Except for the heroines mothers we are not actually told the ages of any of the 'older women' in the early novels of Jane Austen. The mothers are all rising forty-something. Mrs Jennings in Sense and Sensibility is described as elderly but has two daughters in their twenties.
If we rely only on Pride and Prejudice we might come to the conclusion that Jane Austen, not altogether unusually for a young woman, had little time or sympathy for the older woman.
Mrs Bennet, Mrs Phillips, Lady Lucas and Lady Catherine are far from sympathetic characters and are very unsympathetically treated. Of course Jane Austen was only 20 when she began this novel, not far from the age at which the young generally consider the middle-aged to be an embarrassment.
I shall consider the heroines mother first. In this I am following Jane Austens example since in all three novels the mother is introduced on page 1 and in two of them mother is introduced before daughter. And when we consider all three mothers we see that Jane Austen does not always have such an unforgiving view of the older woman as appears from Pride and Prejudice alone.
The business of MRS BENNETs life was to get her five daughters married; and since their social circle in a small country town was limited, and there was real necessity to marry off her daughters because of the entail on their fathers estate, we might start with some sympathy for her.
Such sympathy is however difficult to maintain in light of her continuing vulgar and insensitive behaviour and of the authors refusal to give her sympathetic treatment.
She is quite mercilessly shown as too self-absorbed to realise when her long-suffering but ineffectual husband of twenty-three years is teasing her; too vain and shallow to grow old gracefully and protect her youngest daughters from chasing injudiciously after the officers, (whose scarlet coats she still dreams she is herself young and pretty enough to chase and be chased by); too mean spirited not to wish a patently unpleasant husband on to her least favourite daughter; and too stupid to realise that her transparent plots to throw her eldest daughter at the eligible Mr Bingley could backfire and even endanger her daughters health.
Even her failure to conceive again after the birth of a fifth daughter is treated almost as proof of silliness.
In short "a woman of mean understanding, little information and uncertain temper". Not even the achievement of two good marriages for her eldest daughters could "make her sensible, amiable, well-informed .. for the rest of her life .... she was still occasionally nervous and invariably silly"
In contrast the second MRS HENRY DASHWOOD was the good hearted mother of three cheerful daughters who was much loved by her husband; she coped with fortitude with his relatively early death and her unexpectedly reduced circumstances, albeit that her fortitude was sustained by a certain romanticism and an unrealistic attitude to the need for economy.
She was moreover, unlike Mrs Bennet, open to advice from cooler more sensible heads such as that of her eldest daughter, and was thus restrained from an impetuous break with her stepson. Jane Austen also treats Mrs Dashwood with more generosity than Mrs Bennet, in allowing that it is not too late for her to learn how to govern her strong feelings. In the meantime she, like her middle daughter Marianne, is "everything but prudent."
Nor does she escape the authors censure when she is careless over Marianne and Willoughby's behaviour and reluctant to tackle them about it; "common sense, common care, common prudence were all sunk in Mrs Dashwoods romantic delicacy."
In the end Mrs Dashwood does recognise that her own poor judgement had helped endanger her daughter's life, spends her time after Elinor's marriage "acting on motives of policy as well as pleasure" to bring Marianne and Colonel Brandon together and ultimately is prudent enough, when her aim is achieved, to stay at the cottage rather than move to Delaford, thus staying tactfully out of her daughters married lives
MRS MORLAND, mother of ten, wife of a comfortable but by no means rich west country parson was a woman of "useful plain sense, with a good temper and ..... a good constitution."
She has an intensely practical turn of mind and either ignores or is unaware of her 17 year old daughters romantic longings and imaginings. This causes her to issue only mundane warnings about wrapping up, keeping warm and keeping accounts when her daughter embarks on her first independent adventure in the dangerous waters of Bath.
She is equally calm and down to earth when Catherine returns so ignominiously from Northanger Abbey:
I am glad I did not know of your journey at the time; but now it is all over perhaps there is no great harm done. it is always good for young people to be put upon exerting themselves; and you know, my dear Catherine, you always were a sad little shatter-brained creature; but now you must have been forced to have your wits about you, with so much changing of chaises and so forth; and I hope it will appear that you have not left anything behind you in any of the pockets
Nevertheless she, like all three mothers, does seem a little too careless about her daughters love life, given the age they lived in. And her husband was equally careless. "They never once thought of her heart, which, for the parents of a young lady of seventeen, just returned from her first excursion from home, was odd enough! "
This treatment of the Morlands as quite naturally a team in the upbringing of their children is typical of them. We are not told whether Mr Morland, like Mr Bennet had married slightly beneath him, for we are told nothing of Mrs Morlands background and fortune, but their family life is certainly a contrast to the Bennets.
We get to see other mothers coping with unmarried daughters in LADY LUCAS AND MRS THORPE. Both are sharply, even unkindly, portrayed by the author.
