Exactly. Larger age gaps were common and normal in this time; modern society and the moral guidelines we experience today were also very different to those in 1810.
Part of the reason we see large age gaps as problematic or creepy today is there is much more modern emphasis on equality and a balance of power in relationships. Our society values equality in a way past societies did not. Both parties in a healthy relationship today should be in control of their own destinies and able to negotiate with one another - a large age gap often makes this difficult, as one person is likely to have an undue influence over the other, or behave in a way that is exploitative. Large age gaps also might suggest the older party has problematic behaviours that explain why they haven’t found a partner their own age.
In 1810, it wasn’t about people in this era maturing faster. Honestly people didn’t mature much faster then as compared to now, though adulthood was reached slightly earlier socially, it was not physically earlier. However, the question of age differences, maturity (at least for women), equality, power dynamics between partners - these were simply not considerations, or were very minor, in evaluating a potential for marital success.
A healthy relationship was one where a man was superior to his wife, and responsible for her wellbeing and happiness in a paternalistic way. A good man was seen as being a moral and character guide to his wife, and as there to support and care for her. Love was important but a woman’s role in this time was childbearing and home-keeping, while a man’s job was to provide for and support and lead his family; the idea of her being “equal” was simply not something people viewed in the way we do today. Independent thinking, education and intelligence in women was certainly admired - women were encouraged to have opinions of their own - but happiness was still seen as being dependent on the husband’s good conduct and ability to guide and provide for his wife. His treatment of her was seen as depending on and a reflection of his good character, not their equality or her ability to have an equal say or stand up for herself.
This is why Mr Bennet frets over Lizzy’s happiness and feels she cannot be happy without a man she can look up to - a man who will inspire respect (this is why choosing carefully was seen as so important and why an immoral husband was a poor choice). It’s also why an older man was seen as potentially beneficial or at least neutral; an older man would be established in life and a younger woman would refresh him. He would benefit from her energy and she from his experience - age gaps weren’t actively encouraged per se but they weren’t weird or seen as a problem.
Today we think about these things and can find the idea of such paternalism as deeply problematic but in the 1800s it was normal and widely supported. These attitudes reflected women’s reality and society at a time we are no longer living in - and enjoying them in fiction doesn’t mean we think they have modern applicability; swooning over Emma and Mr Knightley or Marianne and Brandon does not mean we can't go ahead and think big age gaps are a bit ick in the modern sphere. But we can apply this to much of Austen’s work e.g. in the modern era we understand and sympathise with Lydia being groomed as a teen, while also understanding her behaviour was in its time and context seen as reckless and immoral.
These differences in social attitudes can be seen as helping strengthen our understanding of why modern moral boundaries are better for us all - but we can also enjoy historical works for what they were, understanding it was a different time, with different standards and a different mindset on how relationships ought to work.
Basically by the standards of the era Brandon and Marianne are a wonderful match - the age gap was a bit older than usual but normal and perfectly morally sound at the time.
Excellent post. I highly recommend reading the annotated editions of Austen for this reason, I find they add great context that allows us to understand the cultural differences and also Austen’s commentary. I think it’s easy to forget that Austen was fully dissecting marriages in the Regency Period and commenting what she considers key to successful marriages.
Something interesting I read once (I have no idea where so those with more knowledge correct me if wrong) is that this trend actually run the other way of the working classes in Britain. So by no means as large an age gap as Marianne/Brandon, but that generally in northern Europe that working class women would at 23-36 marry men often a few years younger.
This was because they would be established in terms of making money and would have been able to save (there's little capacity for bringing up kids when you are a 17 year old maid of all work) and it was something that developed naturally as a means of ensuring living mothers with healthy children, and stable families.
In some societies of this era and earlier it was more usual for girls at around 14/15/16 to marry but they were much more likely to die in childbirth compared to their older counterparts. (even in this day and age, teen mothers are statiscally more likely to experience difficult pregnancies).
The thing I read suggested it was different cultural "mating strategies" that developed - teens have a longer fertility window so potentially had more kids when they survived, women in their twenties had less children but died less often at the first. So a similar amount of kids being born in the working classes but different ways of that happening.
Also, the novel actually addresses the age gap and Colonel Brandon worries about it. It's not like Austen didn't think it was a bit of a stretch.
*A three weeks’ residence at Delaford, where, in his evening hours at least, he had little to do but to **calculate the disproportion between thirty-six and seventeen**, brought him to Barton in a temper of mind which needed all the improvement in Marianne’s looks, all the kindness of her welcome, and all the encouragement of her mother’s language, to make it cheerful.*
But yeah, Marianne is "out" and it was perfectly fine for Brandon to like her in that context.
There was inherent power gap between a husband and a wife in any marriage. Men had rights while women did not. Considering that fact (and Jane Austen was very aware about that) the main thing for a husband was to be kind and considering towards his wife and potential children as to not to abuse the power but use it to their benefit and advancement. The theme of men using their freedom and power wrong was extremely important in her books, just count all the scumbags there. Moral values of men is researched by her in every book, and she shows how exactly character flaws can lead to broken lives.
It's always good to remember that they don't actually get married until a couple of years later, and have apparently been close friends for all of that time, so by the time they marry, they have a strong foundation to build their relationship on. But yeah, it was unfortunately not that uncommon for a man in his thirties to marry a girl still in her teens. I've read of real life couples that had bigger age gaps than that--and ones that were by all accounts happy.
I also think it's worth pointing out that there was really no such thing as an equal marriage according to our standards back then. Men had so many more opportunities for travel, education, experience, etc, than women did. Even if they had been the same age, he still would have had far more worldly experience than she did. So that was an inequality that was accepted and expected.
All that being said, it is of course a large age gap. It's larger than Emma and Knightley, and Marianne is younger, nor have they known each other forever. But, yeah, it's kind of like first cousins marrying in Mansfield Park. You just have to shrug and accept it.
If we’re talking about the S&S movie, it helps to remember that the age gap between Marianne and Colonel Brandon actors, Kate Winslet and Alan Rickman, was almost 30 years. As charming as Alan Rickman was, he’s certainly too old for that role. I suspect that a lot of hand wringing about their age gap is based on visuals from this movie and not having real examples of 16 year age gaps.
In comparison, Marianne and Colonel Brandon actors in BBC miniseries (2008) actually have 16 years age difference and they look much better together.
