The Regency period is generally viewed as an archaic, distant world, and Jane Austen’s novels wholly consumed with marriage and suitors to the detriment of anything else. The focus on marriage in Austen’s world was significant, but not without cause. In the case of the Bennet girls, they scarcely had a sense of their own identities before it was drilled into them that unless several of them married wealthy, they would all be destitute upon their father’s death. The financial necessity of marriage for women may not be so great now, but we are still heavily scrutinized for our relationship statuses. Much of our worth to our society, our families, and ourselves is wrapped up in this imaginary “timeline,” and if we’ll be bringing anyone to the next family event. Even the American tax code favors married people. 

In The Last Girls at Longbourn, we find Kitty Bennet not only reeling from the absence of her closest confidante, but with her identity and self-image completely intertwined with marriage prospects and men’s opinions of her. The pressures that she and Mary face as unmarried women still exist today, and I’m intrigued by what we can learn about our world from their story. When you set aside the empire waistlines and dated hairstyles, Last Girls is a story of a world very like ours, where women’s only worth is in their proximity to marriage, and where two young women learn to love themselves in spite of that.