Anjolie's Sake

Maia Turman Cooke

Dr. Margie Burns

Engl 364

9 May 2025 

I enjoyed writing this one 🙂 1 essay down, 4 more to go.

Before I even read Pride and Prejudice, I knew this line: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good furniture, must be in want of a wife” (Vol. 1, Chapter 1, pg 5). It had been etched into my consciousness long before I understood my love for literature. This line appears everywhere, from Wikipedia to pop cultural references, and yet its resonance rushes deeper than mere recognition. Perhaps it stays with me because it speaks to something deeply embedded in the cultural imagination: the enduring belief that a woman’s story is anchored by her ability to be chosen. In every age and every form of romantic narrative, there remains a quiet but powerful emphasis on marriage as a destination, especially for young women.

Jane Austen’s opening is not simply a witty observation; it is a pointed critique of the assumptions that structure female lives. This “truth universally acknowledged” is presented with irony, but the weight of its implication is anything but light. It exposes the societal script that defines men by their wealth and women by their desirability. What lingers in this line and perhaps why it engraved itself so easily into memory is the way it reveals how even love can be co-opted by societal expectations. The idea of waiting, passively, positively, and persistently, is not romantic; it is rehearsed. The young girl in me did not just dream of love; she was taught to anticipate it as the defining plot of her life. Austen sees this, and she doesn’t just mock it, she dissects it. Her characters often feel so familiar, not because they are drawn in precise techniques, but because as Price writes, “we see characters in Jane Austen’s novels as we see many people in life, recognizing them as familiar but hardly able to enumerate their features” (263). Austen crafts these women as if we know them intimately, even when we can’t articulate why. By opening her novel with this line, Austen invites the reader to question whether the desire for marriage originates from the heart or from the weight of social design. And for those who are reading Austen centuries later, the question remains disturbingly relevant: is this quote unforgettable because it is brilliant literature, or because it continues to reflect the way women’s lives are imagined, shaped, and constrained?

Only two chapters after Austen’s iconic opening, Mrs. Bennet confesses her ultimate desire: ‘“and all the others equally well married, I shall have nothing to wish for’” (Vol. 1. Ch. 3, pg 12). It is a statement that seems superficial at first, and comic in its bluntness, but buried within it is something deeply sobering. Marriage, for her, is not about romance. It is about securing health, status, and stability for her daughters, as if it’s a social insurance policy sealed with two wedding bands. And her wish is not whimsical, it is strategic. And one is left wondering if she had only sons, would such a desperate, singular wish really would have been necessary? Likely not. Because daughters, unlike sons, carry futures that hinge on being chosen, on marrying well, and on being desirable. 

No one truly blames Mrs. Bennet, and neither does Austen. She, too, was once a young girl trained to survive by surrendering to the rules laid out for her. Austen treats her with the same critical empathy she extends to many of the female characters. In Sense and Sensibility, she writes, “One’s fortune, as your mother justly says, is not one’s own” (Ch. 2, pg 7 ). The line is soft in tone but sharp in truth: regardless of their hopes or intelligence, they rarely possess full control over their own futures. Even if they believe they do, as Marianne and her mother do, that belief is built more on imagination than reality. “[W]ith them to wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect. She tried to explain the real state of the case to her sister” (Ch. 4, pg 15). Hope is its own kind of inheritance, passed down from mother to daughter like fine china or family worry. For women denied power, hope is made to feel like agency. 

This is where Austen’s critique is both subtle and devastating. The women in her novels: Mrs. Bennet, Marianne Dashwood, and even Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, do not wish idly. Their dreaming is not foolish, but it is shaped by a system that limits their choices. Catherine clings to her fantasies not only because she is naive, but because in a world where young women are rarely permitted full independence, imagination becomes a form of resistance. Hope, however fragile or misdirected, becomes a way of reclaiming narrative power in a society that would otherwise write their endings for them. Austen is deeply aware of this, she shows us women who adapt, women who comply, and women who quietly rebel. Yet in each, there is a yearning: for security, for love, but more than anything, for the right to want something of their own without shame. That longing, so often disguised as simple romance, is where Austen locates her fierce commentary. It is not the wish to marry that binds these women, but the reality that marriage remains the only socially sanctioned wish available to them. 

Pride and Prejudice is not the only novel in which Austen exposes both the vulnerability and the relentless expectations placed upon women, often through characters who are deeply complex, emotionally rich, and at times startlingly real. Though they are fictional, the women feel achingly familiar, reflections of questions and quiet reckoning every woman, in some form, has confronted. Marianne Dashwood, for instance, is introduced in Sense and Sensibility with warmth but also with a cautionary tone: “Marianne’s abilities were, in many respects, quite equal to Elinor’s. She was sensible and clever; but eager in everything: her sorrows, her joys, could have no moderation. She was generous, amiable, and interesting: she was everything but prudent. The resemblance between her and her mother was strikingly great” (Vol. 1, Ch. 1, p. 4). In these lines, Austen captures the fullness of Marianne, her depth, her contradictions, and yet underscores how dangerous unmoderated feelings can be for a woman. It is not that Marianne is irrational or unintelligent; it is that society punishes any woman who dares to live without restraint.  

Austen’s brilliance lies in her refusal to flatten women into types. She does not offer the “strong woman” or the “silly girl” as binaries, but instead creates women who, like Marianne and Elinor, contain multitudes. In today’s world, womanhood is often dissected through labels and qualifiers: Are you queer or straight? Cisgender or not? A feminist? And if so, of which wave? Identity becomes a taxonomy, a checklist. But Austen writes beyond labels even in the past. She strips her characters down to their essence, not in a reductive sense, but in a revelatory one. Her women are minds and bodies navigating systems that constantly ask them to choose between survival and selfhood. And these are not abstract ideas, they are not case studies in femininity. They are women trying to think, feel, and endure all at once. What makes Austen’s work especially radical, then and now, is how she allows her heroines to resist moral finality. There is no clear lesson to learn, and no resolution that “fixes” them. As Galperin notes, Austen’s criticism often clings to a “spectacle of a Girl Being Taught a Lesson,” as though readers crave the reassurance that growth must look like obedience or that wayward girls must be corrected (363). But Austen’s narratives push back. They refuse the kind of resolution that reduces a woman to her repentance. What Austen offers instead is ambiguity, the space for contradiction, for longing that doesn’t always lead to clarity, for transformation that doesn’t mean submission. Her women do change, but not always in the ways readers are conditioned to expect. And perhaps that is Austen’s quiet rebellion: her refusal to let her heroines be instructive. They are not fantasies or warnings. They are women, and that is enough. 

These women do so in a world where politeness is a weapon, and silence is often a form of self-defense. Considering this line from Pride and Prejudice, when Jane is praised for her goodness: “‘…to take the good of everybody’s character and make it still better, and say nothing of the bad — belongs to you alone. And so, you like this man’s sisters too, do you? Their manners are not equal to his” (Vol. 1, Ch. 4, p. 17). This is meant as a compliment, but Austen subtly reveals the danger of such behavior. To suppress one’s judgment in favor of social harmony is not kindness, it is learned self-erasure. Similarly, in Sense and Sensibility, Elinor responds to a situation not with protest, but with resigned calculation: “Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition (Ch. 36, p. 194). That phrase, “The compliment of rational opposition,” speaks volumes. Even disagreement is a gift a woman must choose carefully. For Elinor, silence is not passive; it is protective. In Austen’s world, a woman’s restraint is often her armor. 

What connects Marianne, Elinor, Jane, and so many other female characters is not just their femininity, but their negotiation of a world that constantly tells them how to feel, how to speak, how to want. Whether impulsive or composed, hopeful or cynical, Austen’s heroines are never simply reacting, they are navigating. They are reading their worlds, and themselves with as much rigor as any scholar or social critic. And through them, Austen exposes the impossible demands placed upon women: to be desirable but modest, intelligent but never threatening, emotional but always composed. These expectations are not fragments of the Regency era, they echo in every era, including our own. Austen’s irony isn’t just cleverness, it’s a survival strategy, a means of both protection and exposure. As Shaw notes, her irony often grew not from stylistic talent but from, “the author’s intimate involvement in her heroines and their feelings,” revealing not just social absurdities but the quiet tragedy of women estranged from the very world they’re trained to serve (282). This irony operates like a double lens: it lets Austen mock the systems that confine her characters while also showing us the emotional cost of that confinement. Her heroines are not above their society but they are not fully of it. They are constantly translating themselves between duty and desire, silence and speech, public mask and private truth. And that tension, that quiet refusal to surrender fully to the world’s demands, is where Austen’s most devastating insights live. 

