Clutching My Pearls is my ongoing blog series about my take on Jane Austen’s beliefs and ideas, as based on her novels. Click here for the first in the series.

   In part one of this discussion of primogeniture, we looked at how the practice of excluding the younger brothers (and all the sisters) from inheriting the family estate became caught up in a debate around revolutionary change. Some public intellectuals, including Mary Wollstonecraft, wanted to follow the French example and abolish primogeniture, but once the French Revolution turned into the Reign of Terror, a strong backlash arose in England.   
   In Jane Austen: the Secret Radical, Dr. Helena Kelly argues that Sense & Sensibility is a covert attack on primogeniture. Dr. Kelly writes:  “[Austen] wasn’t alone in questioning the fundamental fairness of primogeniture. The feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft did it too, in her 1792 book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.”  The phrasing of this sentence might mislead Kelly’s readers into thinking that the only two people in Georgian England who wrote about primogeniture were Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen. That’s obviously not the case. 
 Many people wrote about primogeniture and inheritance was an anxious topic of discussion among families, especially daughters and younger sons.
   Historian Rory Muir has written that there was more open resentment of primogeniture in Tudor and Stuart times, than in Regency times. He suggests it is because there were more opportunities for second sons in Austen's time. Because of war, exploration and colonization, the younger son could join the army or navy or the East India company. Of course this ended up being fatal to many of them. 

     We don't know if Jane Austen's father had the writings of conservative Edmund Burke or radicals Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft in his library. Regardless, he was an intelligent and well-educated man; he would have been fully aware of the main arguments on each side and I think his daughter would have been exposed to them.  ​
   Fundamentally though, Austen didn’t need anyone to explain the downside of primogeniture to her. It affected her family as well. She was upset when her father turned the Rectory in Steventon over to James, the oldest son. Of course, a post as a clergyman cannot be divided among all your children; but Mr. Austen also sold off many of the family possessions, including Jane's pianoforte. Family lore states that Jane fainted when she learned she had to leave her home and turn it over to her brother and sister-in-law. Later, she complained, “The whole World is in a conspiracy to enrich one part of our family at the expence of another.” ​ 
     Now that the political and personal context surrounding primogeniture is understood, let’s look at what Austen says and doesn’t say about primogeniture in her novels. ​Did she, in fact, question the fundamental fairness of primogeniture?

   Can we truly say Austen is arguing against primogeniture? She describes the situation, but her moralizing is not directed at the law, it is directed at the decisions of the Dashwood family.
    First, she faults the old uncle for tying up the estate to pass it down entirely to John Dashwood and to John Dashwood's little boy, "who, in occasional visits with his father and mother at Norland, had so far gained on the affections of his uncle... as to outweigh all the value of all the attention which, for years, he had received from his niece and her daughters."
     Then she faults John and Fanny Dashwood for being insensitive and selfish. Mrs. Dashwood does not "dispute" the right of her daughter-in-law Fanny to move in immediately after her husband's funeral: "the house was her husband's from the moment of his father's decease; but the indelicacy of [Fanny's] conduct... was to her a source of immovable disgust."
​     Then Fanny talks John out of giving his half-sisters a generous settlement. Austen shows us a man who fails to do his moral duty, and she gives us examples of his weak and avaricious nature throughout the book. Nor does she exempt Elinor and Marianne's father, or their mother, “a woman who never saved in her life,” from criticism for failure to prepare for the inevitable. The primogeniture is inevitable, the selfishness and mismanagement are not.

      As usual, a topic which Dr. Kelly claims is featured in one novel is present in the other novels as well. 
​    Primogeniture and entail, as scholar Zouheir Jamoussi notes, come up in every one of Austen’s novels—and many, many other novels and plays as well. It's not as if Austen’s readers would have been forcibly struck by her description of a situation they’d never encountered before. ​
    The issue is made more explicit in Pride & Prejudice than in Sense & Sensibility. It is Mrs. Bennet who argues most often, and most loudly, against the fact that her daughters are left out of the inheritance.
       And who says: “Your father’s estate is entailed on Mr. Collins, I think. For your sake,” turning to Charlotte, “I am glad of it; but otherwise I see no occasion for entailing estates from the female line. It was not thought necessary in Sir Lewis de Bourgh’s family."  Yes, it's Lady Catherine de Bourgh. So the two people in Austen who protest most explicitly against entailing estates to men only are Mrs. Bennet and Lady Catherine. You would think that if Austen wanted to editorialize against primogeniture, she would have put those sentiments in the mouths of the sympathetic characters, not her fools.

