Regency Era Pride And Prejudice

During the Regency Era, Jane Austen wrote magnificent stories of romance and of lands that one could only dream about. Austen includes in her novels the issues that women face in society, and in her works those problems act as the obstacles that prevent women from achieving happiness. In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, her novel is influenced by the issues that women during the Regency Era face, and these issues prevent characters like Elizabeth from happiness: women’s roles. Some would say that 1811 through 1820 was a time of relative ease for people in the middle class, but Austen revealed otherwise. Women’s roles in Pride and Prejudice act as a pillar of Regency society that prevent women from obtaining their happiness. Early in the plot it is revealed that women have a responsibility to marry off all of their daughters to men of equal or higher wealth or to have someone who could inherit their wealth, “The business of her life was to get her daughter married; its solace was visiting and news” (Austen, 7). Women such as Mrs. Bennett encourage their daughters to marry as fast as they can so that they could …show more content…
When confronting Elizabeth, Lady de Bourgh objects to the union between Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth, because Elizabeth is “a young woman of inferior birth, of no importance in the world, and wholly unallied to [her] family” (Austen, 298). It was the role of women in upper class England society to uphold family status and connections. Even though they were protecting the same system that could have very much put them into poverty or into a miserable marriage. Very ironic that she would protect a system that she ultimately depended on. Fay Weldon said that there “70,000 prostitutes in London in 1801, out of a female population of some 475,000….” It was women like Lady de Bourgh that were very fortunate to be part of the few royalty and not of the many