Through her vivacious cast of hopeless romantics, overzealous meddlers and pushy mothers, Jane Austen – who died 200 years ago this week – documented the trials and tribulations of domestic life in Regency Britain. She gave us a lasting insight into the cultural and societal pressures that influenced who married whom, and it continues to fascinate readers today.
The laws around marriage, equality and divorce have changed a lot since Austen's time, in large part to reflect shifting attitudes. But when it comes to tying the knot, are we really all that different from our 18th-century contemporaries?
The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1923 allowed either husband or wife to divorce on the basis of their spouse's adultery. Previously, this luxury was afforded to the husband only. And after 1937, further grounds for divorce were added, including cruelty, desertion and insanity. In 1969, the Divorce Reform Act was passed, allowing couples to divorce once they had been separated for two years. Even if no one was at fault, if the marriage had broken down, you could get out of it. Cue decades of high divorce rates.
Despite the relative ease with which you can escape a marriage now, in some ways it’s even more of a commitment. Back in Austen’s time, you had to get hitched for money, because you had no other source of income. Now, for the most part, we get married because we want to. (And, you know, sometimes still for money, too.)
So how would Austen’s characters fare in 2017? Which dating app would Darcy use? What would Mrs Bennet think of her daughters choosing their own spouse? How would Emma compete with Tinder? And what would Austen herself think of the way unmarried women are treated by society? In a bid to find out, we meet some modern-day Austen characters...
The mother with lots of daughters: Mrs Bennet
In Jane Austen’s time, your husband would have been chosen for you. Parents and family would seek out appropriate partners for young women – on the rare occasion that a match was made outside of familial arrangements, there was a cautionary tale to be told (take Lydia Bennet, who ran away with Mr Wickham and nearly ruined her family’s reputation in the process).
In Pride and Prejudice, Mrs Bennet is the mother of five daughters. Keen to marry them all off pronto, she’s pushy, snobby and really quite unpleasant. Then again, the only way she could secure her family’s financial future was by finding good matches for her daughters. So it’s hard to be too damning.
Our modern-day Mrs Bennet is called Jane. She’s 52 and has a much more conservative three daughters. While the Mrs Bennet of yesteryear would have tried to impress visitors with her daughters' accomplishments, Jane notes that now it’s the young men who get a full vetting upon entering her house.
“Now it’s like, how can they please us?” she says. “Rather than sweeping my parlour and flattening down their pinnies, it’s the reverse. Every time these hapless young guys come through my door – half of the time I’m fending them off with my criteria. Number one, how druggy is he? Jesus Christ, it’s quite different isn’t it.”
All manner of developments in marriage law, cultural shifts and medical breakthroughs have contributed to this change. But for Jane, some fundamentals remain. “The bottom line is still: is he going to be able to support her? And if they have children, is he going to be able to muster up the energy to go and earn enough to support them while that’s going on?”
Jane admits, too, to a preoccupation with separating romance and lifelong commitment. For many mothers like her, she says, it's all about trying to “prick that balloon and be cynical about romance and the expectations that come with it”.
But despite her more modern views, Jane isn't immune to dropping the odd hint. If she comes home talking about a friend's son who’s “just gone off to work at Merrill Lynch” or “another handsome young man who’s just returned from his global travels," the response is scathing. "I get the Mrs Bennet insult levelled at me if I even look like I’m scheming.”
Photo: REX/Shutterstock
The modern meddler and matchmaker: Emma
And from one eager matchmaker to another. Our modern-day Emma has evolved somewhat, possessing considerably more emotional intelligence than her overenthusiastic, under-skilled forebear – and she has the CV to prove it. Introducing Sarah Raphael, Refinery29 UK’s editorial director and in-house Cupid. Sarah has successfully set up two couples in the past 18 months. They’re both now living together.
But what does it take to be a good matchmaker in 2017? “Emotional intelligence,” says Sarah resolutely. “And vibe. If you get the same vibe from two people who don’t know each other, that’s grounds enough for a set-up.” I’m not sure you’d have caught Emma exercising her intuition in such a way, but presumably matchmakers have evolved over the last two centuries to be a tad more deft in the execution of their meddling.
Sarah’s first win was a colleague and a friend, whose relationship accelerated so quickly that their fourth date was a group trip to Costa Rica. “The moment he asked her out officially on the holiday, I was a metre away,” she half jokes, “admiring my work.”
