Pride-and-Prejudice

herself descends from lower gentry, on her father’s side, while her maternal
grandfather was an attorney.
Despite her allegiance to professionals and businessmen, Austen clearly
had respect for what she would have regarded as the nobler values of the
landed gentry and aristocracy, particularly the sense of social responsibility
and decorum that are implicitly endorsed by the narrator and main characters
of the novel. Although these values are fostered through the preservation of a
strict social hierarchy, they do not happen to thwart the aspirations of the
fictional Elizabeth Bennet, and thus modern readers need never confront the
injustices of an English society that remained wary of the new democratic
values espoused in America and France and among English radicals.
Moreover, even if Austen’s own immediate family fell socially and
economically a degree below that of her central fictional characters, her
family connections made the upper orders not wholly unknown to her.
Austen’s mother, Cassandra Leigh Austen, was descended from a
distinguished family and was related to the duke of Chandos. Austen’s first
cousin, Eliza Hancock, was goddaughter to Warren Hastings, the eminent
statesman and governor of British India, and wife to a member of the French
nobility, Count Jean François Capot de Feuillide, who was guillotined during
the Reign of Terror. Austen’s brother Edward was literally adopted into the
British gentry when Thomas and Catherine Knight, second cousins of the
Austens, took an interest in him, obtained permission to raise him, and,
finding themselves childless, ultimately made him heir to their splendid estate
of Godmersham Park in Kent.
Austen’s own situation in a family of well-connected professionals was
somewhat precarious, for she remained unmarried in an age when women
depended largely on male relatives for support. Her father and brothers,
however, with their strong sense of family responsibility, must have made her
feel more secure than the typical “spinster” would have felt. She and her sister
Cassandra, who also remained unmarried and was Jane’s closest friend and
confidante, were initially dependent on their father, and then, after his death
in 1805, on a small annuity and on the generosity of their brothers. Jane
Austen had always lived in her father’s house; upon his death, she, her sister,
and their mother took up lodgings and visited extensively with relatives and
friends for three years. The women eventually settled in the Hampshire
village of Chawton, in a house made available to them by Edward. Austen
spent the final eight years of her life at Chawton, and it was from this house
that she published her novels.
Given how centered her novels are on the marriage plot and how family-