Jane Austen is having a moment. Another one. With the theatrical re-release of Joe Wright’s 2005 film adaptation of Pride & Prejudice with Keira Knightley, and the forthcoming eponymous Netflix series in which Emma Corrin will play Elizabeth Bennet, it seems like Austen is everywhere—but maybe that’s just the Instagram algorithm picking up on my personal obsession.
I’m having a moment with Jane Austen, too. Another one.
When I began reading Austen’s novels as a teenager, it was the heroines who seemed like the cool older girls at school that drew me to them. That and the romance. The love stories seemed so fated. Satisfying in their inevitability, no twist or impediment was too much to prevent the heroine from marrying her man.
All six of her novels reliably ended in marriage, and that’s something that my culture, growing up Christian in rural Georgia, agreed was the goal. What’s more, each heroine seemed to grow on her journey to love. She seemed to mature and blossom with self-awareness as her interactions with her love interests—even the ones who turned out to be cads and false ends, like Wickham—made her feel more deeply and think more expansively. Moving toward marriage brought these women into greater harmony with themselves.
Perhaps that’s part of the soup of cultural messaging that led me to get engaged at 21 and married at 22. My ex-husband-to-be and I first exchanged “I love yous” the summer after my junior year, when I stayed on campus at my small liberal arts college to complete a fellowship I’d been granted for a research project. I was tracking the concept of “bloom” in Austen’s novels. She used this term to describe the limited period of time in which each of her heroines was at the peak of her loveliness and liveliness, irresistible to those around them—including the man each would come to marry.
My then-boyfriend and I would go on walking dates around campus after I finished long, blissful days reading and writing in the library. I couldn’t believe my good fortune that I was being paid to read and think about my favorite novels, while I was having a romance of my own. It seemed like it was supposed to mean something. He proposed a few months later. I said, “Of course.”
“A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages…”Now, going through a divorce at 33, it isn’t the accepted proposals that I notice when I re-read Austen’s novels; it’s the refusals. When women say “no” to marriage, even when society pressures them to say yes. (Granted, they do always, eventually, say yes.)
And instead of “bloom,” what I notice now when I read Austen is that her characters are obsessed with what it means for a young woman to be “accomplished” or, in other words, marriageable.
In a famous scene from Pride & Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet and her frenemy Caroline Bingley take a turn around the room while they and the men—Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy—extol the virtues of an accomplished woman. From this scene, something of a checklist emerges.
Bingley pronounces that he considers all young ladies he meets to be very accomplished because “They all paint tables, cover skreens [sic] and net purses.”
Darcy and Caroline disagree; there’s more to it. Caroline elaborates: “A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all of this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions.”
Darcy adds that she must also endeavor to improve her mind through “extensive reading” and that on top of everything, she mustn’t seem to try to be impressive. That, he says, is “despicable.”
In other words, a lady must have a long list of skills and qualities to be considered accomplished—but she must also make it look effortless and nonchalant.
The Regency Era woman had to check a lot of boxes to secure an advantageous marriage. (If she didn’t come with a dowry large enough that it didn’t matter, that is.) And securing the match via an engagement is in fact where every Austen novel ends. We don’t even get descriptions of the weddings, other than in Emma (1815).
When I re-read Austen’s novels now, as I do every year or two, I wonder: how might Austen define the accomplished woman today? What would the checklist look like, and what would even be the point, since marriage is no longer the prize for women that it used to be?
Curtis Sittenfeld took a crack at this in Eligible, her 2016 contemporary reimagining of Pride & Prejudice, the title of which is practically a synonym for “accomplished.” Liz Bennet is a successful journalist living in New York City with her older sister Jane, a yoga instructor. Liz is self-sufficient, if not wealthy, while Jane depends on friends and family to support her (something everyone seems happy to do, since she’s so beautiful and sweet). Liz is 38, and Jane turns 40 in the novel. Both are single.
Curtis Sittenfeld’s Liz Bennet is kind of the total package: fancy degree, good job, financially stable and responsible, attractive, fit, funny, productive.The second-oldest Bennet daughter is supremely competent, we learn. When their father’s health begins to suffer, Liz and Jane return home to Cincinnati, Ohio, to find that not only is he incapable of following instructions from his doctor, he and their mother have also descended into debt and are unable to afford the large home that they live in.
Liz takes it upon herself to sort out the tricky mess for them. She cooks healthy meals, tries to solve her mother’s hoarding problem, acts as life coach to her indolent younger sisters, gets the house ready to sell and finds her parents a nice condo to downsize into, all while filing her stories for her job on time, interviewing a feminist icon, going for daily runs, making new friends, and even having steamy sex with one Fitzwilliam Darcy. (Because in this version of Pride & Prejudice, we’re sexually liberated.)
Sittenfeld’s Liz Bennet is kind of the total package: fancy degree, good job, financially stable and responsible, attractive, fit, funny, productive. And still, until she meets Darcy, the best relationship she can find is an unsatisfying situationship with her best friend, Jasper Wick. He’s in an open marriage, allegedly, with the mother of his young child.
While Liz has a long list of accomplishments, it seems that part of her appeal—and ultimately her success in securing Darcy’s affection and hand in marriage (because of course)—is that she’s perfectly fine on her own. She takes care of herself and everyone around her, and makes it look easy. Though her on-again, off-again thing with Jasper does cause her some distress, Liz seems largely unconcerned about aging, fertility, or marriage. She marries Darcy entirely for love, and love only. The same is true, more or less, for Jane. She’s already pregnant via artificial insemination with anonymous donor sperm when she meets Bingley and falls in love.
