Module 1 Question 1

Question: A reading of Letters to Alice changes the modern responder’s understanding of Pride and Prejudice. Discuss with reference to both texts.

Fay Weldon’s Letters to Alice on First reading Jane Austen, through the didactic literary form of an epistolic novel, serves to encourage a heightened understanding of the values and contemporary issues of Jane Austen’s cultural context. In doing so, it inspires the modern responder to adopt more holistic appreciation for the plight of the characters and the values inherent in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Through the inclusion of relevant contextual information from Austen’s time and didactic assertions of the fictional character Aunt Fay, Weldon implores the responder to accept her opinions on the values and issues of Austen’s context. Weldon’s discussion of these, which include marriage, social class and the role and expectations of women within society, transforms a modern responders understanding of the themes and morals explored in Pride and Prejudice, and moreover, alters the way in which the responder perceives the events and decisions of the characters within the novel.
The fundamental importance and value assigned to marriage in the context of Jane Austen and Pride and Prejudice is reinforced through Weldon’s discussion of the options for women outside marriage and its purpose of providing financial security for women. In Pride and Prejudice, Austen constructs Charlotte Lucas as a character who does not think “highly of either men or matrimony”, and hence she marries Mr Collins despite not loving him, to ensure her financial security and elevate her position within society. Mrs Bennet echoes Charlotte’s sentiments, as the “business of her life was to get her daughters married,” because she knew they would not be provided for after the death of her husband. In Letters to Alice, Weldon asserts that before reading Jane Austen, Alice “Must understand.. the world in which Jane Austen was born.” As contemporary...