Jane Austen and Inheritance Rights of Gentry-Women during the Regency-era: The Case of the Bennet Family in Pride and Prejudice (published in 1813)

Published in 1813, Pride and Prejudice, which brought its author great success, remains Jane Austen’s (1775–1817) most famous novel to this day. As in the rest of her work – which consists of six novels published between 1811 and 1818, along with childhood writings and several short stories and unfinished novels – Austen portrays in Pride and Prejudice the lives and matrimonial strategies of the English gentry during the Regency-era. Evidently well-informed about the customs and traditions of her time and social class, Austen occasionally employs the rules of inheritance law – unjust towards women, who were forced to place their financial security in the hands of their father and of their husbands, subsequently – as a narrative tool. While this aspect of her work has already been analyzed by scholars of English literature, it does not appear to have been fully explored by legal historians. This, in our view, is a pity, as Jane Austen’s novels offer a fascinating source for understanding certain mechanisms of English inheritance law during the Regency-era and, more importantly, their implications for women. My study, focusing solely on Pride and Prejudice, aims to analyze the context of Jane Austen’s work and, in particular, the situation of the Bennet family estate. Indeed, due to a specific contractual arrangement, the estate is being withheld from the family’s five daughters and instead meant to be bequeathed to the insipid Mr. Collins, Mr. Bennet’s cousin, much to the dismay of his children and wife.