Forget ‘Pride And Prejudice.’ Modern Women Need The Hard Truths Of ‘Emma.’

Jane Austen fans eagerly await yet another adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice,” which is due for release by Netflix this fall. Certainly, this most beloved of Austen’s novels — about first impressions and their limitations, as experienced by protagonist Elizabeth Bennet and her eventual husband, Fitzwilliam Darcy — offers plenty of food for thought about love and marriage. But the truth is that many of Austen’s precepts in “Pride and Prejudice” apply narrowly to her own time and make only a clumsy transfer to ours. 

In Regency England, with its system of primogeniture, nearly all women needed husbands to achieve any measure of independence or financial security. To remain unmarried was, for most women, to exist on the charity begrudged them by male relatives (as the Dashwood sisters and their mother do at the start of Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility”). This is why Charlotte Lucas, Elizabeth’s best friend in “Pride and Prejudice,” marries the insipid, detestable, self-important Mr. Collins. Such a storyline is inherently dated. Today, of course, Mr. Collins would either shape up or become an “incel.” 

That’s partly because 21st-century women in first-world nations are, by and large, fortunate enough to be in the position of the final Austen heroine who debuted within the author’s lifetime: the financially independent heiress Emma who declares near the beginning of Austen’s eponymous novel that she will never marry. 

So, if we’re going to search for modern lessons about marriage in Austen’s 19th-century corpus, we would do well to focus our attention on “Emma.” Austen’s depiction of a woman who eschews marriage because she does not need to be a wife for material reasons is as prescient and prophetic as it is unflattering. 

The lessons Emma learns — that she is not as capacious, insightful, or charitable as she would like to believe and that her ostensibly disinterested conception of romance and marriage is shallow, self-important, and transactional — are ones that many of today’s young women desperately need. 

What makes a man husband material?

To pay attention to dating discourse today is to recognize that, for a host of reasons, young men and young women are increasingly fed up with one another. Fewer and fewer Americans are dating, marrying, or having sex. 

Apparently, the battle of the sexes has become something of a cold war. 

Males’ extended adolescence and failures to launch no doubt play a central role here. So does the reactionary misogyny evinced by the so-called “manosphere,” where disgruntled young men pine for the days when the Charlotte Lucases were compelled to marry the Mr. Collinses against their own inclination. I am not discounting either of these left-coded explanations for falling rates of coupling up; there is truth in them. 

That said, many college-educated women’s disdain for non-college-educated men in particular has less to do with those men’s failure to grow up than it does with their failure to conform to left-coded elite pretensions and pass various ideological litmus tests. Thus, our ever-increasing political polarization both reflects and serves to perpetuate the growing gulf between the sexes, as more young women attend college and veer hard Left while more young men eschew college and lean Right. In this context, of course, fewer young men seem, to many young women, like plausible life partners. 

Austen has no brief for this kind of female arrogance. 

When Emma manipulates her less fortunate friend Harriet into rejecting a marriage proposal from an honorable farmer (and persuades her that she is in love with a smarmy clergyman instead), she does so out of nothing but self-important prejudice. Emma is sure that a man who works with his hands (and is ignorant of some of the finer manners she is accustomed to in gentlemen of her own class) could never be good enough for her friend. Of course, Emma’s unwarranted meddling nearly wrecks Harriet’s happiness. Meanwhile, Austen throws her heroine’s myopia and solipsism into sharp and unforgiving relief. And, indeed, Emma learns some humility and gains some valuable perspective. 

Unfortunately, many of today’s similarly situated women seem determined to put incomplete, infantile notions of what makes a marriageable man ahead of both their own and others’ well-being. 

Is marriage just another transactional negotiation?

Emma’s perennial insistence that she has no interest in marriage herself falls by the wayside when her former governess’ stepson comes to town. Frank Churchill is dashing and intriguing. His admiration and love would be a feather in Emma’s cap. That fact, more than anything about Frank himself, piques her interest — until she learns that Frank is flirting with her only to maintain the secrecy of his engagement to someone else. 

Emma’s shallow interest in romance as self-aggrandizement finds its modern echo in popular videos from internet influencers who declare that they won’t date men who don’t get them an Uber on the first date or reflexively pay for luxury versions of everything. That is, they won’t deign to date a man unless he essentially portends and embodies a full-life “upgrade.”

As if the upgrade to being a married couple weren’t enough. Which, to these sorts of women, it isn’t. 

When women relied on marriage for financial security, independent wealth like Emma’s obviated the presumed need for nuptial partnership. Now that nearly every young woman earns (or could earn) an income to support herself, marriage writ large has become a want (or not) rather than a need.

Do today’s women want the right thing? Too many of them, it seems, do not. 

Emma’s ultimate partnership with her neighbor Mr. Knightley is as fine a portrayal of the egalitarian, companionate marriage as one could hope to see. Both must admit a degree of fault in how they thought about the romances of others. 

Only, unlike in the case of Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, the greater fault — and therefore, the greater need for character growth — lies with the woman. Emma learns that marriage is not only a vehicle for the upward mobility of which she has no need, but a context for the happy embrace of the holistic responsibility to which she is called.

“Pride and Prejudice” may be the Austen novel we want. But more than ever, “Emma” is the one we need.

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Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about books, education, and culture, including on Substack.

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