We’ve all heard the objections. Elizabeth Bennet, twenty years old, meets and marries a men who is twenty eight. At seventeen Catherine Moreland marries Henry Tilney, who is nine years older. Mr. Knightley is sixteen years older than Emma Woodhouse. And Marianne Dashwood, just sixteen years old, marries a man who is more than twice her age.
Given modern feelings about power dynamics and parity in romantic relationships, it’s no surprise when today’s readers encounter these age differences and say a loud, “Ick!”
Our modern society puts a lot of stigma and suspicion on older men who marry much younger women, and there are reasons for that. It’s easy for an experienced older man to take advantage of younger, naïve women.
But I don’t think it’s fair to impose our 21st century values onto the regency era. Here are multiple reasons why you should not feel compelled to say “Ick!” when considering some of these relationships.
• In regency times men had to support their wives; that was a fact of life. And to do that, they needed an income. To have an income they had to either inherit wealth (maybe even wait for their own father to pass) or else work their way up in their chosen profession. If they could not support a wife and possible children then they had to wait to be ready to marry. In Mansfield Park, Edmund Bertram has to be twenty four years old before he is allowed to take up a living in the church and be able to support a family.
• Societal roles. We don’t like to think about it today, but since men had to support the family they were expected to be the ones who were experienced in the ways of the world. It was all right for a young woman like Catherine Morland to be a little naïve about things outside her own experiences, but it would have been a real problem for the primary breadwinner in her family to be so innocent.
• Primogeniture. See the note about income above. In landed families only the oldest son could inherit the bulk of the estate, so the younger sons had to find another way to support themselves and any eventual family. This might take years.
• War. The Napoleonic wars happened during the regency, so many second born sons of upper class families went into the military in hopes of winning a fortune. Being stationed overseas made it hard for them to meet English women, so many of them waited until they went back to England, fortune in hand, before marrying and starting a family. (Think of Anne Elliott and Captain Wentworth.)
• Childbirth A shocking number of women in regency England died as a result of pregnancy or childbirth, which meant that there were a fair number of widowed men who needed wives, some of them with children to raise. For the same reason, a woman might wish to marry and complete her family while she was still relatively young and healthy.
For all these reasons, the normal pattern was for younger women to marry men who were at least a few years older than them. Regency era women generally preferred to marry someone close to their own age, just as we tend to do today, but they were also realistic. They knew that men with eligible incomes were in short supply, especially if they themselves had nothing but their charms to recommend them. A woman approaching her thirties, still single and a burden on her family, might therefore welcome the chance to be the second wife of a man twenty years her senior, especially if he was gentle and kind and had a large income. And yes, she might even fall in love with him. 🙂
What do you think? Could you ever picture yourself in a relationship with a much older (or younger) person? Do you think we are or fair or unfair to judge society in the 1800’s by the standards we hold today? Please let me know in your comments below!
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