In Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion, Anne Elliot seemingly mourns
the disparity between women’s and men’s education, and women’s lack of
representation in history and the arts: ‘Men have had every advantage of us in
telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree;
the pen has been in their hands’.
But in an age when society believed that
a girl’s ultimate ambition should be a wife and mother, an increasing number of
women (like Austen herself) took up their pens in the hope of earning some money
of their own. In a letter to her brother Frank Austen in 1813, she told him of
the success of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility: ‘I have now
therefore written myself into £250 –which only makes me long for more' (worth approximately £16,000 in today's money).
Over the next few blog posts, I’ll be
taking a look at some of Austen’s predecessors and contemporaries who created a
fresh role for themselves in society as authors. However, to avoid society's censure, like Austen, they often wrote under a cloak of anonymity.
Frontispiece of a French edition of Persuasion, Jane Austen's 'La Famille Elliot' (1821) courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
This is interesting,Sue. When did the womens movement change into the Suffragettes and eventual emancipation?Can you call what you describe with Austen and her contemporaries a,"movement," at all? Its is a story that continues today in so many ways. I'm a man talking here. When we get a female Pope then that will be something.Ha! Ha!
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