The Ones Without the Manners

Abstract

Abstract This chapter discusses several of Jane Austen’s Regency-era novels of manners (Sense and Sensibility [1811], Pride and Prejudice [1813], and Mansfield Park [1814]) along with three midcentury Victorian novels (Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son [1846–48], Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton [1848], and William Thackeray’s The Newcomes [1854–55]) that follow Austen’s lead in positioning their runaway women as secondary characters who are related to the female protagonist in some way, and whose scandalous subplots are (at least ostensibly) meant to show the protagonist what not to do and how not to behave. But there are also ways in which each of these texts pushes back on its own cautionary messaging, and subtly suggests that it is the Social World’s stringent set of rules and expectations, rather than the woman who runs away from them, that is the real social problem.