The Atlantic

The Economics of Jane Austen

In her fiction, the 18th-century novelist wrestled with the same question that preoccupied Adam Smith: Does the pursuit of wealth diminish a person's moral integrity?
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When Jane Austen died in 1817, her reinvention began. Her brother Henry Austen published, as the preface to the posthumous edition of Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, a biographical note that praised her modesty and her financial disinterestedness. According to Henry, Jane accounted herself astonished when her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, made her £150. “Few so gifted were so truly unpretending,” Henry tells us. “She regarded the above sum as a prodigious recompense for that which cost her nothing.”

It is in every way a deeply felt, generous obituary, but the self-effacing, even “faultless” Jane character it imagines has more in common with Emma Woodhouse’s altogether-too-perfect bugbear Jane Fairfax than it does with the author who complained in a letter to a friend that she would have really preferred a bigger advance than the £110 she received for Pride and Prejudice.

It’s no great secret that Austen’s novels are fascinated with the microeconomics of the “three or four families in a country village” that she made her lifelong theme. These days, however, we tend to slap Twilight-style romance covers on them and try to forget that her most charming heroines are actually fortune hunters.

I will pause for a moment as a thousand Janeites around the world cry out in unison. But to resume: The likeable and impecunious Bennet girls, the disinherited Dashwood daughters, and even gentle Anne Elliott are by any standard, contemporary or Georgian, truffling for funds. This was the occupation of a gentleman’s daughter in the late 18th century.

Austen, too, was a fortune hunter, after a fashion. Like any author, she wrote for many reasons—personal artistic expression, to entertain herself and her beloved sister Cassandra, to comment

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