Marriage, Credit, and a Woman’s Education

Abstract

Traditional marriage practices, following Anglican canon law, were codified in Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1753, which was presumed to prevent so-called clandestine marriages and to protect the estates of the landed gentry. The social pressures and practices that prescribed, as well as those that resulted from, the marriage act and the marriage market are reflected in much of the fiction of the period, including Daniel Defoe’s Roxana, Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple, Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall, and Frances Burney’s Cecilia. These fictional works reveal a progression in thought about credit and a woman’s place in the market economy. Jane Austen’s novels would eventually extend and complicate this discussion about the importance of a woman’s credit in setting her value on the marriage market. Other writing of the period also addresses how women’s education and behavior helps to determine a woman’s intrinsic and expressed value. Assumptions about education and behavior in Jane Austen’s novels were likely informed by conduct tracts written by Mary Wollstonecraft, John Gregory, James Fordyce, Hannah More, and Hester Chapone. As revealed in the novels of credit and various treatises on women’s education, a woman’s value was largely determined by her behavior. Even if she had high expressed value, her credit might be damaged with transgressive or even immoral behavior.