Pride and Prestige: Jane Austen and the Professions

Abstract

This essay focuses on Jane Austen’s portrayal of the growing prestige of the professions in her later and final novels, Mansfield Park (1814) , Emma (1816) , and Persuasion (1818). While Austen’s early novels focus on a mainly leisure class, the gentry and minor aristocracy, the later novels reflect England’s changing landscape during the early nineteenth century. The country was moving steadily then from a primarily agrarian way of life to a culture where industry and profession would assume equal if not paramount importance. Although Austen’s novels are often celebrated as portraits of a stable ordered society, each of the later works reveals, in progressive stages, the changing and increasingly significant role that the professions play. No longer simply a source of income for second sons, the professions evolve into part of the identity of professional gentlemen and, finally, in Persuasion as an entry for middle-rank professionals into gentry circles.