Abstract
Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was published two decades before Pride and Prejudice (1813) went to print, but to talk about feminism is to name a qualitatively different attitude than anything that was contemplated by Jane Austen’s society. In the twenty-first century, the choices available to women have dramatically expanded and yet it still seems as if the only permissible ending for a fictional work involving a single female character is to marry her off.
Curtis Sittenfeld’s Eligible (2016), an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, updates Austen for the modern world. In Sittenfeld’s novel, drawing rooms have been replaced by fast food outlets, entails by double-mortgages, handsome militiamen by buff-chested Crossfit instructors, and the horror of impending spinsterhood by the ticking of fertility clocks. But it is not until the book’s last chapter that the marriage plot is finally addressed and the question that has long been a focus for Mary Bennet fan fictions gets asked—namely, how to narrate the possibility of a socially, economically, and emotionally fulfilling existence for Austen’s most famous unmarried female character.
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Notes
- 1.
Curtis Sittenfeld, Eligible (London: Borough Press/HarperCollins, 2016), pp. 513 and 512.
- 2.
James Edward Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen (London, Richard Bentley and Son, 1971), p. 78.
- 3.
Terri Fleming, Perception (London: Orion Books, 2017), p. 3.
- 4.
Colleen McCullough, The Independence of Mary Bennet (New York: Pocket Books/Simon and Schuster, 2008), pp. 20 and 22.
- 5.
Ellen Moers, ‘Female Gothic’, in Literary Women (New York: Doubleday, 1976), p. 126. On feminism and the female gothic, see also, Camilla Nelson, ‘Spooky Jane: Women, History, and Horror in Death Comes to Pemberley’, Adaptation: Journal of Literature on Screen Studies, 9, 3, 2016, pp. 377–392.
- 6.
Curtis Sittenfeld, Eligible (New York: Random House Penguin, 2016), p. 64.
- 7.
Imelda Whelehan, The Feminist Bestseller (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 176.
- 8.
See Susan Wolfson’s analysis of book culture in Jane Austen’s text, ‘Re: Reading Pride and Prejudice: “What think you of books?”’ in Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite, eds, A Companion to Jane Austen (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell: 2012), pp. 112–122.
- 9.
See, for example, Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), Karen Valihora, Austen’s Oughts: Judgment after Locke and Shaftesbury (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010), and Allan Bloom, Love and Friendship (New York, Simon and Schuster 1993).
- 10.
There are a number of children’s films in which the traditional evil mother figure has been replaced by the figure of the absent working mother, including Neil Gaiman’s Coraline or Roald Dahl’s Matilda, for example.
- 11.
Anthea Taylor, Single Women in Popular Culture: the Limits of Post Feminism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 15.
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Nelson, C. (2018). The Trouble with Mary: Curtis Sittenfeld’s Eligible and the Single Woman. In: Hopkins, L. (eds) After Austen. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95894-1_7
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