INTRODUCTION
“The rich are different from you and me.”
“Yes, they have more money.”
Apocryphal conversation between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway
IN FICTION, IN general, the heiress does not have a very good time of it.
Take, for instance, the pallid little figure of Anne de Bourgh in Jane Austen’s 1813 novel, Pride and Prejudice. Anne is the only child of the widowed Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and as such will inherit the superb estate of Rosings Park. Meanwhile the Bennet girls at the center of the novel—Jane, Elizabeth, Kitty, Mary, and Lydia—are hamstrung by genteel poverty because their family estate, worth £2,000 a year, can only be passed on to a male heir. Lady Catherine states that she can see “no occasion for entailing estates away from the female line”; which might be seen as admirable proto-feminism, were it not for the arrogance of the speaker. From her, it sounds like mere self-validation and—strikingly—like a put-down of the novel’s heroine, Elizabeth Bennet.
For Lady Catherine is threatened by Elizabeth. Why should she be? Anne is an heiress: supremely marriageable, in an age when marriage was seen as a woman’s natural destiny. By rights she is the greatest prize among the group of young women—the Bennet girls, Caroline Bingley, Charlotte Lucas—who fight to succeed in this polite and unyielding arena.
Yet Anne is the most insignificant of them all. Described as “pale and sickly,” she sits near-silent at the Rosings dinner table and is glimpsed like a ghost inside her carriage. There is no sense that her fortune makes her happy or blessed; in fact there is scarcely any sense of her at all.
By contrast, Elizabeth blooms. Her personality is the life force of the novel. She is physically at ease with herself, and her sense of humor—“I dearly love a laugh”—is delicately anarchic. Most importantly, she has a sense of self-worth that no insult or reversal can touch. This worries Lady Catherine, for it suggests that her own scale of values is not the only one in town. Here is a girl without fortune, an anti-heiress as one might say, who simply refuses to countenance the idea that she should feel inferior on that account. Instead, and without in the least meaning to do so, Elizabeth suggests through her artless confidence that Anne de Bourgh is her inferior.
And indeed, when it comes to marriage—the means by which a young woman proved her worth—Elizabeth does triumph; thereby more than justifying Lady Catherine’s unease. The intention had been that Anne de Bourgh should marry her cousin, Darcy, whose Pemberley home is on the splendor level of Rosings. A union of two estates, therefore, rather than two individuals; wealth calling to wealth, as was perfectly normal practice. Elizabeth, however, is the rogue factor. Like Lady Catherine, Darcy feels threatened by her (who is this girl?) but he is also beguiled. His aunt, meanwhile, has forgotten that a man as rich as Darcy can marry whomsoever he chooses, and has absolutely no need of an heiress as terminally insipid as Anne.
For all its reputation as a love story, Pride and Prejudice is really a novel about money. Those who have it—Anne, Darcy, his sister Georgiana, his friend Bingley—are set against those who do not; the haves represent a winning post that the have-nots seek to reach. For example Darcy’s friend Colonel Fitzwilliam, well born but without fortune, is attracted to Elizabeth but says to her: “Younger sons cannot marry where they like,” to which she blithely replies: “Unless where they like women of fortune, which I think they very often do.” That is a tease, but it is also the truth: Fitzwilliam is on the hunt, and his quarry cannot be Elizabeth.
As a man of honor he will not behave like the amoral Mr. Wickham, who attempts a shortcut—one extremely familiar in Austen’s time—by plotting to elope with Georgiana Darcy. Meanwhile, Charlotte Lucas shackles herself to the barely tolerable Mr. Collins, which to her friend Elizabeth is scarcely less shocking. But Charlotte accepts that marriage is a “preservative from want,” and in doing so shows better sense than Elizabeth, who turns Mr. Collins down; a dangerous thing for a poor girl to do. Collins makes a very fair point when he says: “Your portion is unhappily so small that it will in all likelihood undo the effects of your loveliness and amiable qualifications.”
What stops his words from coming true is the fairy tale element of Pride and Prejudice; the fact that, in the end, romance conquers the finance-based narrative, Darcy decides that it is the poor girl or nobody, and Cinderella goes to a lifetime of Pemberley balls. Anne de Bourgh—briefly presented as Darcy’s natural mate—disappears almost completely from the reader’s consciousness to be remembered, just, as an etiolated presence trapped in a drawing room dominated by her appalling mother.
Her fate beyond the book is hard to imagine. Health permitting, she would probably have been married off, to a husband of whom her mother approved; as an heiress, she would not have lacked suitors. Yet precisely because she is an heiress—pure and simple—it is impossible to think that she would have been wanted for any other reason. Poor, pale, undersized Anne de Bourgh: she seems weighed down by her inheritance, well-nigh obliterated by it. No clearer contrast is possible with Elizabeth Bennet, who represents freedom in a way that is somehow connected to her lack of money.
