This section can be regarded as a followup to the treatment of women and matrimony during the Regency period, as in many ways, it is the most direct and conflicting discrimination against women in the novel. I’d like to stress the importance of the entailment to the novel by creating a separate page for it. The foundations of the novel, the arrival of Mr. Collins and Mrs. Bennet’s desperation to marry off her daughters, all relate back to the entailment. The entialment thus “serves as a principal motif in Pride and Prejudice" and "the problems it creates for the family are the center of the action” (Apple 611). It is an unfortunate event that luckily for the Bennet family, has a somewhat happy conclusion.

​

​

​

The problem begins with Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, who were hardly concerned with the entailment during the first years of their marriage:

When first Mr. Bennet had married, economy was held to be perfectly useless, for, of course, they were to have a son. The son was to join in cutting off the entail, as soon as he should be of age, and the widow and younger children would by that means be provided for. Five daughters successively entered the world, but yet the son was to come; and Mrs. Bennet, for many years after Lydia's birth, had been certain that he would. This event had at last been despaired of, but it was then too late to be saving. Mrs. Bennet had no turn for economy, and her husband's love of independence had alone prevented their exceeding their income. (Austen 146)

Sadly, however, they do not. In the Regency “it was a tradition that men inherited all fortune” (Gao 385), and thus the five daughters the Bennet marriage produced are not eligible to own the house after Mr. Bennet’s passing. For a family such as the Bennets and the Austens during the Regency, all hopes depended on “the male whom all await can alone bring substance, by inheriting the estate, he will ensure the family the solidity and continuity of income and land” (Morrison 82). The Bennets’s next heir is someone the family has never even met before; Mr. Collins. It is a sad truth that “the inevitable result of an entail in a household more blessed with daughters than frugality is, at best, a limited choice of suitors; at worst, the Bennet’s shortage of money for dowries and their equivocal social position foretell spinsterhood, dependence on a generous relative, or, most ominous of all, work as a governess or lady’s companion. (Clark 105). As we discussed in the section about social class, “Austen never lets the reader or Elizabeth forget how very likely such a future is” (Clark 105).

There’s another pitiful aspect of the entailment that sympathizes with the helpless Mr. Bennet:

The entailment of Longbourn also provides insight into the character of Mr. Bennet and his ability to provide for his family. The entailment damns the family of females to a future of poverty and displacement, a seeming triumph of the law of property over Austen's notions of justice and common sense. Readers often look at the hapless Mr. Bennet with a bit of pity, since it appears that the entail ties his hands and that he can do nothing to help his daughters. (Apple 612)

While we hardly witness a sense of regret for this entailment by Mr. Bennet, his love for Elizabeth particularly persuades the reader to sympathize with his situation. He is incapable of changing the facts of the law, or to leave any source of comfort for his wife and children after his passing. This leaves Elizabeth in a helpless situation more than any other of the Bennet daughters, since she is proposed to by the man who is to inherit their estate. It limits her choices, she “has no decent fortune whatsoever. She must marry; she must marry with an eye to money; and the reason she must marry is that the family inheritance has been settled on a male” (Clark 119). The discrimination against women is evident here, as it was throughout the period.

 

Austen was no strange to the matter of entailment; her own family had one. Upon George Austen’s passing, Jane, Cassandra, and their mother were fully dependent on the Austen male heirs (Kelly 17). This will never cease to strike a modern audience as unfair, but it was a common thing to happen in the Regency period. Consequently, “the greatest disturbances in this community are caused by the sheer number of marriageable women eyeing for the hands of the very few men available”, since they all fought to escape poorer alternatives (Shneider). Marriage, becomes the ultimate savior in such situations. This makes Mrs. Bennet’s obsession with matrimony almost understandable, and sets the entire plot of the novel in motion. We are always reminded of the entailment, and the difficulties the Bennet family faces for having only daughters, charming as  (some) of them are.