Marriage in Pride and Prejudice: A Literary Essay

Book excerpt: I wrote this literary essay in graduate school the semester before I received my Masters Degree in English Literature. It is about marriage expectations in the Regency period as expressed in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It explores the different relationships between the sexes in the novel, and what the options were for women who were not yet married during this period. It is accompanied by photographs taken by my husband when we made a Jane Austen pilgrimage to her homes in Winchester and Chawton, England. Hopefully fans of Jane Austen won't find it too full of bibliographic information and may look at it as an interesting example of the kind of writing that Masters Degree students must submit. Hopefully, my readers will learn some new things about Jane that they didn't already know.