Money in Jane Austen.
In: Review of English Studies, Jg. 64 (2013-04-01), Heft 264, S. 289-310
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Zugriff:
Recent scholars have demonstrated that Jane Austen does not depict a ‘bourgeois’ world. But the attention paid to socio-economic issues of rank or class in the novels has been accompanied by relatively little specificity about the magnitude and buying power of particular sums, especially incomes. Austen lived a very straitened life in economic terms, and she was, unsurprisingly, hyperconscious of money. Each novel poses economic questions, but the difficulty of determining present-day-equivalent buying power makes it hard to judge the magnitude of the sums involved. While recognizing that ‘retail price’ and ‘average earnings’ may diverge as measures of inflation by a factor of more than thirteen, this essay argues that a multiplier somewhere between 100 and 150 produces a generally plausible equivalent today. It also argues that attention to the size and buying power of the specified incomes of Austen’s principals underlines their elite status. Bingley’s £4000–5000 per annum puts him in the top one-tenth of 1% of the population, and Mr Bennet’s £2000 falls in the top one-fifth of 1%. Yet Austen makes clear that Mr Bennet has saved nothing, and will leave his wife and daughters in relatively penury when he dies. Pride and Prejudice can be read as a delightful romance, but properly understood, the romance camouflages a grimly realistic depiction of the dismal position of genteel women in Austen’s society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]
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Money in Jane Austen.
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Autor/in / Beteiligte Person: | Hume, Robert D. |
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Zeitschrift: | Review of English Studies, Jg. 64 (2013-04-01), Heft 264, S. 289-310 |
Veröffentlichung: | 2013 |
Medientyp: | academicJournal |
ISSN: | 0034-6551 (print) |
DOI: | 10.1093/res/hgs054 |
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