£24000 p/a: Duke of Kent (the Prince Regent's brother Edward) £13000 p/a: Duchy of Cornwall (belonging to the Prince Regent) £12000 p/a: James Rushworth ( Mansfield Park) £10000 p/a: Pemberley* ( Pride and Prejudice) £8000 p/a: an average peer in most counties, estates worth more than this were quite rare (barring Oxfordshire, Derbyshire, and Warwickshire). £4000 p/a: the beginnings of 'wealth', allowing a house in town, where the necessity of 'economy' really comes to an end. The Duke of Newcastle had only £3000 or £4000 p/a until his fortuitous marriage to an heiress of £7000 p/a £2600 p/a: an average great banker or merchant Colonel Brandon ( Sense and Sensibility) Marianne Dashwood considers this the 'competence' a couple must have to marry on ( Sense and Sensibility) Estates bringing in over £2000 p/a were classified as 'large.' £2000 p/a: a very good income, providing all the comforts of quiet genteel life, a governess, masters, and about eleven servants. Mr and Mrs Norris begin their married life on just under £1000 p/a £1000 p/a: the wealth Elinor Dashwood thinks necessary to marry on - and which she does ( Sense and Sensibility) the worth of the Norfolk estate which Mrs Ferrars offers her son Edward if he will marry Lord Morton's daughter. £800 p/a: an average lower merchant, manufacturer, higher civil officer, or warehouseman the income from Newstead, Lord Byron's estate £700 p/a: an average gentleman 'living on income' £700-1000 p/a: An improvement on the basic gentility of £500 p/a, permitting more servants and, more importantly, a carriage. Sir John Middleton thinks John Willoughby's estate of Combe Magna to be worth £600 or £700 p/a.

£630 p/a: an active rear-admiral (otherwise he'd have half-pay) The Dashwood ladies ( Sense and Sensibility) £500 p/a: the basic comfortable income, affording three servants. Mrs Price's allowance for domestic expenses ( Mansfield Park) £400 p/a: the income at which a family can have a few luxuries, but not many, and not easily, affording a cook and a housemaid and possibly a boy-servant.

Edward Ferrars' original income ( Sense and Sensibility) £300 p/a: a slight improvement, on which a bachelor can live comfortably enough, affording two servants. £200 p/a: the lowest income at which a ‘genteel’ (or aspiring-genteel) family can scrape by on, affording one servant. £150 p/a: an average tailor or shopkeeper £120 p/a: an average farmer (a more prosperous farmer is more likely to get £150-500) an averag lower clergyman, a Dissenting clergyman an average coal-miner earned just over £40 p/a 'An average,' of course, means the average for the whichever group is named. The abbreviation 'p/a' is 'per annum,' or a-year. Nearly all of the information here comes from The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, Patrick Colquohoun's 'Treatise on Indigence,' and Elie Halévy's England in 1815. That said, money does talk, and it's best to at least have a working knowledge of average incomes and real ones. Mrs Bennet, a lawyer's daughter, thinks in terms of incomes and conspicuous consumption, but she is not the best guide of normal (or sane!) behaviour. (Anne Steele, Anne Darcy, Anne Elliot, Anne Weston.)Ī common mistake is to think that money equals one's consequence - social importance - in the world. “DeBurgh (among other variations).” -Spelt de Bourgh. “Lizzie.” In the book, this nickname is spelt Lizzy. Simply checking the book first will prevent you from such simple mistakes as: (I use “she” because the vast majority of Jane Austen fanfiction writers are female, although there are a few notable males.) There is nothing wrong with this per se, but to the jaundiced reader (most of us, by now) it may smack of amateurism. Misspellings of proper nouns appearing in the book tend to give the impression that the author misspells because she has only heard the name, not seen it - that is, she is someone who only knows Jane Austen through adaptions. Nobody will murder you if you spell Longbourn with an ‘e,’ but it is an irritant. My very first piece of advice: write from the book. Therefore the emphasis will be on that book. The vast majority of Jane Austen fanfiction is Pride and Prejudice-based although occasionally characters from other novels make their way onto the pages, true crossovers, such as Victoria’s A More Prosperous Trial of the State, are rare. Also, there might be some reprisals of what was covered in other lj entries.

I am also speaking as a serious reader of Jane Austen, who reads fanfic primarily as an interpretation of the original books. I may come across as distinctly condescending, although I hope not, but I am speaking as if to a first-time Jane Austen fanfiction writer who knows nothing of the genre. Elizabeth_hootThis is something I'm doing solely for my own pleasure, and very much a Work-in-Progress.

Gifted book fanfiction