They never learn…

It’s all to do with rising life expectancy. Rather than dry statistics, I quote Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, which was written and set 200 years ago.

The novel begins with John Dashwood being asked to give financial support to his widowed step-mother. He decides to make her an annual allowance. His mean and grasping wife destroys his good intentions. She observes that his stepmother is “healthy and hardly 40 … She might live 15 years!”

“Fifteen years!” he cries. She might live to 55! He decides to give her a little money now and again instead. The equivalent shock could only be achieved today by declaring she might live to be 100.

Can we introduce you to the concept of “humorous irony?” Not to mention the actual quote, in context?

“That is very true, and, therefore, I do not know whether, upon the whole, it would not be more advisable to do something for their mother while she lives, rather than for them–something of the annuity kind I mean.–My sisters would feel the good effects of it as well as herself. A hundred a year would make them all perfectly comfortable.”

His wife hesitated a little, however, in giving her consent to this plan.

“To be sure,” said she, “it is better than parting with fifteen hundred pounds at once. But, then, if Mrs. Dashwood should live fifteen years we shall be completely taken in.”

“Fifteen years! my dear Fanny; her life cannot be worth half that purchase.”

“Certainly not; but if you observe, people always live for ever when there is an annuity to be paid them; and she is very stout and healthy, and hardly forty. An annuity is a very serious business; it comes over and over every year, and there is no getting rid of it.

Brilliant black comedy, and certainly not meant as an illustration of life expectancies of Jane Austen’s time, or even of sensible and compassionate conversation.

Back to the article:

Literature shows how our perceptions of age have changed as well. We think of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya as elderly. He’s 47. In the television version of Pride and Prejudice, Lady Catherine de Bourgh was portrayed as a shrivelled husk. But Lady Catherine has a daughter of 15 and, since women married earlier in those days, Lady Catherine is probably about 35. But she seems older to us.

Daughter of 15? We think the author has confused Miss de Bourgh with Georgiana Darcy. Since Lady Catherine and Lady Anne Darcy planned the wedding of Fitzwilliam Darcy and Anne de Bourgh “from their cradles,” most likely the cousins are around the same age, their late 20s. So, figure Lady Cat is in her late 40s at least, and portraying her as 50ish is not at all out of the question. Indeed, since she only had one child, it is possible that Lady Catherine married a little later than the usual age. (We were unable to find any reference in P&P as to whether Lady Catherine or Lady Anne was the elder sister; does anyone know a reference that we missed?)

Yet another New Rule: From now on, all journalists quoting Jane Austen must take a written test to prove that they are qualified in understanding the work in question, quote from it in the proper context, and remember the picky little details (or at least bother to look them up first). Punishment for Austen Quoting Without License (AQWL) will be confinement to literary quotes only from Norman Mailer or Thomas Hardy until after remedial class and retake of licensing exam.