Would Jane Austen Settle?

Breakpoint has published my op-ed in response to Lori Gottlieb's article in last month's Atlantic Monthly (Marry Him!) suggesting that single women should forget about romantic love and settle for "Mr. Okay" instead of waiting around for "Mr. Right."  What would Jane Austen say?  Ultimately, I think she would challenge our notions of love (and probably have a great deal of fun laughing at them as well).

Perhaps I should start by saying that I’m not incensed by this notion. I’m single, I’m 36, and I want to be married. I want to have kids. I actually believe, as Gottlieb ever-so-heretically asserts, that relationships (and primarily marriage) are still in many ways what define us as women.

What strikes me about all of this is that these are conversations we’ve been having for hundreds of years, all the way back to Jane Austen’s dear Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy (or perhaps more to the point here, Charlotte Lucas and the obsequious Mr. Collins. Could Charlotte have been happy that she settled? I doubt it). And as the film The Jane Austen Book Club pointed out, we’re still asking ourselves today, “What would Jane do?”

Would Jane settle? Absolutely not. Marriage in Austen’s day was all about settling, of course. Women who had no opportunity to earn their own living, needed financial security. Men as well were hoping to “settle” on a woman of means. The whole thing became a matter of business, which led to all sorts of mischief and misery. In that setting, Austen gives us poor, intelligent women hoping to marry for love. And because this is fiction, they do. (...)

Comments

[Joseph Ravitts]

I have been married twice and widowed twice. Each time was for love, despite the presence of real-world personality problems to be dealt with. If one is prepared to resist one's own faults and cope wisely with a spouse's faults, a marriage which outsiders look on as "settling" can be nonetheless a marriage for love.

[Jane]

I hear this question and am dealing with it in my own life. But in my world it goes more like this…I live for love, waiting each day to find it, crying for months when it crumbles and yet finding the strength once again to look, to hope, to chance and to maybe one day love again. The problem for me (I think) is children. Do I want them? How badly do I want them? Enough to give up my search for a whole, strong, loving man and settle for a slightly broken one? Or maybe enough to have them on my own while continuing the search. Now, if I don’t want kids then I have all the time in the world to live a long romance filled life. And in that case I’m sure to find it. Right? What scares me is when I think about the fact that Jane never really got what she wrote about. She got it only from her writing. Will that be me? Living life through the pages of her novels while stories I’ve never heard about are being lived out fully by my friends whom I see as boring and settled? Or are these friends happy and “in the know” on what life is really about? If I find that perfect romantic lover will he stay or will it only be for a fleeting moment? I guess I’m afraid I no longer know what love is anymore. Is it the movies, magazines, Sex & the City, celebrity relationships or is it Jane and just Jane. It’s seems so simple to gravitate to her prose, and I want so much to believe I can live in her world. But is it truly her world and no one else’s, meaning not one in which we mortals can live?