   There is no evidence that Austen thought the entire institution of primogeniture had to go. In Sense & Sensibility she explicitly said "No one could dispute [Fanny Dashwood's] right to come" to Norland before her father-in-law was cold in his grave. Nor does she hint at any alternative to primogeniture. Mrs. Ferrars, the matriarch of the Ferrars family, does have it in her power to divide a large inheritance between her sons. Austen doesn't portray a mother who treats her sons equally--although she could have used her novel to show us how things ought to be. Instead, she portrayed a narrow-minded, vindictive woman who punishes her oldest son by giving the money to his younger brother. As Mrs. Jennings remarks, "Everybody has a way of their own. But I don’t think mine would be, to make one son independent, because another had plagued me.” 
  As this next passage from Sense & Sensibility indicates, Austen seems to regard a more equitable world as pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking. 
  "I wish," said Margaret, striking out a novel thought, “that somebody would give us all a large fortune apiece!”
  “Oh that they would!” cried Marianne, her eyes sparkling with animation, and her cheeks glowing with the delight of such imaginary happiness.
​  “We are all unanimous in that wish, I suppose,” said Elinor, “in spite of the insufficiency of wealth.”
   There is a subtle but definite sarcasm in her editorial insertions: it is "a novel thought" to hope someone will give you a large sum of money. Young Margaret doesn't realize how many before her have had the same idea. But the prospect of receiving a large fortune is "imaginary" for most. 
   Oddly enough, the impossible did happen to Austen's brother Edward. He was adopted as the heir of some very wealthy relatives. Near the end of Austen's life, another rich uncle died, leaving his fortune to his wife, instead of spreading the wealth around in the family. Austen admitted that she was disappointed. That's still a far cry from advocating that the laws of inheritance be reformed.
   Austen portrayed dysfunctional marriages--is she arguing that the institution of marriage should be abolished? Austen wrote about negligent parents—is she against the nuclear family? As reviewer Alexandra Mullen perceptively writes: “the aim of Austen’s satire is not to raze the world to ground zero but to amend, as much as humanly possible, the world we have inherited.” And for Austen, this relates more to private conduct than public institutions.

In my novella Shelley and the Unknown Lady, Mary Crawford is surprised and pleased to learn that the poet she's met in Italy, Percy Bysshe Shelley, is the heir to a baronetcy. Click here for more.

  "Well, if they can be easy with an estate that is not lawfully their own, so much the better. I should be ashamed of having one that was only entailed on me.”
  So exclaims Mrs. Bennet in Pride & Prejudice. A bleak future awaits the Bennet girls because Longbourn is entailed on the heirs male, and Mrs. Bennet frets about it frequently. Austen goes on to write:

        Are we to infer from this, or any other of Austen's novels, that she wanted to overturn the law and custom of primogeniture, that reserved estates for the oldest male heir? Consider that later in the novel, Mrs. Bennet is told that her brother probably spent a lot of money to bribe Wickham to marry Lydia. “Well,” [she exclaims defensively], “it is all very right; who should do it but her own uncle? If he had not had a family of his own, I and my children must have had all his money, you know; and it is the first time we have ever had anything from him, except a few presents." 
     Mrs. Bennet, in other words, would not be your first choice for a poster girl for the idea of overthrowing primogeniture. So was Austen was opposed to primogeniture? This is what Helena Kelly argues in Jane Austen: the Secret Radical, but as usual, she does not ask the preliminary and important question, does Austen handle the topic of inheritance in the same way as her fellow authors, or differently?

    That was the debate about primogeniture leading up to the time of the French Revolution. Then primogeniture became one of several issues which, bundled together, were at the centre of a fierce debate when Austen was a teenager.
   Revolutionary France put an end to monarchy, the aristocracy, and primogeniture. Some people in England thought that all sounded like a great idea. Then the revolutionaries in France really went to town and abolished the Catholic church, renamed days of the week and the days of the month, and reset the calendar to year zero. In between chopping off a lot of heads and drowning thousands of people in the river at Nantes.
​   The Reign of Terror caused a huge backlash in England. Those who had initially been favourable to -- or at least interested in -- the French Revolution, found themselves in big trouble. Thus anyone advocating the abolishment of primogeniture at that time would be associated in the public mind with those crazies over there in Revolutionary France. As historian Rory Muir, author of a new book about the effect of primogeniture on younger sons, states:  "Inequality of various kinds was universal [in Austen's time] and taken for granted, challenged only by the most radical and impractical of political philosophers and French Republicans in the most extreme phase of their disastrous revolution." 
   There are several towering names in this debate. Edmund Burke is considered the father of conservatism because of his book Reflections on the Revolution in France, which correctly predicted that the revolution would take a violent turn. Mary Wollstonecraft disagreed so vehemently with Burke that she published her response, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, just a few weeks after his book. She later followed up with her iconic A Vindication of the Rights of Women. ​  ​

     Mary Wollstonecraft wrote powerfully of the social misery primogeniture created in families, of sisters who don’t get an inheritance and are turned into supplicants, reliant on their brothers, resented by the wives of those brothers. 
  Thomas Paine, the passionate radical polemicist, made strong economic arguments against primogeniture. He thought large estates should be heavily taxed and the wealth distributed. Also, he pointed out that the younger sons of the aristocracy were parasites on the economy, because the Crown gave them ceremonial and salaried “posts, places and offices,” like Master of the Rolls, etc, all of which was paid for by the general revenue. ​

​   So those were some of the major voices and those were some of the arguments for and against primogeniture in Austen's time.  
   The French Revolution, as we've seen, made primogeniture a hot-button topic at the time when Austen wrote Sense & Sensibility.  Therefore, if Austen opposed primogeniture, it was a radical thing at that time.   ​ 
 Let’s look next at Sense & Sensibility and Austen’s other novels to see if she was sympathetic to actually abolishing primogeniture, like the English radicals.

Next post:  Primogeniture, part 2

In my Mansfield Trilogy, Thomas Bertram is the heir to Mansfield Park but he looks unlikely to have an heir himself, which would mean that Edmund Bertram or his son would inherit, a fact of great interest to Mary Crawford. Click here for more about my novels.