A book that got a lot of attention last year was published by a 90-year-old Australian lady. What an accomplishment to acquire a doctorate AND become a mainstream published author at such an advanced age! The Jane Austen Remedy tells how Jane Austen helped its author, Ruth Wilson, find her own voice. I gather she is referring to a lifetime of subsuming herself in her roles of wife and mother. A fortuitous family inheritance, she said, enabled her to buy her own cottage in the country away from her husband of 50 years. Money changes everything, as the song goes.
     That reminds me of something I plan to explore in a future blog -- the absolute freedom and independence enjoyed by widows with money in Jane Austen's books. Sense and Sensibility, supposedly a subversive protest against the disempowerment of women, is chock-a-block with empowered women, most of whom abuse their power. It features two old ladies who use their wealth to tell the men in their life what to do--Mrs. Smith of Allenham, who cracks the whip over Willoughby, and Mrs. Ferrars, Edward's despotic mother. Mrs. Jennings also has wealth and complete independence but she is not a despot. Fanny Dashwood has her husband wrapped around her little finger.
   At any rate, The Jane Austen Remedy is about the author's personal relationship with the works of Jane Austen, and there is actually an entire sub-genre of books of this type.  I don't know of any author who has the honour of being the subject of so many books. I think many devoted Austen fans could wax lyrical on what she's meant to them.
       Most of these books I haven't read, some of them I have just sampled, but I list them for your interest....

​    Elinor Dashwood might forgive the man she loves for not telling her he's already engaged to Lucy Steele, but modern academics are not prepared to let Edward Ferrars off the hook. They think he’s weak at best, deceitful at worst, and Dr. Helena Kelly thinks there is a Freudian connotation to his destruction of the “sheath” and the scissors in Chapter 48. 
   Like it or not, Edward Ferrars occupies the post of the hero for Sense and Sensibility. Flatly declaring that he is not a hero confuses and muddles the entire novel. Plenty of people are “meh” about the Colonel Brandon/Marianne pairing, and if we conclude that the guy who marries Elinor at the end is a wimp, a liar and a pervert, where does that leave the message of the book and where does that leave the reader?
    I thought you might be interested in knowing about Coraly, an 1819 novel whose hero is a blend of Edward Ferrars and Colonel Brandon. The heroine in this novel unquestionably is stronger than the hero, especially in her Spartan adherence to a rigid moral code. Yet, she loves the hero, he’s her guy, and they get married. So maybe our expectations for heroes are not quite the same as long 18th century expectations. Something to ponder...

  Money, or more specifically the lack of money, comes up in every Jane Austen novel. Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich, has financial security but Jane Fairfax doesn't. The Bennet sisters  are saved from poverty and spinsterhood by good marriages. Young Lieutenant Wentworth doesn't have enough money to be an approved contender for Anne Elliot's hand. Fanny Price is condescended to by her wealthier Bertram cousins. Catherine Morland isn't rich enough to suit Henry Tilney's father. 
   Money could be an important plot driver. Mr. Wickham turns his attentions from Lizzie Bennet to Mary King after Miss King acquires ten thousand pounds. Willoughby betrays Marianne Dashwood for Miss Grey and her fifty thousand pounds.
  Even beyond romance, money dictates the opportunities for Austen's characters. Anne Elliot's father is a spendthrift, so the family must rent their estate and move to Bath. The poverty of Miss Bates and Mrs. Smith affects the roles they play in Emma and Persuasion respectively.     

​   “What is exceptional about Austen as a novelist is that she tells us exactly how much money each of her characters has.”
   So says an October 2020 ​New Yorker article, and who would dispute it? Mr. Darcy's entrance into the ballroom was followed by a "report which was in general circulation within five minutes... of his having ten thousand a year." Everyone seems to know how much money everybody else has: Mr. Collins knows Elizabeth is only entitled to one thousand pounds in the four percents after her mother’s death. 
     A poem by W.H. Auden, quoted above, surmises that Austen might be shocked to meet Lord Byron in heaven, but she is herself shocking because she's so frank and unsentimental about "the economic basis of society." However, as I’ve come to realize, the statement: “Jane Austen’s novels are preoccupied with money” is incomplete and somewhat misleading. The statement should be, “Jane Austen’s novels, like most novels of her time, were preoccupied with money.”  There was nothing exceptional about it.
    Many, many, novels of this period include exact descriptions of incomes, expectations, disappointments, and inheritances, especially as they relate to someone’s ability to get married. You can literally pick any18th-century novel at random and find passages referring to these things. And, just as in Sense & Sensibility, the financial circumstances of the main characters are often laid out in the introductory passages.  Here is a sampling: