La promotion du commerce et du travail dans les romans d’Eliza Parsons et de Jane Austen

• Main Authors: Marie-Laure Massei-Chamayou, Claire Pignol
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Société d'Etudes Anglo-Américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles 2020-12-01
• Series: XVII-XVIII
• Subjects: Literature and economics; commerce; work; Eliza Parsons; Jane Austen
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/1718/4353

Contrary to the claim that “literature ought not to be the business of a woman’s life”, Eliza Parsons and Jane Austen’s shared concern for the commercial success of their respective novels proves that literature had actually become the business of women at the end of the eighteenth century – whether in the original sense of the word which refers to a variety of social and emotional dealings between people, or in terms of publishing as a means of subsistence. A comparison between some of their novels shows that both writers engaged with the commercial sphere to improve their social condition and promote the values characteristic of the middle classes, such as work, courage, success and individual merit. Their social and cultural differences surface, however, in their ideological preferences: whereas Eliza Parsons’s novels promote trade and its representatives, Jane Austen rather chooses to uphold the values associated with the professional world of sailors in Persuasion.