Alert Janeite Marion Fraley wrote to tell us about a review of several books by Sandra Tsing Loh in the July/August issue of The Atlantic Monthly that references Jane Austen, mostly Pride and Prejudice. It is available online only for subscribers, but Marion kindly sent us a fascinating excerpt.

The phrase that leaped out at me, upon reading that, was “social position.” What a stunningly unique situation modern American women are in. For perhaps the first time in the history of civilization, a woman’s social position is completely fluid, hers to somehow ferret out and determine and sustain. It’s not just that the West is unlike the East. (It’s not just that it’s unlike India, where you have an oppressive if impressively well-defined caste system, or unlike Bali, where of course so many are descended from Javanese royalty—for rapt Westerners, yet another of Bali’s intoxicating-as-a-jungle-flower features.) Think how far we’ve come, baby, from Jane Austen’s day, when women clearly understood that marriage to an alpha male was upon what their social status depended … from brilliant ascension to Mr. Darcy’s £10,000 a year at Pemberley, to the mournful poultry-tending outpost of a union with the rector Mr. Collins.

Mr. Collins, an alpha male? *falls over laughing* Mrs. Collins, who controlled her husband so brilliantly, would beg to differ. We do understand what the authoress is getting at, however.

A modern American woman’s social position is not so easy to calculate. If only it were still just about money—the old Yankee Protestant families, the polo ponies, the little dogs, the ladies’ lunches, the charity balls, the coiffed hair, the dull face.

OUCH! That’ll leave a mark.

My Los Angeles is littered with the wives of giant Hollywood Mr. Darcys who materially want for nothing, but who continue to be gnawed at by the novel that won’t get written, the environmental cause that can’t quite gain celebrity traction, the holistic fitness line that won’t sell (it’s not the money itself they need, but the prized creativity-and-success marker of the money). Nor is female professional success/independence the cure-all. I think of a novelist friend whose books unfailingly receive burnished notices in The New York Times (making her, literarily, extremely high-caste). The problem is that in person, people find her insufferable (at dinner parties she’ll drain the life out of a room with her endless pedantic monologues, much as Elizabeth Bennet’s own sister Mary would, plodding on and on with her Scotch and Irish airs). As a result, this friend can’t even find her Mr. Collins—or at least not a straight one. On the flip side, I have a vivacious writer friend who lives in a trailer in Topanga who wrote a rickety (yes, Bali-inspired) chapbook several years ago to a spray of pungently mixed reviews that ran only on the West Coast. No New York Times mention for her, not even a capsule. And yet, she’s not only an attendee but a hit—especially with flirtatious males of dubious repute, a chain of Mr. Wickhams only adding to her allure—at A-list canyon parties. In the drab wake of pretend feminism, where women share the fuzzy poncho of “sisters,” this woman has social capital—which is to say access—to burn.

Jane Austen would lie down with a headache doing this calculus, which isn’t really all about the money. It’s about the hunger for self-definition, the terror of never knowing where you stand. In lieu of Mr. Darcy (and the ladyship of Pemberley, which I believe I would have handled quite well), at least I have this: a stale, old wedding-gift Tranquility candle.

Since Jane Austen wrote the book from which Ms. Loh draws her reference, we think that the calculus would not have troubled her at all. We think she would have found these people incredibly self-absorbed and worthy of mockery in her literature. However, we enjoyed all the P&P references woven so beautifully into the article and love seeing yet more proof of the universal nature of Jane Austen’s work!