Mrs Dashwood, not-so-quietly stoked about Willoughby\u2019s interest in her daughter Marianne.
\nSense and Sensibility (1811)<\/p>\n
The father of sisters Marianne and Elinor Dashwood fails to provide for them properly upon his death and abandons them to their well-meaning yet silly mother who now depends on the charity of distant relations in the far reaches of Devon. When Marianne falls in love with bounder Willoughby her mama encourages the very public flirtation, leaving Elinor to worry about Willoughby\u2019s motives. As is the case with many Austen heroines, the parenting is delegated to the most responsible child who sacrifices her own happiness for the sake of reputation. Marianne ends up marrying Colonel Brandon, a decent bloke but a substitute father of sorts. Elinor does land her love, Edward Ferrars, who\u2019s disinherited by his evil, greedy mother in the process. Elinor now has Mrs Ferrars for a mother-in-law. Oh joy.<\/p>\n
The five daughters in Pride and Prejudice.
\nPride and Prejudice (1813)\u00a0<\/p>\n
Mr Bennet hides in his library, not giving a toss about the fact he\u2019s squandered his wife\u2019s dowry despite the fact that he has five daughters and his Longbourn estate is entailed to the slimy Mr Collins. He has no excuse not to know better. Mrs Bennet is anxious about marrying off her daughters but, deprived of education and common sense, has no clue on how to deal with any situation. Mr and Mrs Bennet are spectacularly ill-matched and their daughters are left to fend for themselves. Mr Bennet has favourites (most Austen parents do): Jane and, most of all, Elizabeth. Mrs Bennett has favourites too: Lydia and, down a far second, Kitty. Nobody gives a fuck about Mary who tries to homeschool herself on bits and pieces from Mr Fordyce\u2019s Sermons to Young Women.<\/p>\n
Lydia runs off with Mr Wickham and ends up a bride at 16 with a very dodgy soldier who\u2019s been bribed by the hero of the story, Mr Darcy, to put a ring on it. A few years earlier Wickham had tried to snare Darcy\u2019s 13-year-old sister Georgiana who, orphaned, was under the care of a wicked governess. Many of Austen\u2019s characters have no parents. Mothers in particular tend to disappear early on, with childbirth being the number one killer for younger women if the Gentleman\u2019s Magazine statistics are anything to go by. Fathers often can\u2019t be bothered to pay attention to their children.<\/p>\n
Fanny and Edmund, married.
\nMansfield Park (1814)<\/p>\n
Fanny Price has the dubious privilege of being raised in her rich Aunt Bertram\u2019s family at the instigation of her meddling Aunt Norris. When Fanny returns to her own family in Portsmouth after being away for a decade she reluctantly admits to herself that her own mother was \u201ca partial, ill-judging parent, a dawdle, a slattern, who neither taught nor restrained her children, whose house was a scene of mismanagement and discomfort from beginning to end, and who had no talent, no conversation, no affection towards herself; no curiosity to know her better, no desire of her friendship, and no inclination for her company that could lessen her sense of such feelings\u201d. <\/p>\n
Her father is a seedy, braggart drunk. The Bertrams are slave owners, and while Sir Thomas is away from Mansfield Park sorting out his plantations, Fanny is enslaved, on a genteel scale, to the indolently tyrannical Lady Bertram and her stupid, exploitative sister. Fanny marries the only person who is nice to her in that prison \u2013 her clergyman cousin Edmund. In order to extricate herself from Lady Bertram, Fanny ropes in her sister Susan as \u201cthe stationery niece\u201d who \u201ccould never be spared\u201d. And so the cycle of domestic slavery continues.<\/p>\n
Gwyneth Paltrow as Emma and Toni Collette as Harriet Smith in Emma.
\nEmma (1815)<\/p>\n
Motherless Emma Woodhouse spends a lot of her time catering to the petty wishes of her father, a hypochondriac egotist who sucks the oxygen out of any room he\u2019s in. She\u2019s jealous of the orphaned Jane Fairfax who had a taste of the high life with a rich friend. But when said rich friend got married, Jane returned to her aunt and grandmother in Highbury and may have to become a governess, a polite term for raising someone else\u2019s children for no thanks and very little money. Emma herself was raised by a governess who greatly indulged her and who was almost prevented from marrying herself by Mr Woodhouse who didn\u2019t want to lose an underpaid ersatz parent for Emma. Emma takes a great interest in parentless Harriet Smith, a child raised in a school, and almost destroys Harriet\u2019s chance for a good marriage with Robert Martin. Emma indulges in mischief with Frank Churchill who, not unlike her, also grew up motherless, adopted by a domineering aunt. <\/p>\n
Both Emma and Frank display a breezy callousness in their dealings with others which points to a lack of empathetic responsibility due to minimal parental guidance. Jane Fairfax marries Frank Churchill, and I\u2019ve always felt sorry for her. Emma, like Marianne Dashwood, marries a substitute father figure, Mr Knightley, who\u2019s been keeping her on the straight and narrow all along. We are supposed to understand the magnitude of Mr Knightley\u2019s love for Emma in his consent to move in with the old patriarch.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ciar\u00e1n Hinds as Captain Wentworth in Persuasion, in location at Lyme Regis.
\nPersuasion (1817)<\/p>\n
Anne Elliot is also motherless, cast largely in the role of mothering her demanding sister Mary and her children. Her father, Sir Walter Elliot, is despicably ridiculous. Vain, stupid, deluded and entitled, he is a nasty piece of work who has mismanaged his own estate Kellynch Hall and who needs to be cajoled into being \u201cimportant\u201d in Bath as opposed to going completely broke in London. Anne\u2019s elder sister Elizabeth, arrogant and superannuated, is Sir Walter\u2019s favourite and together they gang up on Anne. Enter, again, the dashing Frederick Wentworth, to whom Anne had been briefly engaged seven years earlier. Captain Wentworth had no fortune at the time and Anne gave up the engagement, persuaded by Lady Russell, a family friend whom she loved and trusted. Tellingly, her father never actually supported or advised her; he \u201cgave it all the negative of great astonishment, great coldness, great silence, and a professed resolution of doing nothing for his daughter\u201d. Anne is older and wiser than Austen\u2019s other heroines, and manages to regain Wentworth\u2019s love.<\/p>\n
Of all matches in Jane Austen, the one between Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth is the most adult: compatible, equitable (sort of), and not an exercise in parental substitution. The novel also contains a perfect example of a warm, companionable marriage: Admiral and Mrs Croft, who rent Kellynch Hall, and who used to sail the seas together. They are inseparable and enjoy each other\u2019s company. They put the plethora of looking glasses in storage, because, unlike the narcissist Walter Elliot who had them dotted all over the place, they look at other people with kindness and generosity. They are happy and they have no children.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Want to feel better about your own family? Take comfort in the fact they probably aren\u2019t as shit…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":100410,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[489,156,2522,111,139,69,8765,20005],"class_list":{"0":"post-100409","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-jane-austen","11":"tag-new-zealand","12":"tag-newzealand","13":"tag-nz","14":"tag-parenting","15":"tag-pride-and-prejudice"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100409\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}