What views on love and marriage does Jane Austen present to the reactor in Pride and Prejudice.

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Emma Wilson 10G

Monday 3rd March 2003

What views on love and marriage does Jane Austen present to the reactor in Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen has very mixed views on love and marriage. In pride and prejudice she writes about many relationships and marriages. Some of these she frowns upon and some she believes are ideal. Jane Austen is very critical and disapproves of marrying for money and status rather than love and affection. However she does not agree on marrying just for love with no money and very low status.

She is very sarcastic about the reasons people got married for in the nineteenth century. The very first line of the novel is;

        ‘It is the truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife’  

Jane Austen puts forward many examples of good and bad marriages. An outstanding example of a bad marriage would be Lydia Bennet’s and Mr Wickham’s.

When Lydia accompanies Colonel and Mrs Forster on a visit to Brighton she acts extremely foolish. Lydia and Wickham decide to elope. However, they are not traced to Scotland (where most young people get married, as people can marry in Scotland without their parents consent.), they are seen heading towards London. Living with a man and not being married was one of the most unforgiving actions you could carry out in the early 19th century. To express how disgraceful this is mr Collins writes in a letter;

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        “The death of your daughter would have been a blessing in comparison of this.”

Lydia’s selfish decision could of made the whole of the Bennet family a disgrace if Lydia had not married Wickham in the end. It would have been almost impossible for mr and Mrs Bennet to marry off any of their daughters.

Jane Austen deeply disapproves of Lydia’s decision and her character, she wrote,

‘Nothing but love, flirtation, and officers, have been in her head.’

Another example of a bad marriage is Charlotte’s and mr Collins’s marriage. Charlotte only married him for money ...

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