Emma Claire Sweeney

And in rereading the scene, I was struck by how many times he attempts to seize her, to take hold of her.

And the way in which she resists, perhaps partly down to having a certain amount of privilege from her class status, she has the confidence to turn down his advances.

And I think she plays in her novels with these different levels of power, whether that be to do with gender or whether that be to do with wealth or class.

I'm thinking of a letter that Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra about a friend of Austen's, Anne Sharp.

And Anne Sharp, it appears, has reported to Jane Austen about some kind of harassment that she has received at the hands of a more powerful man.

Austen

One appears to believe her, reports it to Cassandra without questioning it.

But what she then claims in a very playful way is that she really hopes that Anne Sharp is going to get to marry a more powerful and wealthy man and that sort of marriage might protect her from these kinds of advancements.

And I guess her novels generally are marriage plots too.

So it's marriage that saves these women from the precarious economic circumstances.

one of the ways I think we can read it is to think that by having this quite conservative marriage plot, it allows Austen to get away with exploring things that might have been quite subversive at the time.

So whilst

I don't necessarily think we could say, yes, Jane Austen would consider herself a feminist, certainly not in the terms we might conceive it today.

I think what we can say is that she had a persistent interest in what happens when women make choices and speak up.

I wonder if this is something that the novel is really well equipped to do.

We can hold more than one idea equally and at the same time.

So that we can laugh at these terrible marriages at the same time as, you know, inwardly crying for the entrapment as well.

It's a fascinating image to conjure up, isn't it?

Who knows what she would have thought?

I can well imagine mixed feelings.