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The Vulgar Question of Money - Heiresses, Materialism, and the Novel of Manners from Jane Austen to Henry James (Paperback)
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The Vulgar Question of Money - Heiresses, Materialism, and the Novel of Manners from Jane Austen to Henry James (Paperback)
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It is a familiar story line in nineteenth-century English novels: a
hero must choose between money and love, between the wealthy,
materialistic, status-conscious woman who could enhance his social
position and the poorer, altruistic, independent-minded woman whom
he loves. Elsie B. Michie explains what this common marriage plot
reveals about changing reactions to money in British culture. It
was in the novel that writers found space to articulate the
anxieties surrounding money that developed along with the rise of
capitalism in nineteenth-century England. Michie focuses in
particular on the character of the wealthy heiress and how she,
unlike her male counterpart, represents the tensions in British
society between the desire for wealth and advancement and the fear
that economic development would blur the traditional boundaries of
social classes. Michie explores how novelists of the period
captured with particular vividness England's ambivalent emotional
responses to its own financial successes and engaged questions
identical to those raised by political economists and moral
philosophers. Each chapter reads a novelist alongside a
contemporary thinker, tracing the development of capitalism in
Britain: Jane Austen and Adam Smith and the rise of commercial
society, Frances Trollope and Thomas Robert Malthus and
industrialism, Anthony Trollope and Walter Bagehot and the
political influence of money, Margaret Oliphant and John Stuart
Mill and professionalism and managerial capitalism, and Henry James
and Georg Simmel and the shift of economic dominance from England
to America. Even the great romantic novels of the nineteenth
century cannot disentangle themselves from the vulgar question of
money. Michie's fresh reading of the marriage plot, and the choice
between two women at its heart, shows it to be as much about
politics and economics as it is about personal choice.
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