The second couple she set up was also an instant hit – their first date lasted an entire weekend.
Matchmaking is a high-risk business but that’s where the fun lies, says Sarah. “I love the thrill. It’s very gratifying when it works,” she explains. “I’m aiming for three, because apparently in Jewish culture, if you have three successful match-makes you can go to Jewish heaven.”
This initial success has given Sarah a boost of confidence, very much as Austen’s Emma was drawn to the time she set up her former governess with the man who became her husband. But unlike Emma, Sarah’s always keen to take things slowly. “Since I’ve had these success stories, so many of my single friends are like, ‘Why can’t you do that for me?’ and I say, 'When the time is right, I’ll come for you'. I don’t want any fluffs to dilute my success rate. You can’t rush it.” Spoken like a true pro.
And what does our Emma think of marriage in 2017? “I've known couples who get to a 'certain age' maybe and they start saying, ‘Ok either we’re going to break up, or get married' – the classic ‘make or break’ time – but surely that’s the worst point to choose to get married? I always think you should get married when you’re the most in love – when you’re on a high.”
The slightly hopeless romantic: Mr Darcy
If you don’t have a friend with such hyped matchmaking skills, there’s always that other modern-day matchmaker: Tinder. Only, surely, Mr Darcy wouldn’t go on Tinder...
Our swashbuckling hero is Matt, a tall, handsome, 26-year-old creative. The stiff upper lip has disappeared and he’s more into plaid Carhartt shirts than high-neck, billowing-sleeved cotton numbers. After two years of living in London and abstaining from all forms of online dating – “I didn’t like being that careless with people’s lives” – he gave in and signed up to Bumble. Or as Matt calls it: “Tinder for guys who can’t deal with rejection.” So far, so Mr Darcy.
Matt met his girlfriend not long after signing up to the feminist dating app. But he still held a candle for real-life romantic meetings. “I asked her if we hadn’t met on a dating app, how she’d like to have met,” he says. “And she told me this story about how some tall creative type walked into a café while she was working in there, and they started talking. So we re-enacted that the next day.” You guys.
When you perceive how relatively young Tinder is, considering how long human beings have had relationships, it’s not surprising that meeting someone online still carries a stigma. Matt thinks that the issue goes further than our throwaway culture, and says that choice is what makes it harder to find long-term partners. “We have this real mentality at the moment that nothing is ever good enough,” he says. “That there’s something better on the horizon. I think that’s stopping functional relationships.”
His views on marriage are optimistic, though, if a tad cautious. “When you see a couple that you just know are so good for each other, it’s amazing,” he says. “The weight of committing your entire life to someone is incredible. But I do think it gets thrown around a lot. I think a lot of people do it to spice things up, which is really sad. And I think people do it because they feel like it’s something you need to do.”
Photo: REX/Shutterstock
The one who doesn’t care for marriage: Jane Austen
One thing's for sure: for Austen, marriage wasn’t just “something you needed to do”. Despite her flair for bringing romance into the lives of her heroines, Austen never married. Different theories exist as to why, but it would seem that her number one devotion was to her work.
And as much as our attitudes to marriage have evolved over the last 200 years, there is one particular breed of person who is still met with caution, stigma and even reproach: the single woman.
28-year-old Emily – a self-confessed Jane Austen fan and artist, for whom career comes first – recalls a story from a recent wedding. “A guy I know said a comment about ‘all the single girls who’ve been left on the shelf'. It was like they’d been shunned,” she says. “That attitude really, really annoys me. Is it a failure that you’re single in your 30s, 40s, 50s, whenever? This guy is 28, it’s 2017: where has this attitude come from? Is it through literature? Is it through your parents?”
Emily hasn’t sworn against marriage by any means, though. “I’m all for marriage, I just wish it wasn’t the be-all and end-all,” she says. Then, speaking about the feeling that marriage is somehow an inevitable part of growing up, she says: “I was never desperate to get married when I was younger, but it always felt like something that was there in my future that would happen. Whereas now there’s a lot more that I want to do. It’s not the be-all and end-all for me.”
Further reading
Dating Advice From Jane Austen For Modern Women
Is It Harder For Smart Women To Find Love?
How Not "Defining The Relationship" Got Me Exactly What I Wanted
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