongly implied that Lizzy would have married someone poor that she loved and respected.

	▲	neaden 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		She doesn't even talk to any poor people though. Her father is the richest man in town, there are no farmers, tradesmen, or clerks that she even speaks to in the book let alone someone who is actually part of the bottom 90% of England's economy at the time. Even with Wickham when they first meet and she likes him, she flirts with him but knows nothing serious can ever happen since he doesn't have enough money and knows he will want to marry an heiress. In chapter 26 her aunt cautions her against falling in love with Wickham and she assures her aunt that while she enjoys his company she doesn't view him as marriage material.