![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The rolling lawns and portrait-covered grand staircases we tend to associate with Austen tales onscreen are almost always the denizens of suitors or foils, not of her steel-spined heroines. Anne Elliot of Persuasion: renting out her grand Somerset home and moving to a small house in Bath in the hopes of righting her family’s upside-down pocketbooks. (Live in a cottage? The indignity!) Fanny Price of Mansfield Park: so poor she’s sent to live with her aunt and uncle, where she’s expected to blend in with the drapery. The Dashwood sisters of Sense and Sensibility: left without money after their father’s demise and forced to radically alter their lifestyle. Elizabeth Bennet of Pride and Prejudice: daughter to a spendy, unemployed dad with four other sisters in need. Catherine Morland of Northanger Abbey: one of ten kids, poor. For all the Merchant & Ivory Doric-column grandeur of most Jane Austen stories, she’s the novelist’s only wealthy heroine. ![]()
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