Pride before a man
Dating columnist, millennial singleton Sinead Corcoran looks to The Great Romance Classics for inspiration for her love life.
‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife,’’ wrote Jane Austen in Pride and Prejudice.
What she really meant though, is a broke, single woman who is probably living off her overdraft is absolutely in want of a husband with a decent Kiwisaver.
Pride and Prejudice, set in the late 1700s-early 1800s, is about a middle-class family of five young women whose mother is desperate to marry them off to wealthy men. Whether or not the daughters are ‘‘into’’ the men or not is irrelevant, all that matters is that they have bucks.
If, like me, you hadn’t read the book but it sounds incredibly familiar – that’s because it is.
Mrs Bennet is the Kris Jenner of the 1700s. An overbearing, money-hungry, social-climbing ‘‘Momager’’, Mrs Bennet will stop at nothing to ensure the Kardashian-Jenner girls succeed – and in that day in age, to succeed was to lock down a welloff husband.
As a 26-year-old independentish woman in 2019, I was alarmed at how relevant this notion was to me. While Mrs Bennet’s thirsty desperation is incredibly cringe, it is understandable.
I consider myself a feminist, but I’m also single, a journalist, living in Auckland’s housing market with zero home-owning prospects, no savings and no family inheritance or any semblance of a Just In Case plan if I get into any sort of financial strife. This means I live in