Key Terms

📖 Key Terms

Narrative voice and irony

Austen's narrator slides between her own perspective and a character's (or society's) perspective without signalling the shift — "It is a truth universally acknowledged" voices the ideology, not Austen's own view. This allows Austen to expose social assumptions from inside.

Entail

A legal arrangement restricting property inheritance to a specific line of heirs — usually male. Longbourn's entail to Mr Collins means the Bennets' daughters cannot inherit, making their marriages economically urgent.

Satire

The use of irony, exaggeration, or humour to expose and criticise human folly. Austen's treatment of Mrs Bennet, Mr Collins, and Lady Catherine uses satire to expose the marriage system's absurdities.

Coverture

The Regency legal doctrine under which a married woman's legal identity was absorbed into her husband's — she could not own property, sign contracts, or sue independently. (Plain English: married women had no legal identity of their own.)

Marriage market

The social system by which Regency women found husbands — social calls, balls, visits — functioning as an economic exchange in which women exchanged youth and breeding for financial security.