Elizabeth is loved not for what she has, but for what she is; she is loved, as the phrase has it, for herself. No wonder Pride and Prejudice has become so popular among the “you’re worth it” generation. Indeed the lengths to which the wildly eligible Darcy goes to win Elizabeth—paying off and putting up with her embarrassing relations, proposing for a second time despite a rejection that he can scarcely credit—have an outlandishness worthy of Richard Curtis. Austen’s great literary gift solidifies the happy ever after, makes clear that it is also the culmination of a series of moral choices. Nevertheless I never read the book without thinking: my God, Elizabeth, would you have gotten this lucky in real life?
* * *
In fiction, however, the penniless heroine—which means all of Jane Austen’s protagonists except Emma Wodehouse, who has £30,000—is allowed to be in a fair fight with the heiress, her implicit enemy. She is given qualities that the heiress lacks because, in fiction, fortune alone cannot be allowed to carry the day. If it does, as when Marianne Dashwood loses her beloved Willoughby to a rich girl in Sense and Sensibility, this proves to be a blessing in disguise: Willoughby was not worth having.
Furthermore, as Austen makes clear, had Willoughby not been financially “all to pieces” he would have chosen Marianne every time. The woman whom he does marry—Sophia Grey, possessor of the enormous sum of £50,000—is again a cipher, but a still more unappealing one than Anne de Bourgh. The reader is told that she is “not handsome,” that she is “jealous as the devil.” Unlike lovely passionate Marianne, she has nothing to offer beyond the fact that she is an heiress; therefore, any victory that she scores is a hollow one.
But let us turn the tale around, and imagine—say—a novel entitled Sophia, or Avarice and Advantage, in which events are seen through the eyes of Miss Grey. Would her jealousy not seem reasonable, pitiable even, given that she knows all too well that it is only her money that keeps Willoughby by her side? And would she not, like the impoverished heroine, become a sympathetic figure? She would, of course. Such is the nature of narratives.
And yet, even when the story is told from the heiress’s point of view, still it seems to be weighted against her. Her inheritance is her fate and, as in the old Muslim proverb, she wears it around her neck like a collar and chain (albeit one deliciously bejeweled). She suffers, and she suffers, and then she suffers some more. Unlike the bright-spirited poor girl, she is permitted no true transformative freedom, nor indeed much happiness.
Take Catherine Sloper, for instance, in Henry James’s 1880 novella Washington Square (or, as it was bluntly titled on stage and screen, The Heiress). Catherine has $10,000 a year, and the promise of $20,000 a year more when her father dies. Wonderful! She is pursued by a young man named Morris Townsend, whose attentions dazzle her; Morris is glamorous, Catherine mild and homely. Still better! Lots of money and a desirable husband: only the rarest of women would have asked for more. This, then, could have been Catherine’s happy-heiress ending; were it not for the fact that her father—the ice-cold spanner in the works—perceives her suitor to be a gold-digger, and threatens to withdraw her inheritance should she marry. The threat is designed to find Morris out. For why should he want Catherine, except for her money?
And therein lies the existential question at the heart of this piercing little fable, which itself contains the essence of the heiress’s dilemma. How is she to know her own intrinsic worth, when everybody around her is so distracted by externals? How—especially in matters of love—can she ever be sure that she is wanted for herself?
As a woman of the nineteenth century, deprived of the right to pursue her own destiny (much more on this later), Catherine Sloper must accept that others will decide that question for her. Later fictional heiresses were at least allowed to do so for themselves; as for instance in Agatha Christie’s 1967 novel Endless Night, which contains a superbly convincing sketch of a “poor little rich girl”—murder victim Ellie Goodman—who longs for a freedom beyond luxury hotel suites and Krug on tap in VIP lounges, and marries a sexy penniless young man rather than a family-approved blue blood. Ellie chooses to believe that her husband truly loves her, which he certainly seems to do. At the same time it is somehow clear that she knows he might not. She accepts this uncertainty as her heiress’s burden, which is inescapable, however free she becomes. As with Linnet Doyle, the heiress victim in Death on the Nile (1937), her “self” is inseparable from her money, and indeed both women are murdered because of it. For why else would an heiress be killed?
Again, their lives are at the mercy of their inheritance—although they are at least in charge of it. Ellie causes ructions with her marriage to a Carnaby Street Morris Townsend, but she goes ahead anyway: an eighteenth-century-style elopement directed by the bride. Linnet has a sound business head, but she too chooses to bestow herself upon a good-looking pauper whom she hardly knows. These are twentieth-century women, and they have agency. The irony is that this very independence may lead them straight to the kind of men who plagued their heiress forebears.
Copyright © 2021 by Laura Thompson
