Time being what it is

[vr_trakowski]

I watched Emma Thompson's Sense and Sensibility today; I've seen it before, but not recently.  I hadn't so much as forgotten that Hugh Laurie was in it as that he simply wasn't on my radar at the time. 

It's been so long since I read the book that I don't know how accurate the movie is, but aside from completely failing to show any attraction in Marianne to Colonel Brandon, it's fun.  Though I did keep thinking that Elinor and Colonel Brandon would be a better match. 

It's sobering to reflect, though, that for women of that class there was nothing but marriage.  It's their defining thought.  I don't know enough history to know if the same was true for the other classes, but it gives me a nasty feeling.  I know I'm very lucky to live in this time, and place, where for me marriage never became more than a "maybe someday, if the opportunity arises".  It was never a necessity.  

Of course, the idea of being married to someone I do not love, or to someone who does not love me, is one of my personal nightmares.  But that's rather beside the point. 

Comments

[vr-trakowski.livejournal.com]

Yeah--I don't know much about her, but I wonder if she deliberately avoided it in the end. Was she making enough money from publishing to support herself?

[katrinb.livejournal.com]

She always deliberately avoided marriage _with someone she didn't love_. However, as a girl from a relatively poor gentry family (some of her brothers were very well off, but she and her sister Cassandra were never wealthy enough to live the standard gentry life - but because of their breeding, couldn't do anything else), she had not enough dowry for most men of her class to even consider marrying her, no matter what they felt for her. It's thought (though not known, since Cassandra burned the crucial letters) that she may have been in love in her youth, but the man's family separated them because of her lack of money.
She was proposed to late in her life (she wasn't old, mind, just in her thirties - she died in her early forties) by a relatively wealthy male friend whom she liked but didn't love, accepted him in the evening, but had rethought it in the morning and turned him down gently.

[vr-trakowski.livejournal.com]

Brave woman. I figure she'd be both amused and appalled to see what's been made of her writing since then.