ered adesirable fate (so when Charlotte Lucas, at age 27, marries Mr. Collins, her brothers are "relieved from their apprehension ofCharlotte's dying an old maid", and Lydia says "Jane will be quite an old maid soon, I declare. She is almost three andtwenty!"). (See also the reflections on the recompenses of old-maidhood from Jane Austen's Emma, published in 1815when she was herself 39 years old and never-married.)Given all this, some women were willing to marry just because marriage was the only allowed route to financial security, or toescape an uncongenial family situation. This is the dilemma discussed in following exchange between the relatively impoverishedsisters Emma and Elizabeth Watson in Jane Austen's The Watsons:Emma: "To be so bent on marriage -- to pursue a man merely for the sake of a situation -- is a sort of thing that shocks me; I cannot understand it. Poverty is a great evil, but to a woman of education and feeling it ought not, it cannot be the greatest. -- I would rather be a teacher in a school (and I can think of nothing worse) than marry a man I did not like." Elizabeth: "I have been at school, Emma, and know what a life they lead; you never have. -- I should not like marrying a disagreeable man any more than yourself, -- but I do not think there are many disagreeable men; -- I think I could like any good-humoured man with a comfortable income. -- [you are] rather refined." In Pride and Prejudice, the dilemma is expressed most clearly by the character Charlotte Lucas, whose pragmatic views onmarrying are voiced several times in the novel: "Without thinking highly either of men or of matrimony, marriage had alwaysbeen her object; it was the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertainof giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want." She is 27, not especially beautiful (according to both sheherself and Mrs. Bennet), a...
