centali:

mysharona1987:

“I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched & narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer in both the stories I have read, “Persuasion,” and “Pride & Prejudice,” is marriageableness. All that interests in any character introduced is still this one, Has he or she money to marry with, & conditions conforming? ‘Tis “the nympholepsy of a fond despair,” say rather, of an English boarding-house. Suicide is more respectable.”

—

Ralph Waldo Emerson.

You can love Jane Austen novels, like I do, and accept this is a valid point. 

But the thing is: The female characters in her novels *don’t* have many choices. It was the 1800s. They had to get married. Or end up homeless and destitute. 

The man that made this quote *had* choices.    

jane austen worked in a world that made women marry whether they felt inclined to or not, so she made characters that often married at the end, but not because of social convention but because of love, which was fucking great if u can have it back then but the gentry often didn’t marry for love. so fuck u, dude from like a hundred years ago.