Mary Bennet, often overlooked and dismissed for her stiffness, offers one of the most incisive lines in Pride and Prejudice: “‘A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us’” (Vol . 1, Ch. 5, p. 21). In this brief moment of clarity, Mary articulates the tension at the heart of not just Austen’s novels, but of womanhood itself: the delicate balance between internal worth and external validation. What does it mean, then, when so many women, across centuries measure their value whether or not they are chosen, married, or settled? To what extent is this desire shaped by pride, the wish to feel secure in one’s own path, and to what extent it is governed by vanity, the fear of appearing unsuccessful, unwanted, or left behind in the eyes of others? 

Austen’s characters are not simply longing for love; they are bracing themselves against the shame of being seen as unfulfilled. The anxiety of returning home “another year older, wedless and childless” is not just the dread of loneliness, but of scrutiny. Family gatherings become silent courtrooms where a woman’s personal timeline is put on trial. The unspoken question is, when will you settle down? — cuts through centuries. Austen wrote in the early 19th century, and yet here in the 21st, her women still live inside us. That same tension between pride and vanity haunts every woman who has ever paused before answering a relative’s probing question, who has ever wondered if ambition will make her appear cold, or if singleness will be mistaken for failure. 

And what does this say about women today? That even with more freedom, more rights, and more visibility, we are still unlearning the centuries old script that connects a woman’s worth to her marital status. We are still resisting the idea that fulfillment must take a particular shape (husband, children, household) and we are still negotiating the gaze of others, trying to distinguish what we truly want from what we’ve been told we should want. The myth of the ideal woman may have changed its costume, but it never lost its grip. As Yeazell notes, even historical roles often erased the lived realities of women, recasting them as “sacred virgins, vestals who whom childbearing is apparently unknown,” defined not by their agency, but by how well they could fit into tidy domestic categories like daughter, wife or sister (148). In this framing, women become symbols rather than subjects, preserved and silenced. Perhaps we are still in the middle of an Austen novel, still somewhere between self-definition and societal expectation, still longing for a kind of pride that is private and not performative. Austen saw us coming. She left us maps in the forms of Elinor, Elizabeth, Marianne, and Catherine, women who do not offer easy answers, but who ask better questions. Their struggles are not behind us. They are beside us, still unfolding in the choices we make today, the scripts we reject, and the lives we are slowly rewriting on our own terms. 

Now shifting to the perspective of Marianne and Elinor’s widowed mother, we find another woman shaped by her relationship with marriage, not just as a participant, but as a witness to its social consequence. With a sigh of relief, she declares: “She had only two daughters, both of whom she had lived to see respectably married, and she had now therefore nothing to do but to marry all the rest of the world” (Ch. 8., p. 28). Marriage, for her, is not joy or romance revealed in this declaration. It’s an obligation. A duty. A relief. It has consumed her life, three marriages in, and only now, as an aging woman alone, is she free to engage with the world on her own terms. Austen, with her characteristic irony, hints at how marriage becomes a threshold a woman might cross before being allowed to exist as herself. And really what does this say about marriage in Austen’s world? Is it about love, or simply attention? Is it about security or the appearance of it? Does it offer women real emotional reciprocity, or is it simply a promise to be protected, spoken through a legal vow, and sealed with a ring? Charlotte Lucas, the realist, offers one of the clearest answers: “‘Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance’” (Pride and Prejudice, Vol. 1, Ch. 6, p. 24). In Austen’s time, this wasn’t cynicism, it was logic. A woman’s choice was rarely free of economic calculation. Even now, in a supposedly freer world, women still navigate the pressures of choice within a society that offers “freedom” with conditions: race, class, queerness, and gender identity still shape who is allowed to love without scrutiny. Charlotte, in securing her marriage with Mr. Collins, is not giving up on happiness, she’s redefining it as stability. And what’s more feminist than survival in a world that offers you so few tools to build it?

Meanwhile, men like Darcy hold court on what makes a woman worthy of admiration. He proclaims: “‘A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking and the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half deserved’” (Pride and Prejudice, Vol. 1, Ch. 8, p.39). In other words, a woman is not born complete, she must be crafted, shaped, and adorned until she becomes a spectacle of perfection. She must be everything, accomplished, charming, poised, or she is nothing. In one of the most satisfying moments of the novel, Elizabeth responds with irony, “‘I never saw such a woman, I never saw such capacity, and taste, and application, and elegance, as you describe, united” (Ch. 9, p.39). Her mockery punctures Darcy’s absurd checklist of womanhood. She knows the impossible standard is not only ridiculous, it’s dangerous. 