Eligible suggests that nowadays, an accomplished woman is a woman who doesn’t need marriage and is happy on her own without it. Ironically, this, according to countless Instagram dating coaches, is the only way to attract a true match. Self-satisfaction is the new checklist.
But is that true on the other side of a marriage? If marriage is the ultimate accomplishment, or if your accomplishments all amount to marriageability, what does that mean for you if your marriage ends?
Recently, I’ve pondered these questions via a string of movies featuring passionate relationships between older women and younger men. In The Idea of You (2024), Babygirl (2024), and Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (2025), desirability is divorced from eligibility for marriage. The women in their forties and fifties who lead these films are highly accomplished in the modern sense: they have great careers, plenty of money, and, already, children. They are either married, divorced, or widowed when they meet the twenty-something men they fall for. The age gap seems to be what attracts these younger men to them, yet it is also the thing that prevents real, lasting relationships from forming—the kind that might end in marriage.
“Sexting a man that you just met in a park is nothing like Jane Austen’s day.”The original Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), adapted from Helen Fielding’s novel, also imagines a modern-day Pride & Prejudice, 25 years before Eligible is set. The fourth installment, Mad About the Boy, asks: but what happens to our heroine when Darcy dies?
The movie questions marriage as the ultimate accomplishment by probing life for the heroine post-marriage to her dream guy. If marriage is the ultimate accomplishment, and you’ve already accomplished it, and then it comes to an end, then what? If you don’t need marriage for children or for money, then what do you need it for?
Love seems to be the only answer. And yet, Mad About the Boy says, love also isn’t enough. It isn’t enough to keep Darcy alive, and it isn’t enough to overcome the age gap in our heroine’s next romance.
Bridget (Renee Zellweger)—our Elizabeth Bennet character—is grieving and lonely after her husband Mark Darcy is tragically killed while doing humanitarian work in Sudan. After four years of grieving, she begins to pick up the pieces of herself by going back to work and, at the urging of her friends, getting on Tinder. After matching with Roxster (Leo Woodall), a hot 29-year-old she’d already had a meet-cute with IRL, Bridget experiences the joy of flirty texting and worries aloud to her friends that actually dating him will ruin this. “I mean, maybe it’s like in Jane Austen’s day, when they did letter writing for months and months and then suddenly just got married.”
“Bridget,” one replies, “sexting a man that you just met in a park is nothing like Jane Austen’s day.”
Obviously, she’s right. Yet Bridget is also on to something that the real thing might not quite live up to the fantasy. After marrying her dream guy and then losing him, Bridget is a bit more pragmatic than she was back in 2001.
She does finally agree to meet up, despite her concerns about their age gap. On their first date, Roxster tells her, “I think older women… have a wiser view on life. You know, they’re more experienced and more emotionally mature. I find that very attractive.”
Attractive, but ultimately ineligible. After a months-long relationship, Roxster ghosts Bridget. She sits at her kitchen table one night, after texting him for weeks with no response, and drinks herself silly while resolving, finally, not to text him again. Erasure’s “A Little Respect” is the soundtrack for this scene.
He comes back, eventually, apologizing for “panicking,” for thinking he wanted “someone his own age.” He’s realized that was all wrong, and he’s ready for Bridget, ready to be a dad to her kids, ready for it all. Bridget, however, isn’t. She’s wiser than she used to be, and she also has more self-respect. She doesn’t need him for validation, or for company. She has her other accomplishments to occupy her: her career as a tv producer, her children, and her friendships (which incidentally preceded and have outlasted her marriage to Darcy).
Bridget, though sad, emerges from this relationship more or less unscathed, and indeed primed for a suitable relationship with someone in her age bracket: Mr. Walliker, her son’s schoolteacher.
From Pride & Prejudice to Eligible to Mad About the Boy, a few truths emerge universally. To be successful in love, not just in marriage, one must be willing to say “no” to the wrong relationship. One must be willing to choose one’s own company over the company of someone who isn’t right. And, finally, compatibility is important. Wanting the same things, being in the same stage of life, and being aligned on your values—these are the unsexy things that make a loving relationship a lasting one.
In this way, Austen’s heroines, and her novels, were forward-thinking. Elizabeth Bennet, Anne Elliott, Fanny Price, these older girls I wanted to be like in high school, they all turned down men who they believed were not right for them, who they either did not love, did not respect, or did not consider compatible. They read books not because doing so would make them more accomplished, but because they wanted to. They were devoted sisters and friends and aunts, and endeavored to live life as fully as possible within the constraints of their situations, before they ever became engaged—without a strong expectation of ever doing so. And they held out for the type of match that felt right to them.
That’s what I missed when I read these novels as a younger woman. I saw the inevitability of their marriages, how those “yeses” tied up their futures with a tidy bow. Now, I see young women who hold to their guns, who resist pressure from their peers, families, and society to marry the wrong person, even knowing what a difficult life they will have if they never get married.
When my marriage ended, I thought my relationship with Austen might have to end, too.
Divorced and childless in my thirties, I would be a pariah in Regency England. An old spinster, and worse, a scandalous one. Someone to be pitied, feared, avoided, and judged. A failure of the highest order. Jane Austen’s cast of characters would not love me. Could I still love them?
The answer, for me, is unequivocally yes.
And Jane Austen herself, I like to think, wouldn’t shun me in a ballroom, or spurn my calling card. I bet she’d return the visit, and maybe make a quip or two about my light-filled apartment, my color-coded bookshelf, and the daily cappuccino I make with the espresso machine I bought with the money I’ve earned teaching people how to write. And if I succumbed to the temptation to tell her about my own missteps, I rather think she’d tell me to “quit such odious subjects,” as she begins the last chapter of Mansfield Park, and get on with the business of enjoying—and maybe writing about—my life.
