Kathleen Anderson - Jane Austens Guide to Thrift: An Independent Womans Advice on Living within Ones Means

Jane Austens
Guide to Thrift

Jane Austens
Guide to Thrift

A N I NDEPENDENT W OMANS A DVICE ON
L IVING W ITHIN O NES M EANS

Kathleen Anderson and Susan Jones

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

USA / Canada / UK / Ireland / Australia / New Zealand / India / South Africa / China

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
For more information about the Penguin Group, visit penguin.com

This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

Copyright 2013 by Kathleen Anderson and Susan Jones.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or
electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted
materials in violation of the authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

BERKLEY is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

The B design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Anderson, Kathleen.

Jane Austens guide to thrift / by Kathleen Anderson and Susan Jones.

p. cm.

ISBN: 978-1-101-62207-0

1. Home economics. 2. Consumer education. 3. Thriftiness.
4. Austen, Jane, 17751817Characters. I. Jones, Susan. II. Title.

TX147.A634 2013

640.73dc23

2012043437

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Berkley trade paperback edition / April 2013

Cover design by Lesley Worrell.

Cover art by Natasha Molotkova.

Book design by Tiffany Estreicher.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for
author or third-party websites or their content.

To David Athey with love.
Thanks for twenty-two years of thrifty adventures.
Kathleen Anderson

To my sister, Lisbeth, who is the other half of my self,
and my dear friend Linda Moody, who has put up with
me more times than I can count.
Susan Jones

J ANE A USTENS T HRIFTY S PIRIT

I am determined to spend no more

W e love Jane Austen!

Austens spirited characters and her solid, practical values are as alive to us today as they were in her own time. The more we read her work and enter her world, the more we learn about ourselves. And we wonder what Jane would make of our world and our times, when diets and personal trainers swear they will help us become as thin as supermodelsfor a fee. When fashion statements lure us to buy accessories and garments we cant do without, and to buy them NOW. And when computer pop-ups promise to find our perfect match, if only we fill out a questionnaire and make an online payment.

We wonder: Would Jane Austen or her characters have succumbed to personal trainers to achieve a svelte look? Would Catherine Morland of Northanger Abbey pore over fashion magazines and think that a pair of $400 shoes was money well spent? Would Pride and Prejudices Elizabeth Bennet have turned to an online matchmaking service, looking for Mr. Darcy? Would she have looked in the mirror and pulled out her credit card? We dont think soAusten had a thrifty spirit that she exhibited both through her most beloved (and even some of her rather loathed) characters. Just look at the number of times money is an issue to her characters. Remember in Sense and Sensibility when Marianne Dashwood cries, exuberant as always, What have wealth and grandeur to do with happiness? and Elinor argues that wealth may assist a person to be happy. But it is Marianne who has the last word: Money can only give happiness where there is nothing else to give it. Beyond a competence, it can afford no real satisfaction Then theres Catherine Morland, who must figure out how much money she should have for her trip to Bath. And we see how important it is for the Bennet sisters, for Harriet Smith of Emma, for Anne Elliot of Persuasion, for all the Austen heroines to find Mr. Right with the right income, in order to survive.

How else do we know Austens take on thrift? It is woven through her letters to her sister, Cassandra, which reveal just how often they both had to practice discipline in spending. Austen wrote frequently to her sister about everyday matters, and although Cassandra destroyed many of the letters when Jane died, about 160 of them remain today, in various locations such as the Morgan Library in New York and the National Library of Scotland, so we may share her experiences and ideas. Considering the many ways Jane Austen chose to comment on economics and handling money in both her fiction and her personal writing, its clear that she has serious opinions on thriving on thrifty living.

When Jane Austen died, having authored six extraordinary novels, she left a small monetary legacy. As a woman, she had never had access to the two main means of acquiring wealth during her time: inheritance or profession. And unlike her characters, she never married into money. Her family never sent her to India to troll for a nabob, an Englishman who founded his family fortune in Far East trading, nor did she long for a planter from the Indies. When we consider Jane Austens wealth, we see that it lay in herself, in the generosity with which she shared her wit in her letters and publications. As her readers (whether newcomers or scholars), we are her heirs and beneficiaries from that endeavor.

There is little doubt that sometimes Jane Austen, who never married, must have struggled with less than a competence. She lived with her parents when she wasnt assisting a brother and his family with household and child-minding tasks. She visited wealthy friends and relatives, but she had little money of her own, even from the publication of her works. Although the first edition of Pride and Prejudice sold out and two more editions were published during her lifetime, she had sold her interest in the book for a mere 110. So, although Austens works became popular during her lifetime, her own earnings from them hardly made her rich. Her whole life long, she tailored her spending to what she had on hand. In short, she practiced principles of thrift, and she wrote those principles into her characters.

Historically, the idea of thrift is connected with savings and good management, as we might expect, but it is also intimately tied with the notion of thriving, from which the word is derived. Sensible people of the nineteenth century would have connected the concept of thrift with prosperity, good fortune, and success. Thus, where modern readers might be tempted to think of thrift as giving things up or being frugal, for Austen and her heroines,