I no doubt am unfair to Sir Thomas…but Austen does plant a lot of little ticking bombs. He is quite dreadful in many ways.

I have to disagree about Charlotte Lucas and Mr Collins though! That is a nightmare marriage, and a real degradation for Charlotte. A clever person married to an idiot was one of Austen’s worst nightmares. She makes comedy out of them, but they’re also real nightmare.

(Frank Churchill is another adoptee.)

Changes in social order seem to be driven by far bigger changes, in say economic realities or political ideas. E.g. the change in the relative status of dairy and sheep farmers in agricultural NZ is being driven by a relative difference in returns to the different forms of farming over the last few decades, not by marriages and friendships. Social orders are quite capable of carving off exceptions for marriages and friendships, e.g. my father whose marriage to the daughter of a Taranki dairy farmer was accepted despite his being a soccer player, and without impacting Grandad’s general belief that soccer playing is proof of all sorts of moral depravity and physical weaknesses.

As for the desire for a granddaughter – I think the letter-writer could achieve her aims much more cheaply. When I was very little I spent large chunks of time at the house of our next-door neighbour who also lacked grandchildren of her own – she would take the time to peel apples for me while my mum maintained that the skin was good for me. Sadly she died before we could find out if that early friendship would last after I could wield a paring knife myself. Leaving aside the nutritional issue, would such a way of developing a relationship cause any ethical problems?

JA allows for reasonably successful marriages of secondary characters where material comfort outweighs physical revulsion, e.g. the ever-practical Charlotte Lucas’ marriage to Mr. Collins in P&P. But on the whole she requires affection/respect and sufficient wealth for her heroines.

I think Ophelia’s being a little harsh on Sir Thomas B., though. Firstly, JA makes it clear that Fanny seriously considers Henry Crawford as a potential husband, and even hints that Fanny’s influence might have redeemed the man. Though his failure to persevere just once more in his courtship of Fanny is telling. And as well as being unfairly angry and bullying, Sir Thomas also seems genuinely perplexed and concerned that Fanny would refuse such an attractive suitor. But anyway, these re-readings are part of what makes JA’s work so enjoyable.

By the by, I remembered this morning another JA character who’s adopted and brought up by a better-placed relative – Emma Watson in JA’s unfinished work The Watsons.

Actually Austen never says the couple married for love – she says Frances Ward married to disoblige her family. Love is entirely omitted from the picture. In fact it’s omitted from the account of the marriages of all three Ward sisters. The whole account sounds more like a set of business contracts. Classic Austen irony.

Mind you, in another way her theme is love. A large part of the burden of MP is how misguided and disastrous it is to marry for money and position in the entire absence of love or even respect – as Maria does, and as Sir Thomas so very mistakenly and cruelly tries to compel Fanny to do. Sir Thomas ends up with a very bad conscience about allowing Maria to marry Mr Rushworth when he strongly suspected that she couldn’t bear him.

I also note that Amy never says why it it unethical, perhaps because she wants to avoid alienating her readership.

I also think that within the boundaries of gentility and comfortable circumstances Jane Austen was writing about women having not just freedom of choice, but freedom to make mistakes, learn by them, and choose again. (In her world that meant choosing a mate, since there were no opportunities outside of service for women.) Nowadays the ways she was gently but firmly subversive are invisible because we have gained all the points she raised.

Of course, Jane Austen was writing about a vanishing England. The industrial revolution was on, and the old fashioned land capitalists were merging with the new breed of factory capitalists. The courts were throwing out all those entailed wills that Ms. Austen was so fond of.

Jane Austen was the Sholom Aleikem of a certain part of pre-industrial England.

On a parallel issue, I only realised on reading Malcolm Gladwell’s recent New Yorker article what a significant class marker good teeth is for those in the US. It does make the emphasis on orthodontics among their middle classes much easier to understand.