Yet, when men are described, their portraits are often startingly vague. Considering this line from Sense and Sensibility: “‘Brandon is just the kind of man, … whom every body speaks well of, and nobody cares about; who all are delighted to see, and nobody remembers to talk to.” (Ch. 10, p. 39). There is no scrutiny of his voice, no track of accomplishments. He floats through society with ease. And while that might seem like a minor detail, it is, in fact, everything. Women in Austen’s world, and in our own, are examined from head to toe, from manners to marriagebility. They are expected to prove themselves worthy of attention, while men simply exist. This is not to say that men are bad, Austen is far more nuanced than that, but rather that society is careless with men in a way it will never be with women. A man can be forgettable and still respected. A woman cannot even be mildly inconvenient without risking condemnation. As Wright notes in her commentary on Pride and Prejudice, even in moments of high emotion. A man is granted the full “prerogative” of expression, while a wife is expected to receive it in silence, her body and attention folded neatly around his (422). The entitlement to be heard, to be unfiltered, is gendered. Writers like Austen live in a world where the only path to independence is through satire, where the only way to criticize the system is to write it out, one line at a time. Where women must study the very structures that hold them down, simply to survive inside them. 

A striking line in Sense and Sensibility is: “She was without any power, because she was without any desire of command over herself” (Vo.l 2, Ch. 15, p. 64). It’s a line that sits heavy, not because it condemns the woman, but because it exposes the subtle violence of a world that never taught her how to want something other than what was handed to her. So then, what determines a woman’s command? Is it being wedded? Is it bearing children? Or is it the rare and radical ability to say no to all of it? In Pride and Prejudice, Austen writes, “…Should you think ill of that person for complying with the desire, without waiting to be argued into it?” (Vol. ., Ch. 10, p. 49). There’s an implicit tension here, between instinct and social training, between passion and pressure. Because the truth about society is that you don’t have to argue most women into marriage. This argument has already been made. It’s been whispered to them through bedtime stories, reinforced by mothers who want “the best,” and repeated through every cultural script, from Jane Austen’s heroines to Isabella Swan’s love-struck stares in Twilight. As Hopkin notes, Austen was often “forced to read mainly romantic novels” (402), a quiet coercion that shaped what they thought they could want, what they believed they should become. Even pleasure, reading, loving, and dreaming, were regulated. And still, women read on, looking for themselves between the lines. 

This indoctrination begins long before a girl even understands what marriage is. Before her body has matured, she is told what it’s for. Little girls are taught to dream of wedding dresses, of rings, of being chosen, and that dream is presented as both aspiration and salvation. Austen knew this. Her novels expose the quiet, lifelong rehearsal of womanhood as performance. But even now, centuries later, modern media has not gone far from the same template. The faces have changed yes, but the message hasn’t; love will complete you, marriage will fix you, and someone’s desire for you is your ticket to safety. And the cost of resisting that? Power. Or at least, that’s what women are led to believe. Yet, as Morris argues, Austen’s young women mediate the “energies of social change and shifting values,” becoming the very agents through which a new, more progressive social order is imagined (32). These heroines don’t resist the script, they revise it. Through, them Austen transforms womanhood from a fixed role into spaces of possibility, where survival is not submission but a strategy. 

Though Marianne shows us that love, for many women, is far more than a physical, tangible piece of jewelry. It’s an emotional bind, something that lives in memory, gesture, and the quiet hope that affection is mutual. “But from such vain wishes, she was forced to turn for comfort to the renewal of her confidence in Edward’s affection, to the remembrance of every mark of regard in look or word which fell from him while at Barton, and above all to that flattering proof of which he constantly wore round his finger” (Sense and Sensibility, Ch. 17, p. 79). Marianne is trying to actively believe that Edward cares for her, she’s replaying in her head the moments at Barton Cottage. Her main significance comes from a ring, which he wears always. This ring serves as a constant reminder and in her mind a proof of his love. Marianne is not being silly or naive, she is doing the emotional math women have been taught to do: gathering glances, remembering sentences, and turning moments into evidence. Her belief in Edward’s love is brought together through small gestures, and the ring he wears becomes more than a token. It is proof, comfort, and validation all in one. It’s the only thing she can hold onto in a world where women have so little control over how they are chosen, or discarded.