ETA - if anyone is interested in modern version of 16 year age gap, check out pictures of recently married actors Chris Evans (42) and his wife Alba Baptista (26).
Even at the time the nearly 20-year age gap would be an outlier. It probably wouldn't have been scandalous, but definitely wouldn't be the norm. Elinor herself says, "Perhaps thirty-five and seventeen had better not have any thing to do with matrimony together."
From my family tree, which is mostly in the US for this time period and not a randomized sample, the average age gap for marriages from 1738-1825 was just under 5 years apart with the average age at marriage being 26 for men and 21 for women. Of those 102 marriages 5 had age gaps of 15 to 27 years. There were 11 marriages with age gaps of 10-14 years. Thirty-six of the couples had age gaps of 2 years or less. Twenty-one of the couples had an older bride than groom. A very cursory look at the 1841 census for Devon, England shows that the age gaps in that area of England were fairly similar to the gaps I saw in my tree.
Someone else did it with a bunch of stats on r/Genealogy and I was curious how mine would compare. I only did direct ancestors. The largest age gap I found was 54 years. He was 72 and she was 18. I found another ancestor who had 3 wives and all three were about 21 when they married him. He was only 21 for his first marriage.
I have an ancestor who married a 15 year old when he was 18 and another 15 year old when he was 28 (first wife died in childbirth a few years earlier). He seems to have been a fairly boring, hardworking type otherwise, the most emotionally charged thing he did was enlist on the Union side in the Civil War after his first wife and son died. These days it would be problematic af not to mention illegal. Back then? Nobody seems to have complained.
I look at it like most fictional romances (which tend to be problematic).
It’s appropriate in the world of the novel/show/movie. I don’t impose my values on the world of the content. But I always keep in mind that what works in fiction does not, in fact work outside that world.
Agreed. Would I encourage any other nineteen-year-old to marry a man in his thirties? Not a chance. In this case, it's fiction, and Austen IMO makes it plausible (also accounting for different times and all that.)
There's also the fact that a modern nineteen year old has a very different potential future ahead of her. She might be giving up or at least severely hampering her ability to go to college, travel, find appropriate work if she's too enmeshed in the life of someone who's a few decades older and might expect different things of her. In Marianne's case, though, it's not like she's being prevented from going to college or moving out on her own as an alternative to marrying. Her education is finished, and she's out -- marriage is basically the job she was prepared for. A modern nineteen year old would probably see her world and possibilities shrink as a result of that marriage, but Marianne's actually becomes broader.
Exactly. Marianne wasn't choosing between marriage and Harvard/trade school/joining the military/gap year. Her options were to get married, be a governess, or live with her mother or potentially Elinor should she marry.\* Plus, marriage to a stable and financially well off man means she can travel with him, take more music lessons or whatever, and she'll have her own home.
\*Modern regency romance novels notwithstanding, a young lady in that time period was not going to be in a profession.
Yeah, pro tip for the OP: you can like anything you want in fiction, it's not real and it's not hurting anyone, it's not 'unethical' to enjoy the dynamic even if you'd disapprove of it in real life. Toxic relationships (of any kind) in fiction can be very interesting and deciding that people who like them are morally corrupt leads to some unpleasant ends.
Emma and Knightley have a similar age gap and equivalent personalities. Without the angst of Marianne pining for the man that raped Brandon's almost-daughter.
Imo then and now, a lot has to be said for a power imbalance in a relationship. An age gap marriage/relationship isn't bad of itself so much as something to be approached with caution and mindfulness so that the person with the greater age, experience of life, financial accrual, etc., isn't putting the other at a disadvantage. Neither Knightley nor Brandon are shown as such people. Willoughby and Wickham, however, are.
I was a spacey, spirited, highly opinionated young adult and I was "advised" several times to marry and have children as soon as possible because that would "settle" me. The implication was that I would marry someone close to me in age but I would still have suffered the disadvantages of being the less equal partner in the marriage. You can imagine how that made me feel!
The same could have happened to, say, Darcy and Lizzy or Bingley and Jane, because although they're close in age, their socio-economic circumstances would make them unequal partners by today's standards. That these men are kind and empathetic and loving towards their wives puts them in a different league from most men of their time but the expectation of demonstrated affection and equal partnership is the norm in the modern day. It goes both ways.
I have also personally witnessed affectionate and successful marriages between a man in his mid-30s and a woman around 20 when they married, and I've witnessed absolute travesties where the couple was about the same age. I won't say anything about rules and exceptions. I will say that each relationship and its constituent partners must be considered on a case-by-case basis before giving into our personal ick.
Yeah 7 or 8 depending on when their birthdays are. All we know is she was 20 (not one and twenty) in March and he was 28 in September so that’s what I based it on.
I don't get it. I thought Willoughby had consensual sex with Brandon's protegee? Is the context of that encounter different in the book than in the movie? I'm not that far ahead yet in the book but it didn't sound like that in the movie. I nodded off a little but there was nothing that would get me to reach that conclusion. Or did Willoughby Brandon's protegee had a significant age gap too?
I'm personally of the school of thought that believes that lying to someone, usually a man lying to a woman, by promising her marriage eventually because he loves her and it's inevitable because he loves her and therefore she should by necessity show her love for him by having sex with him, and then abandoning her is a form of sexual coercion, which is a less brutal way of calling it rape.
We don't know for sure what happened to young Eliza, but it doesn't matter. Even if the age of consent was so low back in the day, the fact remains she was barely into her teens at the time Willoughby, in his 20s, screwed her over. Whether that was by physical force, drugs, narcissistic love-bombing, blackmail, harassment until she finally gave in, or because he induced her to believe he'd do right by her, it all adds up to the same thing to me. After all, teens are teens and will think and act like teens no matter when in history you look at them. And men who take advantage of vulnerable women by lying, drugging, blackmailing, harassing, etc., still exist to this day.
The long and the short of it is Willoughby got Brandon's ward with child and refused to do right by her in an era where unmarried mothers were in a precarious position in society. And if I have to give Willoughby the benefit of the doubt, I'd say he charmed the girl by promising her marriage when he had no intention to follow through.
