page_title: Bennet family
section_title: Guilty negligences
hierarchical_section_title: Bennet family / Maternal branch / Mrs. Bennet / Guilty negligences
caption_attribution_description: English: "Lizzy, my dear, I want to speak to you" - Mrs. Bennet trying to get Mr. Bingley and Jane alone. Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. London: George Allen, 1894.
context_page_description: The Bennet family is a fictional family of dwindling Hertfordshire landed gentry, created by English novelist Jane Austen. The family plays a central role in Austen's 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice, as it is the protagonist, Elizabeth's family. The complex relationships between its various members influence the evolution of the plot.
  The family belong to a society where marriage is the only possible future for a young girl of good family. Yet the Bennet couple do not assume their role as educators: the mother repeatedly makes a spectacle of herself, who does not realise that her behaviour is more likely to put off any rich, eligible young man. All the while, the father, who seems to be an indifferent husband, has long-since given up on reining in his wife's behaviour, more intent on 'enjoying the show' than in correcting her behaviour, and the behaviour of his younger daughters.
context_section_description: Mrs Bennet has not really raised the girls that she would like so much to see married, as good housekeepers. She never gave them any notion of home economics, which was the traditional role of a mother in a middle-class family.
  It was Thomas Gisborne who theorized in An Enquiry Into the Duties of Men, published in 1794, and in An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex, published in 1797, the idea of areas reserved for men and women. According to him, women are by nature destined to the domestic sphere, defined as the particular area where "their excellence deploys". Therefore, their role is to keep the house and direct the domestic sphere. Mrs. Bennet openly mocks Charlotte Lucas when she is forced to go into the kitchen in order to supervise the tarts making, proudly saying that her "daughters are brought up differently"; also, she reacts with force when Mr Collins, on the day of his arrival, assumed that his cousins took part in the preparation of dinner. Even if it was unnecessary for her daughters to do kitchen work, they should have learnt how to supervise the servants who did such work.
  Mrs. Bennet also adds that they lived quite well, since Mr. Bennet spends annually his entire comfortable income: Mrs Bennet "had no turn for economy"; and for Lydia-only the expenses amounted to approximately £90-per year (almost double her allowance, because of her income (the £40 Interest from her 1/5 share of her mother's dowry), plus all of the additional indulgences of her mother providing her with more ("and the continual presents in money which passed to her through her mother's hands, Lydia's expences had been very little within [£100 per annum]"), and going to her sisters to borrow money (which she then never pays back)); with the £100-per annum financial arrangements (for the rest of Mr. Bennet's life) made for her marriage, Mr. Bennet is "scarcely £10 pounds more out of pocket" then he was before Lydia's marriage.
caption: Mrs. Bennet looks for ways to let Jane and Bingley be alone together (Hugh Thomson, 1894).
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