LADY LUCAS is "a very good kind of woman, not too clever to be a valuable neighbour to Mrs Bennet"; a bit lackadaisical but sharp enough "to calculate with more interest than the matter had ever excited before how many years longer Mr Bennet was likely to live" once her daughter married Mr Collins; and who "could not be insensible of triumph on being able to retort on Mrs Bennet the comfort of having a daughter well-married; and she called at Longbourn rather oftener than usual to say how happy she was, though Mrs Bennet’s sour looks and ill-natured remarks might have been enough to drive happiness away".
We hear very little more of Lady Lucas; she does not accompany her husband and second daughter on their visit to the Collinses (perhaps because she had to stay at home to look after an unspecified number of smaller children) but she does take the earliest opportunity to enquire "across the table after the welfare and poultry of her eldest daughter”. Mrs Bennet also refers to Lady Lucas' sharp household management, reflecting her struggle with a reduced income after her husband so rashly retired on his receipt of a knighthood
MRS THORPE is a lawyer's widow who has 3 sons and 3 daughters to settle in life and no great fortune. We are told that she is gossipy but does not listen to her friend Mrs Allen's gossip in return, that she is over-indulgent as a mother and lacks the clear eye to see her children’s shortcomings. However she disappears abruptly in the middle of the novel so we never get to hear how she copes with the disappointment of her son's failure to get engaged to Catherine Morland or her eldest daughter’s loss of two eligible suitors
LADY CATHERINE DE BOURGH is another mother with a daughter to get off her hands. She is also much the grandest older woman we meet in these early novels - daughter of an earl, widow of Sir Lewis de Bourgh, sister of the late Lady Anne Darcy and in possession of some fortune.
None of this is enough to keep her from being totally unhinged.
In the earlier chapters this derangement is partly hidden by Mr Collins obsequiousness towards his patron. All is revealed however when Lady Catherine descends on the Bennets to confront Elizabeth and order her to deny a non-existent engagement to Darcy while asserting his equally non-existent engagement to her daughter.
I can only assume that this derangement is caused by sadness at not having more children and anxiety about who but a cousin would marry and be kind to her sickly daughter.
That a reconciliation with Darcy is eventually arranged "by Elizabeth’s persuasion” shows that this 20-year old heroine of a 20-year old authoress is just too good to be true.
MRS FERRARS was another mother who held the purse strings. She was the widow of a man who died very rich, and had already seen her only daughter married to a man (John Dashwood) who was at least very comfortably off. She was equally concerned that her two sons should marry wives of suitable fortune and was also ambitious for them to achieve worldly success, preferably in politics.
She too is described with sarcasm and without any generosity as "a little thin woman upright, even to formality, in her figure and serious, even to sourness, in her aspect. Her complexion was sallow: and her features small, without beauty, and naturally, without expression: but a lucky contraction of the brow had rescued her countenance from the disgrace of insipidity, by giving it the strong characters of pride and ill-nature."
As usual our heroine can discern no redeeming features in this ogress but all ends happily when Mrs Ferrars comes to love Lucy as a favourite child and her son Robert is restored to her favour.
MRS JENNINGS is a wealthy widow, a mother who has safely married off her two daughters and is free to take a kindly interest in other girls.
"A good humoured, merry, fat, elderly woman who talked a great deal, seemed happy and rather vulgar", her humour on the subject of lovers and husbands was not always appreciated by shy young things such as Marianne Dashwood. She is garrulous and prone to repeat herself - within weeks of their acquaintance she had "repeated her own history to Elinor two or three times." She is also nosey and not ashamed to pry, despite the remonstrances of her daughter, Lady Middleton
Overall however her portrayal is affectionate. She is very generous as well as aware of her faults - she invites both Dashwood girls to London so that they can laugh at her odd ways together. There is more than an element of snobbishness in the attitude of Elinor and others to her humble origins as the wife of a man in trade.
Generous to the end, almost the last we hear of her is when she gives the ruthlessly abandoned Nancy Steel 5 guineas when, following her sisters marriage to Robert Ferrars, Nancy is left with no money to get back to Devon
MRS ALLEN is the only older woman in these novels whose shortcomings cannot in part be attributed to the strains of bringing up a family, because she has none.
Lack of maternal shortcomings however does not save her from the author's barbed pen. She is "one of those numerous class of females whose society can raise no other emotion than surprise at there being any men in the world who could like them well enough to marry them. She had neither beauty, genius, accomplishment nor manner"
She is, of course, gossipy, though in what she and Mrs Thorpe called conversation there was "scarcely ever any exchange of opinion and not often any resemblance of subject for Mrs Thorpe talked chiefly of her children and Mrs Allen of her gowns" She is also generous in a way which other characters do not always appreciate, not only taking Catherine to Bath but always ready at home to receive her when she needs an escape from her numerous siblings.
As I've said before, I do detect in all this something of the young woman – you would never mistake it for something written by Beryl Bainbridge
Jane Austen had such a notably sharp pen that I suspect that looking at other categories, such as younger men, would find similar kind of treatment
It is instructive that we are not generally shown these women having any kind of hobby or occupation that really absorbs them. Even Lady Catherines voluntary work in sorting out the problems that the villagers have is treated with great derision as being nosiness
