“They had often attempted to do it before, but it was a subject on which Mrs. When she exclaims angrily, repeatedly, unceasingly about her daughters’ inability to inherit property-“the hardest thing in the world,” she calls it-our heroines, Jane and Lizzie, exhaustedly explain the logic of the sexist concept yet again. Bennet rails against the confines of the misogynistic society she inhabits. Remarkably, even as she shoulders the burden of her family’s future alone, Mrs. Through the homogenizing fog of history, her obsession sometimes feels ridiculous-but when the options are marriage or destitution, and when you live in the countryside where well-bred men are scarce, and when at least two of your daughters are already past prime marriageable age, panic is understandable. An entail demands that none of her five children, all girls, may inherit their father’s estate, and thus they will have no permanent home or source of income unless they find it in wealthy men.

The woman has one abiding goal through the novel: to see all her daughters married and thus financially secure. Bennet shows to the sensibility and decorum most of her compatriots value so highly is not her weakness but in fact her greatest strength. The clever jokes her husband makes at her expense go right over her head, much to his amusement and her elder daughters’ disappointment. She tends to be read at face value-flighty, talkative, too often drunk, and too obsessed with marrying off each of her daughters. Bennet, mother to the five Bennet sisters and incorrigible social gadfly, is largely dismissed by both the book’s readers and its facetious narrator, but she is perhaps the most radical character in the novel. Of all the delightful idiots filling the pages of our well-worn copies of Pride and Prejudice (hint: this is everyone except maybe Charlotte), one of the best is also one of the most overlooked-even by Jane Austen, who never grants her a first name.

Pride and prejudice characters