Today's Austen (16/3/2026)
Why Jane Austen Adaptations Just Keep Coming—And We Keep Watching
It is financial security, coupled with a respectable and compatible match, that leaves our heroines truly happy in the end.
In Austen’s novels, the main female characters always get to have their cake and eat it, too: love without security is simply not good enough. A “good match,” as Pedro Pascal’s millionaire Harry says to Lucy, needs to make both parties’ lives better.
But for women of Austen’s circumstances, living genteel lives without actual land or ample income, employment would have been inappropriate, even scandalous (recall Philadelphia’s slippery slope scenario), and therefore unthinkable. Because her heroines often share this same pseudo-gentry status, usually through the vanity or misfortune of one or both of their parents, they find themselves scrimping to get by while keeping up appearances. Time and again, the only real solution is to marry well. And to do so without compromising one’s values and intellectual or emotional capacities, Austen suggests, is—for single women and, in some cases, for single men—a real and persistent struggle.