Pride and Prejudice Read Online Free Page A

participants in a middle-class meritocracy.
    The characterization of women as ‘rational creatures’, 10 the question of whether marriage is the only legitimate goal for a woman, the promotion of an active feminine identity and a professional ideal: these issues, raised by Wollstonecraft and others in the cause of revolutionary change, reverberate in political writing – and in fiction – throughout the 1790s and beyond. And they are clearly still very much current in
Pride and Prejudice
. In the 1790s radical women such as Mary Hays, Charlotte Smith and Wollstonecraft herself wrote experimental novels with active – even unchaste – heroines, novels which exposed the stifling limitations of the conventional happy-ever-after marriage; in response, anti-revolutionary novels by, for example, Jane West or Elizabeth Hamilton reasserted a virtuous, domestic feminine ideal, often through plots which demonstrate the catastrophic personal consequences of taking up radical ideas – or of giving in to ‘first impressions’. Drafts of Austen’s
First Impressions
have not survived, so we can’t know precisely how her original novel might have fitted into this fictional ‘war of ideas’. What is evident, however, is the broad resemblance between Austen’s plot and the plots of some of the more conservative novels of the 1790s. In Austen’s novel, Elizabeth has to learn to revise her first impressions, not just of Darcy but also of the unscrupulous Wickham; in conservative fiction, heroines similarly over-confident of their capacity to make independent decisions, and to act on them, learn the error of their self-assertiveways – often (unlike Elizabeth) by suffering near or utter ruin.
    More than ten years intervened between the writing of
First Impressions
and the publication of
Pride and Prejudice
in January 1813. Austen ‘lopt and cropt’
First Impressions
11 to produce the novel as we now know it, in a rather different political climate. In the later 1790s, with the failure of revolutionary ideals in France and repressive domestic policies at home, English radicals lost confidence and their voice became more muted; during the next decade, as the Napoleonic Wars went on, the sometimes hysterically reactionary atmosphere at the turn of the century also gradually gave way to a precarious conservative consensus, at least among the increasingly confident middle classes. Again, ideas about the role of women played a crucial part in these shifts of opinion. Conservatives and traditionalists could not ignore the new Wollstonecraftian femininity. It was violently discredited in some anti-revolutionary propaganda, usually by depicting Wollstonecraft and other radical women as prostitutes, ‘unsex’d females’ who advocated and practised ‘Gallic licentiousness’. But the idea that women might be active participants in culture also had a more complicated and pervasive effect: in a much modified form, active femininity was appropriated for the conservative cause of national family values, Burke’s ‘little platoon’.
    The work of the evangelical writer Hannah More typifies this process. In many ways, More is the ideological opposite of Wollstonecraft. More herself, as well as other contemporary commentators, certainly presented the two women as the acceptable and unacceptable faces of womanhood, and a brief comparison of More with Wollstonecraft provides a very useful context against which to tease out the subtleties of Austen’s treatment of femininity in
Pride and Prejudice
. In her
Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education
(1799) More vehemently reasserts ‘natural’ sexual difference, implicitly answering Wollstonecraft’s belief in a human identity common to both sexes: ‘Each sex has its proper excellencies, which would be lost were they melted down into the common character.’ 12 On thebasis of that difference, More makes a rousing appeal to women on behalf of their war-torn nation:
    I would call on