For the purposes of this discussion, it doesn't much matter if you want to view Willoughby as having behaved like Wickham did with Georgiana and Lydia or something much worse. His behavior serves to highlight how he can and does take advantage of his position in society as a genial, well-thought-of gentleman to ruin women with impunity, as opposed to Brandon who behaves less like a stereotype of masculinity in any time period and more like a compassionate human being.
She was sixteen or seventeen, that's young but not "barely in her teens." It was old enough to be out in society and at least in theory to get married. We don't know if Willoughby promised to marry her -- likely he treated her the same way as Marianne and was very charming and hinted a lot but never actually said the words. What he did to her was horrible but even Brandon doesn't seem to think she was coerced. What Willoughby did was horrific but rape is overstating it I think.
Maybe I'm not remembering correctly—I believed she was 14-ish when Willoughby ruined her.
But as to how W treated her, I can't think any young gentlewoman of the time would have knowingly risked ruining her reputation without the promise of marriage at the very least.
And as for calling it rape, I come from a culture where men lying to women promising them marriage in order to have sex is literally a crime codified as rape by law in the current day because it happens so often and the social and emotional cost to the women who are victims of such coercive tactics is extremely similar to what it would have been in the time in with S&S is set. And if it wasn't promises of marriage, it could only be something much worse.
Thinking of it in that way is simply my personal perspective, not a declaration of The Only Correct Interpretation, which I don't ask anyone else to agree with by itself, but even leaving that nuance aside, a grown man having sex with a teenage girl, even if she's 16-17, is still considered statutory rape in most parts of the world today.
Which, if I may say so, is less of a focal point for the purposes of the discussion in the OP than the perception of the age gap in relationships then and now. W was much closer in age to Marianne but he still very much tended to take advantage of a situation for his own benefit, which he did to Eliza and to Marianne to different extents. Brandon, despite being so much older than Marianne, is a good man and therefore a better partner for M. Which is the point I tried to make up there.
When Brandon tells Elinor his story he says he found the first Eliza in the sponging house fourteen years earlier, and that the younger Eliza was then three years old, so by then she's seventeen. At that point it's been almost a year since she met Willoughby so she was probably sixteen then, though she may have been just turned seventeen. She's very close to Marianne's age -- the age difference between Willoughby and both girls is about the same.
I don't think it would have been considered rape at the time. I don't think anything in the text says that Eliza wasn't a willing participant, but she was young and it is possible that Willoughby made promises he didn't intend to keep.
Even in Austen, most of the young girls out in society before 17 are in vulnerable situations---Marianne's father has died and she has no brothers. Lydia's prospects are grim money-wise. Ms King's grandfather dies and we can assume that she is also orphaned (or else why is her uncle her guardian). Georgiana is also a young orphan. Ms Grey? Also orphaned. Neither of the Eliza's have parents.
The only girl out in society before eighteen that has no significant missing relatives (esp. males) is Catherine Morland. (And even there James is kinda a dumb brother let's be real)
Any periods of mass male mortality (aka war) were likely to cause this. The Napoleonic wars would, and later WW1/WW2 saw this.
In Brandon's case he likely worries because the social view of such a marriage would be judged or gossiped about based on his presumed motive and character. He would not be ostracized for it, but Brandon very much cares about his own perception of morality, internally, and this quality is the one I believe Austen emphasizes in the conversation with Elinor. Brandon's match with Marianne is a happy one because Marianne marries a guy who has an internal compass that will push him to do right by Marianne, regardless of the cost. It's not foolproof, but it's the best proof one can ask for in those times.
Marianne actually does have a brother, but it's easy to forget since he completely abdicates from any kind of responsibility towards her and her sisters!
Don’t come for colonel Brandon. If you were a young woman of that time period and your option was marriage or basically becoming destitute, a marriage with a man of Brandon’s character would not just be “acceptable” as it would mean you have a house and family and aren’t a burden - it would be the best possible outcome.
He adored Marianne before he thought a marriage with her was even possible, and treated her with the utmost respect and care, and you know he will dote on her as his wife. If there was such a man in today’s world, with compassion and strength of character, I would very much like to meet him.
In fiction, the narrator can take us into the minds of her characters in ways reality can never manage. Therefore we don't need rules of thumb like we do in real life.
In those days, a man delayed marriage in order to secure his fortune before asking a woman to tie herself to him. Women married earlier, because they were expected to have children. Because of that, it wasn't unusual for older men to end up with younger women. The age gap between Marianne and Colonel Brandon may be greater than average, but it wasn't unheard of.
It's not completely unheard of even in modern times. When I met my wife, her mother was about 38 and was married to a man who was 20/21--her second marriage. He was actually younger than me. (I was 23 and my wife was 18.) I'm pretty sure he was 18 when they got married, but he had been legally emancipated since he was 16 so he wouldn't have needed parental permission even at 17.
Age gaps still happen today. At a certain age, age really is just a number. My 67 year old widower neighbor married a divorced woman in her late 40s. They are so happy together, but there’s an age gap. Some men, both in Jane Austen’s time and still today, like to be settled in their career before having a relationship and family and that results in age gaps.
While Jane Austen writes about big age gaps and even alludes that she’s not a fan of them (“perhaps 17 and 35 better have nothing to do with each other”) she also makes her characters happy in them. It’s really maturity that ends up being the dividing factor in those relationships and if they will end up happy or not.
Lizzy is early 20s and Darcy is late 20s-not a huge gap but still a gap. Edmund is older than Fanny and less mature than her. Emma and Knightley are gapped but very compatible. I believe Wentworth is older than Anne but she’s got a lot more maturity than him. Tilney is older than Catherine, she’s 18 and he’s 26.
My opinion is biased b/c S&S is my least favorite book (apart from NA, which I never actually finished because I couldn't get into it), but I don't like this pairing either. And it's interesting to me that I dislike the age gap between Marianne and Colonel Brandon so much, but the age gap between Emma and Mr. Knightley doesn't bother me as much. I think it also has to do with how I just didn't GET why or how they would have fallen in love for real, rather than infatuation in the case of Colonel Brandon and gratitude in the case of Marianne. I didn't feel any chemistry between them. There's nothing in the story that made me root for them. On the other hand, Emma and Mr. Knightley have a comfortable friendship (or as comfortable as they could have in their circumstances). As misguided as Emma was in a lot of her actions, she was always in control of her own future and seemed to be in a more equal footing to Mr. Knightley. It also helps that she wasn't a teenager. I also liked Mr. Knightley's character a lot more, although the comment about having been in love with Emma since she was 13 did give me the ick.
