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A Question of Dependence or Independence

The Lot of Women in Jane Austen’s Emma

Jane Austen’s novel Emma, written in 1814-1815, is regarded by many as her masterpiece. In it, more than in any of her other novels, we get a view of a whole small society, that of a rural town in the county of Surrey, during the early years of the nineteenth century. In Emma, by examining the interdependence of the various members of the gentry of a small country town she calls Highbury, Austen shows us a wider range of what lives were possible for women who were born into the gentry of the time.

In Austen’s first two novels, Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, it’s essential to the heroines’ future prosperity that they marry. It’s an economic fact – and one they discuss – that they must marry men who have sufficient incomes to support them, as they themselves will not receive enough money from their families to contribute much to the support of a new family. Moreover, when possible marriages come up, the heroines’ lack of money is counted against them. For women of the time there were very few options beyond marriage that were considered respectable. A gentlewoman could marry, or become a governess, or stay at home. A few women, like Austen herself, could augment the family income by writing – but Austen made very little in her lifetime from her novels.

In Emma for the first time Austen poses the question of what will become of a young woman who doesn’t have any real financial need to marry, and who believes she doesn’t want to marry. Emma Woodhouse, unlike any of Austen’s other heroines, is already wealthy and holds a high position in society at the beginning of the novel. In no other of Austen’s novels do we have a heroine for whom marriage would not be a distinct step up in the world. As Emma says, she has never been in love and has no need to marry – she has an excellent fortune of her own, and is as much mistress of her elderly widowed father’s house as any woman is of her husband’s. If marriage is a job, she already has the best one in town as Mr. Woodhouse’s daughter.

At the beginning of the novel, Emma’s former governess, Miss Taylor, has just married and become Mrs. Weston. As the lot of governesses at the time went, Miss Taylor had a very pleasant situation with the Woodhouses. Many governesses would not be treated as equals by the families that employed them, but rather would be ranked with the housekeeper, and only seen when they brought the children downstairs. Miss Taylor, however, was considered a member of the family, and kept on by the Woodhouses even after Emma had officially grown out of needing a governess. Nonetheless, marriage was clearly a large social step up for her. As Mr. Knightley, Emma and her father’s close friend and the only other major landowner in the area, says of her marriage, “When it comes to a question of dependence or independence! At any rate, it must be better to have only one to please than two.” Marriage is also, of course, a position for life, whereas a governess’ lot, once her charges grew up, was often tenuous. 

As we look around Highbury, the town Emma lives in – and this is much more a novel of community than any of Austen’s others – we see other, and grimmer, possibilities for women’s lives. 

Miss Bates, the surviving daughter of the parish’s former rector, struggles a great deal economically. She suffers the fate that the Bennet sisters in Pride and Prejudice manage to avoid – of surviving her father, and with him his income, and of having to make do on very little. If the Woodhouses and Mr. Knightley didn’t regularly keep her supplied with food from their estates, Miss Bates would be struggling to eat. Austen herself was the daughter of a clergyman, and she, her mother, and her sister depended on the support of her brothers after her father died.

Miss Bates’ niece, Jane Fairfax, is poor and plans to establish herself by becoming (like Miss Taylor) a governess. With no money of her own, Jane was “brought up for educating others; the very few hundred pounds which she inherited from her father making independence impossible.” Marriage would be a better option, but with her lack of fortune it would be foolish to count on it. 

For Emma’s friend Harriet Smith, who doesn’t have the education and abilities required of a governess, marriage is the only really possible solution – but to whom? Although she wasn’t born into the gentry (she’s the illegitimate daughter of an unknown father who supports her in the school where she lives), Emma has tried to lift her into it via her friendship. A marriage that would seem very advantageous considering her position (to a young farmer) is one Emma considers socially beneath her – but then where exactly does Harriet fit in?

Jane Austen was 39 when she wrote Emma. From the little we know of her personal feelings (her sister Cassandra burnt all the letters that were too personal after death), she had had a few romances, none of which had led to marriage. It seems likely she actually turned down one offer of marriage, despite her family’s limited circumstances. At a time when she had moved well beyond the age at which women usually married, she seems more attentive in writing Emma to the predicament of women of her class who didn’t marry, and how they negotiated their lives and the questions of money and status.    

                                                                                    - Elizabeth Williamson, Dramaturg