After reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time some 25 years ago, I began to wonder about the novel’s heiress, Miss Anne de Bourgh. Was Anne’s character and situation based on a real person? Had Jane Austen become acquainted with an heiress, perhaps during visits to her brother’s estate, Godmersham, in Kent? Did Austen resent the wealth and ease enjoyed by a young lady of property?
Answers to these questions may always elude us, since Austen’s dear sister, Cassandra, burned many of Jane’s letters a few years before she herself died, but Austen would be only human if she resented the fortune that befell a true heiress. Writing to Cassandra from her home in Steventon in December of 1798, she said: 1 “People get so horridly poor & economical in this part of the world that I have no patience with them.—Kent is the only place for happiness, Everybody is rich there …” Like many unmarried ladies with no fortune in the early 19th century, Jane and Cassandra endured perpetual financial insecurity and all its challenges after their father died. The kindness of family supplied a roof over their heads and bread on their table.
The “true heiress” lived a very different life from that of the Austen sisters. The true heiress inherited real property—that is, land, buildings, canals, forests, dams and the like. [See Eileen Spring’s paper on the heiress-at-law or her book Law, Land & Family: Aristocratic Inheritance in England, 1300-1600.] According to Spring, no property law was more important that the right to inherit a landed estate. Unfortunately, few daughters who were entitled to inherit landed estates actually did so. By the time of Jane Austen, the aristocracy had whittled down women’s right to inherit real property. It wasn’t always so.
One legacy of the Norman Conquest of England in the 11th century was the common law, under which land descended to the eldest son. If a family had no son, land descended to daughters. In other words, the common law recognized the eldest son over younger sons and any daughters, but it chose daughters over the “collateral male.” That is, if a family had only a daughter, she was the preferred inheritor over a nephew, younger brother or male cousin. If there was more than one daughter, all inherited equally. (Had common law principles been in full force at Longbourn, all of the Bennet daughters in Pride and Prejudice stood to inherit their father’s estate on his death.)
Over the next 800 years, however, a woman’s right to inherit land eroded steadily, such that by Jane Austen’s time few women were true heiresses. Where about 20% to 25% of daughters would be expected to inherit under the common law, only about 5% to 8% of daughters living in the counties of Hertfordshire, Northamptonshire and Northumberland between 1540 and 1880 actually inherited landed estates (see Lawrence and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone’s book An Open Elite? England 1540-1880, Table 4.2). According to Susan Staves, author of Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660-1833 (p. 226), women were seen as lacking “the rationality for the active management of property.”
Not until 1870 did Parliament begin dismantling the barriers to women’s inheriting real property, when it gave women the right to hold onto any wages and property which were earned through their own effort. The last pin fell in 1925 when women gained full property rights.
1 Jane Austen: Selected Letters. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, letter 10 (14), pp. 20-21.