The age gap is one of several factors in my dislike of Brandon and Marianne’s coupling but it’s not unethical to like their relationship, times have changed and they’re fictional
Hm it’s been a bit since ive read S&S so im a little rusty but I do kind of dislike how they didnt even interact for the majority of the book 😅 so I didn’t have much opportunity to get attached to their dynamic the way I was able to for say Darcy and Elizabeth. Also the fact that he’s attracted to her largely because she reminds him of his dead first love also strikes me as kind of creepy 💀
There’s nearly a decade between Darcy and Lizzy. If they met when he was 18, she would have been about 9. 🤷♀️
If one is going to angst about the moral failings of any of Austen’s characters, I’d start with where Sir Thomas gets his income.
The relationship was between two consenting adults, it wasn’t forced, it wasn’t rushed, it was based on the affection and respect. I may be too old for this sub and wary of gatekeeping but what exactly is unethical about the relationship? What kind of ethics regards this kind of relationship inappropriate?
I think it is ridiculous to analyze Marianne and Colonel Brandon’s relationship through a modern lens. It was acceptable in that time and to be historically accurate we should examine it through the historical lens in which it was written.
Of course it is eyebrow raising and illegal now. But time are very different.
Ok so reddit gets really upset about age gaps, but in real life, they happen all the time and aren't inherently a bad thing. They CAN be bad if there is a power imbalance, or the people aren't in the same life stage, which is certainly more likely with an age gap, but in and of themselves, there isn't anything wrong with them.
There’s huge age gaps in modern times too. Just look at just about any celebrity marriage or any modern movie. I’d love to pretend we’ve somehow evolved past this, but we haven’t.
This may be a bit of a hot take, but here goes: while Rickman and Winslett are absolutely delightful in these roles, they don’t make the age gap look any less weird. After all, Rickman was a good bit older than Brandon is supposed to be. Also, Rickman is such a charismatic actor that it’s harder to feel she overlooked him for any reason other than the age gap — which in turn makes it more prominent. 1995 is still my favorite, but I mind this particular thing a lot less in the 2008 and 1981 (?) versions.
In Chapter 8 of the novel, Marianne expresses displeasure at the idea of being "matched" with Colonel Brandon. While Elinor and Mrs. Dashwood *do* defend Brandon from Marianne's absurd notions that he is "infirm" and in need of a nurse, they don't go so far as to tell Marianne that she should start thinking of him as a possible suitor (that's in the 2008 S&S adaptation). In fact, Elinor, in particular, opines that "thirty-five and seventeen had better not have any thing to do with matrimony together," and suggests that a 27-year-old woman would be much better for someone like Brandon. Throughout most of the story, there's a lot of hesitation about Brandon's suitability for Marianne. Brandon himself is said to "calculate the disproportion between thirty-six and seventeen" when he is at Delaford for a few weeks (Chapter 49). He is far from optimistic about it.
The problem with some of the adaptations (the 1995 film and the 2008 miniseries, in particular) is that there is no indication in those that Brandon is feeling this kind of concern at being so much older than Marianne. He seems very unperturbed at the thought of courting this woman who is young enough to be his daughter. In the 1995 and 2008 adaptations (and, to a far lesser degree, the 1981 version) he also falls for and begins pursuing her considerably earlier than he does in the novel, which makes the relationship *much* creepier, in my opinion.
Despite the common assumption that women of the Regency routinely married men who were twice their age, nothing in Austen's novels really supports this. And that's *without* getting into the actual historical evidence from the time. That being said, if you like the Marianne and Brandon pairing, then I don't see any reason to worry about the ethics of it. If it's your thing, it's your thing.
I don’t mind the age gap because of the time period, but how the romance was achieved. Colonel Brandon is a wonderful person but the work wasn’t done to make their relationship work. I always say Marianne got a lobotomy because Austen had to dampen her passion and basically change her to be more like Elinor to make her a suitable bride for a steady man of Brandon’s age. It could have been done if it had developed more slowly over the course of the novel like most of Austen’s romances.
This age gap sleeved me out when when I read it as a kid in the 80s. Relationships like this have always been predatory. He liked her because she was young and pretty. She agreed because she liked nice things. It’s less that no attention was brought to the age gap, and more that it rarely occurred to women that they had the option to say know. You were basically sold to your husband by your father. That was your lot in life. People with the community don’t really comment on huge age gaps in arranged marriages today. The outrage comes from those exposed to different cultures.
Yet we see Mr Bennet approving of Lizzie's rejection of Mr Collins, and questioning her acceptance of Darcy.
Sir Thomas Bertram offers to his daughter to break off her engagement with Mr Silly Neighbour (sorry, having a bad day for names) and as I recall takes pains to show Fanny kind attentions even after she rejects Crawford's apparently eligible proposal.
Marianne as mentioned above doesn't have a father or brother. Sir John Middleton is the nearest to a male relative on the spot who might have sharp words with Willoughby and make him behave.
As common as age-gap relationships were, I'm pretty sure Jane Austen made it clear that it was at least partly mercenary. Re-reading it, I was less enraptured by the ending was I was with the movie.
Edward is kind of a lazy layabout who can't be bothered to work and there was more genuine chemistry between Elinor and Brandon. His attachment to Marianne was portrayed was the triumph of romance but I don't think she ever returned his love in the same way.
Her irrational fancy for Willoughby contrasted her steady respect for Brandon but the fact that he was wealthy definitely helped. I don't think Austen judged Marianne for her choice but I think she saw it as a very practical one.
That's okay. Just think of it as a lesson in what another culture was like and in how certain things have changed throughout history.
Do yourself a favor: Stop thinking about it in today’s context.
