| Summary: | This article makes a thorough investigation of the prominent novelist Jane Austen (1775-1817)’s novels, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, and Emma, to shed light onto the socio-economic incentives and implications of matrimony in women’s lives in the early nineteenth century English society. As an acute observer of society and people around her, Austen’s talent in depicting ordinary middle-class people in everyday life, namely her focus on domestic realism, in contrast to then fashionable romantic melodramas, render her works as an invaluable source of historical information on pre-Victorian culture and society. One such important issue that predominates Austen’s narrative is marriage. As a never-married woman until her death at the age of forty-one, Austen’s preoccupation with marriage market stands out as a vigilant author’s descriptive interest in societal realities concerning the institution of matrimony, especially social and financial implications of marriage for women. Even though practice of coverture which as a legal practice compelled married English women to relinquish their property and legal rights under the guardianship of the husband, in other words helped solidify the patriarchal domination of men over women, marriage still stood as the ultimate determiner of class and financial status for women in an environment where female sex was relegated to the private sphere of the home, deprived of chances of career and financial improvements partially offered to the middle-class men. Considering the centrality of matrimony in nineteenth century English women’s lives, this article will put forward a study of social and financial incentives of matrimony as well as its decisive role as a marker of class and status in society in light of the subject’s treatment in Austen’s novels. The argument of this study is that despite the given financial and legal limitations that being a femme covert— a married woman whose legal existence was subsumed under that of the husband— entailed, Austen’s realistic treatment of motivations and subtleties involved in arrangement of marital unions in consideration of class and socio-economic status as well as status of wives and single women known as spinsters, provide us with invaluable information about women’s view of the place of marriage in the early nineteenth-century English society.
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