Experts have shown the depth and accuracy of Jane Austen's legal knowledge at a special event to mark the 250th anniversary of the author's birth.
The legal scholars showed how Austen used her novels to advocate for women's rights, and how she assumed her readers had a good knowledge of property and family law.
After Austen's death it was claimed by her nephew James Edward Austen-Leigh that she 'never touched upon politics, law or medicine' as there were 'matters which she did not thoroughly understand'. In fact law and legal themes lay at every turn of her novels, both expressly but also in possible covert coded messages.
The event was hosted by the University of Exeter's Bracton Centre for Legal History Research in collaboration with the journal Law and Humanities as part of the journal's annual Roundtable programme. The journal's general editor David Gurnham, from the University of Southampton, opened the event.
Also in attendance was the journal's arts editor Elena Cooper (CREATe, University of Glasgow) who spoke about the scholarly significance of the recent expansion of the journal's arts reviews section, which will include a review (in progress) of the new exhibition of Austen's manuscripts – original novel drafts and letters – currently on at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York City: 'A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250'. She discussed how a law and humanities lens on a manuscripts collection, inevitably incomplete and formed by collecting rather than scholarly imperatives, could cast new light on how we see legal themes in Austen's novels and provide counterpoint with the event's wider scholarly findings about Austen's understanding of law.
Braction Centre for Legal History director, Professor Rebecca Probert, showed how Austen expected her readers to know the law on weddings, separations, and divorce - and why in Pride and Prejudice Elizabeth and Darcy did not get married by special licence, despite Mrs Bennet's hopes. She also discussed her theory that the depiction of the relationship between Edmund and Fanny in Mansfield Park was designed to raise questions about the legalities of cousin marriage, still a hot topic today.
John Avery Jones, a retired judge, showed how a knowledge of ecclesiastical law can increase people's understanding of Austen's novels - in particular the law of simony - selling church roles or offices for financial benefit – and the minimum age for ordination, providing evidence of people's ages. He also set Austen's own will in the context of the contemporary rules on probate and legacy duty.
Nichola McNulty, from Bath Spa University, explored Austen's portrayal of women's rights in the family home through the lens of feminist jurisprudence. She said Austen had a subtle but persistent feminist battle cry, advocating for women's rights in the family home through the voice of her heroines and often through their mothers - including Mrs Bennet, all too often dismissed as simply silly.
Pauline Marshall, from the University of Sorbonne, discussed the representation of inheritance and more particularly the system of 'entail' - where property was designated to specific descendants. In Pride & Prejudice Austen's female characters spend far more time discussing entails than her male characters, and it is the central force driving the plot as the Bennet daughters' inability to inherit their father's estate forces them to seek financially secure marriages to avoid poverty.
Anne Bottomley, from the University of Kent, presented her research on three of Austen's female characters: Fanny Price, on the margins of the family in Mansfield Park; Harriet Smith in Emma, described as a child of 'some-one' but legally a child of 'no-one'; and Miss Lambe in the unfinished Sanditon, an heiress of Anglo-Antigan mixed heritage. She linked Miss Lambe to the 'reputed children' of plantation owners like Sir Thomas in Mansfield Park.
Other researchers presented their work on property and inheritance in Austen's novels. Marco Mazzocca, from Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, discussed how events in Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility offer a literary examination of property law and its role in perpetuating gendered inequalities under the guise of rational order, with law in Austen's world being not merely a set of rules but a cultural narrative.