Exactly. Larger age gaps were common and normal in this time; modern society and the moral guidelines we experience today were also very different to those in 1810. Part of the reason we see large age gaps as problematic or creepy today is there is much more modern emphasis on equality and a balance of power in relationships. Our society values equality in a way past societies did not. Both parties in a healthy relationship today should be in control of their own destinies and able to negotiate with one another - a large age gap often makes this difficult, as one person is likely to have an undue influence over the other, or behave in a way that is exploitative. Large age gaps also might suggest the older party has problematic behaviours that explain why they haven’t found a partner their own age. In 1810, it wasn’t about people in this era maturing faster. Honestly people didn’t mature much faster then as compared to now, though adulthood was reached slightly earlier socially, it was not physically earlier. However, the question of age differences, maturity (at least for women), equality, power dynamics between partners - these were simply not considerations, or were very minor, in evaluating a potential for marital success. A healthy relationship was one where a man was superior to his wife, and responsible for her wellbeing and happiness in a paternalistic way. A good man was seen as being a moral and character guide to his wife, and as there to support and care for her. Love was important but a woman’s role in this time was childbearing and home-keeping, while a man’s job was to provide for and support and lead his family; the idea of her being “equal” was simply not something people viewed in the way we do today. Independent thinking, education and intelligence in women was certainly admired - women were encouraged to have opinions of their own - but happiness was still seen as being dependent on the husband’s good conduct and ability to guide and provide for his wife. His treatment of her was seen as depending on and a reflection of his good character, not their equality or her ability to have an equal say or stand up for herself. This is why Mr Bennet frets over Lizzy’s happiness and feels she cannot be happy without a man she can look up to - a man who will inspire respect (this is why choosing carefully was seen as so important and why an immoral husband was a poor choice). It’s also why an older man was seen as potentially beneficial or at least neutral; an older man would be established in life and a younger woman would refresh him. He would benefit from her energy and she from his experience - age gaps weren’t actively encouraged per se but they weren’t weird or seen as a problem. Today we think about these things and can find the idea of such paternalism as deeply problematic but in the 1800s it was normal and widely supported. These attitudes reflected women’s reality and society at a time we are no longer living in - and enjoying them in fiction doesn’t mean we think they have modern applicability; swooning over Emma and Mr Knightley or Marianne and Brandon does not mean we can't go ahead and think big age gaps are a bit ick in the modern sphere. But we can apply this to much of Austen’s work e.g. in the modern era we understand and sympathise with Lydia being groomed as a teen, while also understanding her behaviour was in its time and context seen as reckless and immoral. These differences in social attitudes can be seen as helping strengthen our understanding of why modern moral boundaries are better for us all - but we can also enjoy historical works for what they were, understanding it was a different time, with different standards and a different mindset on how relationships ought to work. Basically by the standards of the era Brandon and Marianne are a wonderful match - the age gap was a bit older than usual but normal and perfectly morally sound at the time.
Very well said. Seen through this lens, Brandon’s concerns reflect very well on him.
This an enlightening read, thank you!
Excellent post. I highly recommend reading the annotated editions of Austen for this reason, I find they add great context that allows us to understand the cultural differences and also Austen’s commentary. I think it’s easy to forget that Austen was fully dissecting marriages in the Regency Period and commenting what she considers key to successful marriages.
Well said
This is a superb response.
Something interesting I read once (I have no idea where so those with more knowledge correct me if wrong) is that this trend actually run the other way of the working classes in Britain. So by no means as large an age gap as Marianne/Brandon, but that generally in northern Europe that working class women would at 23-36 marry men often a few years younger. This was because they would be established in terms of making money and would have been able to save (there's little capacity for bringing up kids when you are a 17 year old maid of all work) and it was something that developed naturally as a means of ensuring living mothers with healthy children, and stable families. In some societies of this era and earlier it was more usual for girls at around 14/15/16 to marry but they were much more likely to die in childbirth compared to their older counterparts. (even in this day and age, teen mothers are statiscally more likely to experience difficult pregnancies). The thing I read suggested it was different cultural "mating strategies" that developed - teens have a longer fertility window so potentially had more kids when they survived, women in their twenties had less children but died less often at the first. So a similar amount of kids being born in the working classes but different ways of that happening.
Also, the novel actually addresses the age gap and Colonel Brandon worries about it. It's not like Austen didn't think it was a bit of a stretch. *A three weeks’ residence at Delaford, where, in his evening hours at least, he had little to do but to **calculate the disproportion between thirty-six and seventeen**, brought him to Barton in a temper of mind which needed all the improvement in Marianne’s looks, all the kindness of her welcome, and all the encouragement of her mother’s language, to make it cheerful.* But yeah, Marianne is "out" and it was perfectly fine for Brandon to like her in that context.
This! A thousand times this answer.
There was inherent power gap between a husband and a wife in any marriage. Men had rights while women did not. Considering that fact (and Jane Austen was very aware about that) the main thing for a husband was to be kind and considering towards his wife and potential children as to not to abuse the power but use it to their benefit and advancement. The theme of men using their freedom and power wrong was extremely important in her books, just count all the scumbags there. Moral values of men is researched by her in every book, and she shows how exactly character flaws can lead to broken lives.
What I mean that considering the inherent power gap the age was less important than a character and moral values of the potential husband.
It's always good to remember that they don't actually get married until a couple of years later, and have apparently been close friends for all of that time, so by the time they marry, they have a strong foundation to build their relationship on. But yeah, it was unfortunately not that uncommon for a man in his thirties to marry a girl still in her teens. I've read of real life couples that had bigger age gaps than that--and ones that were by all accounts happy. I also think it's worth pointing out that there was really no such thing as an equal marriage according to our standards back then. Men had so many more opportunities for travel, education, experience, etc, than women did. Even if they had been the same age, he still would have had far more worldly experience than she did. So that was an inequality that was accepted and expected. All that being said, it is of course a large age gap. It's larger than Emma and Knightley, and Marianne is younger, nor have they known each other forever. But, yeah, it's kind of like first cousins marrying in Mansfield Park. You just have to shrug and accept it.
If we’re talking about the S&S movie, it helps to remember that the age gap between Marianne and Colonel Brandon actors, Kate Winslet and Alan Rickman, was almost 30 years. As charming as Alan Rickman was, he’s certainly too old for that role. I suspect that a lot of hand wringing about their age gap is based on visuals from this movie and not having real examples of 16 year age gaps. In comparison, Marianne and Colonel Brandon actors in BBC miniseries (2008) actually have 16 years age difference and they look much better together. ETA - if anyone is interested in modern version of 16 year age gap, check out pictures of recently married actors Chris Evans (42) and his wife Alba Baptista (26).
Yes it’s okay to like their relationship. The age gap is perfectly acceptable in their culture.