Yet, Sense and Sensibility also gives us Elinor, who lives on the other end of the emotional spectrum. She is steadier, quieter, and deeply aware of the cost of visible grief. “She was stronger alone, and her own good sense so well supported her” (Vol. 3, Ch. 23, p. 107). But Elinor’s strength doesn’t make her immune. It makes her silent. Her composure is not a lack of feeling but a desperate containment of it, because she knows the world won’t give her the luxury to unravel. Later, the narrator tells us, “Elinor could no longer witness this torrent of unresisted grief in silence” (Ch. 29, p. 142). Elinor’s breaking point comes not from her own sadness, but from watching Marianne break under the weight of hers because women are always expected to contain, repress, and present themselves with grace, even when their lives are falling apart. The emotional surveillance, this constant demand for women to manage not just their feelings of others but the feelings of others, bleeds into Pride and Prejudice as well. Elinor’s silence echoes in Elizabeth’s Bennet’s clarity: “‘The world is blinded by his fortune and consequences, or frightened by his high and imposing manners, and sees him only as he chooses to be seen’” (Pride and Prejudice, Ch. 16, p. 77). Both Elinor and Elizabeth are women who know how much is hidden beneath the surface. They live in a world where appearances rule, where a man like Darcy can control the narrative of his character simply by wealth and presence. But women like them, like Elinor and Elizabeth, must negotiate between public perception and private truth, constantly deciphering who they are allowed to be, and what the world is willing to see. 

To move through Pride and Prejudice is to trace the slow burn of a woman growing sharper in her insight and more defiant in her truth. Austen’s evolution as a writer mirrors a woman’s evolution in the world, incremental, often invisible to others, but fiercely felt within. Her novels, while beloved by many, speak in a particular frequency to women, whose lives are still shaped by the same pressures her characters faced: to be pleasing, to be chosen, to be silent. There is no universal reading of Austen because her stories live differently in women’s bodies. They are not just literature, they are lived reflections. With each novel, Austen grows less concerned with pleasing and more invested in revealing. That shift is the quiet legacy of a woman writing under constraint and still managing to make the whole world listen. And yet Austen’s sharpest truth is that women have always known. Known how to read a room, how to protect themselves with politeness, how to hope and pretend it’s practicality, and how to shrink themselves so their loved ones can expand. Austen understood that the most radical thing a woman can do is to refuse to be flattened by society, family, or by fiction. That’s why the male characters are mostly absent here, not by accident, but by design. They are not the point. They are not the engine. The women are and they always were. Women do not orbit anyone else’s gravity. They move the narrative themselves. Austen did not leave behind instructions. She left women who are complicated, unfinished, and unapologetic. And perhaps that is the truest inheritance: not a heroine who learned her place, but one who claims it. 

Works Cited 

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Published January 28, 1813

Austen, Jane. Sense and Sensibility. Published 1811.

Galperin, William. “‘Describing What Never Happened’: Jane Austen and the History of Missed Opportunities.” ELH, vol. 73, no. 2, 2006, pp. 355–82. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30030016. Accessed 10 Apr. 2025.

Hopkins, Annette B. “Jane Austen the Critic.” PMLA, vol. 40, no. 2, 1925, pp. 398–425. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/457230. Accessed 10 Apr. 2025.

Morris, Pam. “Sense and Sensibility: Wishing Is Believing.” Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Worldly Realism, Edinburgh University Press, 2017, pp. 29–54. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1g09tv4.5. Accessed 10 Apr. 2025.

Price, Martin. “Manners, Morals, and Jane Austen.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 30, no. 3, 1975, pp. 261–80. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2933070. Accessed 10 Apr. 2025.

“Pride and Prejudice.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 30 Apr. 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_and_Prejudice.

Shaw, Valerie. “Jane Austen’s Subdued Heroines.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 30, no. 3, 1975, pp. 281–303. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2933071. Accessed 10 Apr. 2025.

Wright, Andrew. “Jane Austen Adapted.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 30, no. 3, 1975, pp. 421–53. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2933078. Accessed 10 Apr. 2025.

Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. “The Boundaries of Mansfield Park.” Representations, no. 7, 1984, pp. 133–52. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2928460. Accessed 10 Apr. 2025.