Connections Between Pride And Prejudice And Letters To Alice

Despite the vast change in context, purpose and audience, both Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Fay Weldon’s Letters to Alice (1984) address universal and timeless issues within society in order to challenge perspectives and understandings of them. Each explore the values and attitudes ascribed to marriage and women, and through an intertextual reading of both Austen and Weldon, a contextualisation of both constructs grows.

The exploration of the construction of values regarding marriage, and the role of women within this, is achieved through a consideration of the role of literature in the context of both texts. Education for Regency women was generally limited to achieving certain successes or skills; “a women must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern language”, which made a woman an accomplished one and in better protect to attract a husband. However, in this, the voice of the women was often overlooked and replaced by a quantification of their accomplishments. Austen is significant in her proto-feminist approach to promoting greater education and empowerment for women through reading; “where there is a real superiority of mind, pride will be always under good regulation”, promoting intelligence over pride. Austen’s critical stance on her society’s low value of education is observed through dialogue of Darcy who asserts that one “must yet add something more substantial in
Austen’s critical appreciation of the need for women’s education for reasons beyond marriage is significantly subversive to her time, and is thus