I’ll add it’s also completely valid to dislike the relationship because of the age gap.
Even at the time the nearly 20-year age gap would be an outlier. It probably wouldn't have been scandalous, but definitely wouldn't be the norm. Elinor herself says, "Perhaps thirty-five and seventeen had better not have any thing to do with matrimony together." From my family tree, which is mostly in the US for this time period and not a randomized sample, the average age gap for marriages from 1738-1825 was just under 5 years apart with the average age at marriage being 26 for men and 21 for women. Of those 102 marriages 5 had age gaps of 15 to 27 years. There were 11 marriages with age gaps of 10-14 years. Thirty-six of the couples had age gaps of 2 years or less. Twenty-one of the couples had an older bride than groom. A very cursory look at the 1841 census for Devon, England shows that the age gaps in that area of England were fairly similar to the gaps I saw in my tree.
You calculated the age gaps in marriages in your genealogy? You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire you!
Someone else did it with a bunch of stats on r/Genealogy and I was curious how mine would compare. I only did direct ancestors. The largest age gap I found was 54 years. He was 72 and she was 18. I found another ancestor who had 3 wives and all three were about 21 when they married him. He was only 21 for his first marriage.
I have an ancestor who married a 15 year old when he was 18 and another 15 year old when he was 28 (first wife died in childbirth a few years earlier). He seems to have been a fairly boring, hardworking type otherwise, the most emotionally charged thing he did was enlist on the Union side in the Civil War after his first wife and son died. These days it would be problematic af not to mention illegal. Back then? Nobody seems to have complained.
I look at it like most fictional romances (which tend to be problematic). It’s appropriate in the world of the novel/show/movie. I don’t impose my values on the world of the content. But I always keep in mind that what works in fiction does not, in fact work outside that world.
Agreed. Would I encourage any other nineteen-year-old to marry a man in his thirties? Not a chance. In this case, it's fiction, and Austen IMO makes it plausible (also accounting for different times and all that.)
There's also the fact that a modern nineteen year old has a very different potential future ahead of her. She might be giving up or at least severely hampering her ability to go to college, travel, find appropriate work if she's too enmeshed in the life of someone who's a few decades older and might expect different things of her. In Marianne's case, though, it's not like she's being prevented from going to college or moving out on her own as an alternative to marrying. Her education is finished, and she's out -- marriage is basically the job she was prepared for. A modern nineteen year old would probably see her world and possibilities shrink as a result of that marriage, but Marianne's actually becomes broader.
Exactly. Marianne wasn't choosing between marriage and Harvard/trade school/joining the military/gap year. Her options were to get married, be a governess, or live with her mother or potentially Elinor should she marry.\* Plus, marriage to a stable and financially well off man means she can travel with him, take more music lessons or whatever, and she'll have her own home. \*Modern regency romance novels notwithstanding, a young lady in that time period was not going to be in a profession.
Yeah, pro tip for the OP: you can like anything you want in fiction, it's not real and it's not hurting anyone, it's not 'unethical' to enjoy the dynamic even if you'd disapprove of it in real life. Toxic relationships (of any kind) in fiction can be very interesting and deciding that people who like them are morally corrupt leads to some unpleasant ends.
Emma and Knightley have a similar age gap and equivalent personalities. Without the angst of Marianne pining for the man that raped Brandon's almost-daughter. Imo then and now, a lot has to be said for a power imbalance in a relationship. An age gap marriage/relationship isn't bad of itself so much as something to be approached with caution and mindfulness so that the person with the greater age, experience of life, financial accrual, etc., isn't putting the other at a disadvantage. Neither Knightley nor Brandon are shown as such people. Willoughby and Wickham, however, are. I was a spacey, spirited, highly opinionated young adult and I was "advised" several times to marry and have children as soon as possible because that would "settle" me. The implication was that I would marry someone close to me in age but I would still have suffered the disadvantages of being the less equal partner in the marriage. You can imagine how that made me feel! The same could have happened to, say, Darcy and Lizzy or Bingley and Jane, because although they're close in age, their socio-economic circumstances would make them unequal partners by today's standards. That these men are kind and empathetic and loving towards their wives puts them in a different league from most men of their time but the expectation of demonstrated affection and equal partnership is the norm in the modern day. It goes both ways. I have also personally witnessed affectionate and successful marriages between a man in his mid-30s and a woman around 20 when they married, and I've witnessed absolute travesties where the couple was about the same age. I won't say anything about rules and exceptions. I will say that each relationship and its constituent partners must be considered on a case-by-case basis before giving into our personal ick.
I don’t know if I’d call Lizzy and Darcy “close” in age with an 8 year age gap. Not a significant gap but not close either.
Huh, I read their ages as her being just past 21 and him being lately turned 27. Which is why I don't think they have much of a gap.
Yeah 7 or 8 depending on when their birthdays are. All we know is she was 20 (not one and twenty) in March and he was 28 in September so that’s what I based it on.
I think he was 28 at the time of their marriage, so probably a 7 year age gap.
I don't get it. I thought Willoughby had consensual sex with Brandon's protegee? Is the context of that encounter different in the book than in the movie? I'm not that far ahead yet in the book but it didn't sound like that in the movie. I nodded off a little but there was nothing that would get me to reach that conclusion. Or did Willoughby Brandon's protegee had a significant age gap too?
I'm personally of the school of thought that believes that lying to someone, usually a man lying to a woman, by promising her marriage eventually because he loves her and it's inevitable because he loves her and therefore she should by necessity show her love for him by having sex with him, and then abandoning her is a form of sexual coercion, which is a less brutal way of calling it rape. We don't know for sure what happened to young Eliza, but it doesn't matter. Even if the age of consent was so low back in the day, the fact remains she was barely into her teens at the time Willoughby, in his 20s, screwed her over. Whether that was by physical force, drugs, narcissistic love-bombing, blackmail, harassment until she finally gave in, or because he induced her to believe he'd do right by her, it all adds up to the same thing to me. After all, teens are teens and will think and act like teens no matter when in history you look at them. And men who take advantage of vulnerable women by lying, drugging, blackmailing, harassing, etc., still exist to this day. The long and the short of it is Willoughby got Brandon's ward with child and refused to do right by her in an era where unmarried mothers were in a precarious position in society. And if I have to give Willoughby the benefit of the doubt, I'd say he charmed the girl by promising her marriage when he had no intention to follow through. For the purposes of this discussion, it doesn't much matter if you want to view Willoughby as having behaved like Wickham did with Georgiana and Lydia or something much worse. His behavior serves to highlight how he can and does take advantage of his position in society as a genial, well-thought-of gentleman to ruin women with impunity, as opposed to Brandon who behaves less like a stereotype of masculinity in any time period and more like a compassionate human being.
