Pride and Prejudice (1813)

An ancient regime known as the British aristocracy has long ruled the land and through a combination of terror, murder and extraction—now outsourced to the furthest reaches of the globe—has accumulated vast sums of a strange kind of cursed bookkeeping known as private property. In this world it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of private property must be in want of a wife. This wife will be his intimate companion and kept sexual object sanctioned by church and society; she will produce an heir to keep the private property in the family; she will aid in his social integration by helping him appear normal and properly sexed. The high romantic appeal of this world—with its many marriage plots, balls, dancing, intrigue, high collars, muslin, bare shoulders, drawing-room gossip, grand estates, thrilling letters, and candlelit drama—merely shrouds the terrible cruelty at the heart of society: should a woman be unable to find a husband before a certain age she will be condemned as redundant; a spinster; a failed woman. Meanwhile, despite this dystopia (or because of it) the voice remains breezy, funny and irreverent. Jane Austen’s caustic ironies and misanthropic humor redounds from the terribleness of society. She herself never married (probably because she was too tall); one wonders what would have become of the novels had she married. No surprise that our heroine Lizzy should share in these caustic ironies. Because her father’s estate is entailed to a male heir and yet he has no sons, she and her sisters will be forced from their home. Lizzy must find love or be evicted. Together with her “fine eyes,” she charms with the intellectual enchantment of her class prejudice. She offers “bewitching converse;” Darcy “had never been so bewitched by any woman” (a reminder that glamour has always been witchy). Hidden within the book’s popular appeal is a weird question: can love subvert the curse of inheritance?