Women and Value in Jane Austens Novels: Settling, Speculating and Superfluity [Paperback]

Jane Austens minor female characters expose the economic and social realties of British women in the long eighteenth century and reflect the conflict between intrinsic and expressed value within the evolving marketplace, where fluctuations and fictions inherent in the economic and moral value structures are exposed.  Just as the newly-minted paper money was struggling to express its value, so do Austens minor female characters struggle to assert their intrinsic value within a marketplace that expresses their worth as bearers of dowries.  Austens minor female characters expose the plight of women who settle for transactional marriages, become speculators and predators, or become superfluous women who have left the marriage market and battle for personal significance and existence.  These characters illustrate the ambiguity of value within the marriage market economy, exposing womens limited choices.  This book employs a socio-historical framework, considering the rise of a competitive consumer economy juxtaposed with affective individualism.

Shines a spotlight on the supporting cast of female characters in Jane Austens novels Provides rich connections to the emerging industrial culture of the late eighteenth century Reveals the grim reality of a womans lot in early nineteenth-century Britain and underscore the dark futures that could have faced heroines like Elizabeth Bennett or Anne Elliot

Lynda Hall shines a spotlight on the supporting cast of female characters in Jane Austens novels: the superfluous who struggle to retain intrinsic value in an economy does not value them, the desperate who marry for solely for security, and the ambitious who speculate on the marriage market, sometimes winning, sometimes losing. These minor characters reveal the grim reality of a womans lot in early nineteenth-century Britain and underscore the dark futures that could have faced heroines like Elizabeth Bennett ol£7