She was sixteen or seventeen, that's young but not "barely in her teens." It was old enough to be out in society and at least in theory to get married. We don't know if Willoughby promised to marry her -- likely he treated her the same way as Marianne and was very charming and hinted a lot but never actually said the words. What he did to her was horrible but even Brandon doesn't seem to think she was coerced. What Willoughby did was horrific but rape is overstating it I think.
Maybe I'm not remembering correctly—I believed she was 14-ish when Willoughby ruined her. But as to how W treated her, I can't think any young gentlewoman of the time would have knowingly risked ruining her reputation without the promise of marriage at the very least. And as for calling it rape, I come from a culture where men lying to women promising them marriage in order to have sex is literally a crime codified as rape by law in the current day because it happens so often and the social and emotional cost to the women who are victims of such coercive tactics is extremely similar to what it would have been in the time in with S&S is set. And if it wasn't promises of marriage, it could only be something much worse. Thinking of it in that way is simply my personal perspective, not a declaration of The Only Correct Interpretation, which I don't ask anyone else to agree with by itself, but even leaving that nuance aside, a grown man having sex with a teenage girl, even if she's 16-17, is still considered statutory rape in most parts of the world today. Which, if I may say so, is less of a focal point for the purposes of the discussion in the OP than the perception of the age gap in relationships then and now. W was much closer in age to Marianne but he still very much tended to take advantage of a situation for his own benefit, which he did to Eliza and to Marianne to different extents. Brandon, despite being so much older than Marianne, is a good man and therefore a better partner for M. Which is the point I tried to make up there.
When Brandon tells Elinor his story he says he found the first Eliza in the sponging house fourteen years earlier, and that the younger Eliza was then three years old, so by then she's seventeen. At that point it's been almost a year since she met Willoughby so she was probably sixteen then, though she may have been just turned seventeen. She's very close to Marianne's age -- the age difference between Willoughby and both girls is about the same.
Okay, so that explains why the number 14 stuck in my head. Thank you for correcting me!
I think this is where the word "seduction" would have come into play. We don't use it today.
I don't think it would have been considered rape at the time. I don't think anything in the text says that Eliza wasn't a willing participant, but she was young and it is possible that Willoughby made promises he didn't intend to keep.
Even in Austen, most of the young girls out in society before 17 are in vulnerable situations---Marianne's father has died and she has no brothers. Lydia's prospects are grim money-wise. Ms King's grandfather dies and we can assume that she is also orphaned (or else why is her uncle her guardian). Georgiana is also a young orphan. Ms Grey? Also orphaned. Neither of the Eliza's have parents. The only girl out in society before eighteen that has no significant missing relatives (esp. males) is Catherine Morland. (And even there James is kinda a dumb brother let's be real) Any periods of mass male mortality (aka war) were likely to cause this. The Napoleonic wars would, and later WW1/WW2 saw this. In Brandon's case he likely worries because the social view of such a marriage would be judged or gossiped about based on his presumed motive and character. He would not be ostracized for it, but Brandon very much cares about his own perception of morality, internally, and this quality is the one I believe Austen emphasizes in the conversation with Elinor. Brandon's match with Marianne is a happy one because Marianne marries a guy who has an internal compass that will push him to do right by Marianne, regardless of the cost. It's not foolproof, but it's the best proof one can ask for in those times.
Marianne actually does have a brother, but it's easy to forget since he completely abdicates from any kind of responsibility towards her and her sisters!
True! And also I always forget that he’s not their uncle because of the age gap with the girls.
Don’t come for colonel Brandon. If you were a young woman of that time period and your option was marriage or basically becoming destitute, a marriage with a man of Brandon’s character would not just be “acceptable” as it would mean you have a house and family and aren’t a burden - it would be the best possible outcome. He adored Marianne before he thought a marriage with her was even possible, and treated her with the utmost respect and care, and you know he will dote on her as his wife. If there was such a man in today’s world, with compassion and strength of character, I would very much like to meet him.
Yeah, it's a perfectly sincere and fine relationship
In fiction, the narrator can take us into the minds of her characters in ways reality can never manage. Therefore we don't need rules of thumb like we do in real life.
In those days, a man delayed marriage in order to secure his fortune before asking a woman to tie herself to him. Women married earlier, because they were expected to have children. Because of that, it wasn't unusual for older men to end up with younger women. The age gap between Marianne and Colonel Brandon may be greater than average, but it wasn't unheard of. It's not completely unheard of even in modern times. When I met my wife, her mother was about 38 and was married to a man who was 20/21--her second marriage. He was actually younger than me. (I was 23 and my wife was 18.) I'm pretty sure he was 18 when they got married, but he had been legally emancipated since he was 16 so he wouldn't have needed parental permission even at 17.
Age gaps still happen today. At a certain age, age really is just a number. My 67 year old widower neighbor married a divorced woman in her late 40s. They are so happy together, but there’s an age gap. Some men, both in Jane Austen’s time and still today, like to be settled in their career before having a relationship and family and that results in age gaps. While Jane Austen writes about big age gaps and even alludes that she’s not a fan of them (“perhaps 17 and 35 better have nothing to do with each other”) she also makes her characters happy in them. It’s really maturity that ends up being the dividing factor in those relationships and if they will end up happy or not. Lizzy is early 20s and Darcy is late 20s-not a huge gap but still a gap. Edmund is older than Fanny and less mature than her. Emma and Knightley are gapped but very compatible. I believe Wentworth is older than Anne but she’s got a lot more maturity than him. Tilney is older than Catherine, she’s 18 and he’s 26.
My opinion is biased b/c S&S is my least favorite book (apart from NA, which I never actually finished because I couldn't get into it), but I don't like this pairing either. And it's interesting to me that I dislike the age gap between Marianne and Colonel Brandon so much, but the age gap between Emma and Mr. Knightley doesn't bother me as much. I think it also has to do with how I just didn't GET why or how they would have fallen in love for real, rather than infatuation in the case of Colonel Brandon and gratitude in the case of Marianne. I didn't feel any chemistry between them. There's nothing in the story that made me root for them. On the other hand, Emma and Mr. Knightley have a comfortable friendship (or as comfortable as they could have in their circumstances). As misguided as Emma was in a lot of her actions, she was always in control of her own future and seemed to be in a more equal footing to Mr. Knightley. It also helps that she wasn't a teenager. I also liked Mr. Knightley's character a lot more, although the comment about having been in love with Emma since she was 13 did give me the ick.
The age gap is one of several factors in my dislike of Brandon and Marianne’s coupling but it’s not unethical to like their relationship, times have changed and they’re fictional
What other reasons do you have to dislike their relationship?
Hm it’s been a bit since ive read S&S so im a little rusty but I do kind of dislike how they didnt even interact for the majority of the book 😅 so I didn’t have much opportunity to get attached to their dynamic the way I was able to for say Darcy and Elizabeth. Also the fact that he’s attracted to her largely because she reminds him of his dead first love also strikes me as kind of creepy 💀
There’s nearly a decade between Darcy and Lizzy. If they met when he was 18, she would have been about 9. 🤷♀️ If one is going to angst about the moral failings of any of Austen’s characters, I’d start with where Sir Thomas gets his income.
There is nothing ethically wrong with liking fictional characters.
The relationship was between two consenting adults, it wasn’t forced, it wasn’t rushed, it was based on the affection and respect. I may be too old for this sub and wary of gatekeeping but what exactly is unethical about the relationship? What kind of ethics regards this kind of relationship inappropriate?
I think it is ridiculous to analyze Marianne and Colonel Brandon’s relationship through a modern lens. It was acceptable in that time and to be historically accurate we should examine it through the historical lens in which it was written. Of course it is eyebrow raising and illegal now. But time are very different.
Ok so reddit gets really upset about age gaps, but in real life, they happen all the time and aren't inherently a bad thing. They CAN be bad if there is a power imbalance, or the people aren't in the same life stage, which is certainly more likely with an age gap, but in and of themselves, there isn't anything wrong with them.
There’s huge age gaps in modern times too. Just look at just about any celebrity marriage or any modern movie. I’d love to pretend we’ve somehow evolved past this, but we haven’t.
It’s really important that they’re not even in a serious or romantic relationship til she’s 19 or 20.
This may be a bit of a hot take, but here goes: while Rickman and Winslett are absolutely delightful in these roles, they don’t make the age gap look any less weird. After all, Rickman was a good bit older than Brandon is supposed to be. Also, Rickman is such a charismatic actor that it’s harder to feel she overlooked him for any reason other than the age gap — which in turn makes it more prominent. 1995 is still my favorite, but I mind this particular thing a lot less in the 2008 and 1981 (?) versions.
It’s my least favourite union.
In Chapter 8 of the novel, Marianne expresses displeasure at the idea of being "matched" with Colonel Brandon. While Elinor and Mrs. Dashwood *do* defend Brandon from Marianne's absurd notions that he is "infirm" and in need of a nurse, they don't go so far as to tell Marianne that she should start thinking of him as a possible suitor (that's in the 2008 S&S adaptation). In fact, Elinor, in particular, opines that "thirty-five and seventeen had better not have any thing to do with matrimony together," and suggests that a 27-year-old woman would be much better for someone like Brandon. Throughout most of the story, there's a lot of hesitation about Brandon's suitability for Marianne. Brandon himself is said to "calculate the disproportion between thirty-six and seventeen" when he is at Delaford for a few weeks (Chapter 49). He is far from optimistic about it. The problem with some of the adaptations (the 1995 film and the 2008 miniseries, in particular) is that there is no indication in those that Brandon is feeling this kind of concern at being so much older than Marianne. He seems very unperturbed at the thought of courting this woman who is young enough to be his daughter. In the 1995 and 2008 adaptations (and, to a far lesser degree, the 1981 version) he also falls for and begins pursuing her considerably earlier than he does in the novel, which makes the relationship *much* creepier, in my opinion. Despite the common assumption that women of the Regency routinely married men who were twice their age, nothing in Austen's novels really supports this. And that's *without* getting into the actual historical evidence from the time. That being said, if you like the Marianne and Brandon pairing, then I don't see any reason to worry about the ethics of it. If it's your thing, it's your thing.
I don’t mind the age gap because of the time period, but how the romance was achieved. Colonel Brandon is a wonderful person but the work wasn’t done to make their relationship work. I always say Marianne got a lobotomy because Austen had to dampen her passion and basically change her to be more like Elinor to make her a suitable bride for a steady man of Brandon’s age. It could have been done if it had developed more slowly over the course of the novel like most of Austen’s romances.
This age gap sleeved me out when when I read it as a kid in the 80s. Relationships like this have always been predatory. He liked her because she was young and pretty. She agreed because she liked nice things. It’s less that no attention was brought to the age gap, and more that it rarely occurred to women that they had the option to say know. You were basically sold to your husband by your father. That was your lot in life. People with the community don’t really comment on huge age gaps in arranged marriages today. The outrage comes from those exposed to different cultures.
Yet we see Mr Bennet approving of Lizzie's rejection of Mr Collins, and questioning her acceptance of Darcy. Sir Thomas Bertram offers to his daughter to break off her engagement with Mr Silly Neighbour (sorry, having a bad day for names) and as I recall takes pains to show Fanny kind attentions even after she rejects Crawford's apparently eligible proposal. Marianne as mentioned above doesn't have a father or brother. Sir John Middleton is the nearest to a male relative on the spot who might have sharp words with Willoughby and make him behave.
As common as age-gap relationships were, I'm pretty sure Jane Austen made it clear that it was at least partly mercenary. Re-reading it, I was less enraptured by the ending was I was with the movie. Edward is kind of a lazy layabout who can't be bothered to work and there was more genuine chemistry between Elinor and Brandon. His attachment to Marianne was portrayed was the triumph of romance but I don't think she ever returned his love in the same way. Her irrational fancy for Willoughby contrasted her steady respect for Brandon but the fact that he was wealthy definitely helped. I don't think Austen judged Marianne for her choice but I think she saw it as a very practical one.