Madison Tuck, Justice in the World of Jane Austen: Advocating for Lydia Bennet and Maria Bertram

Woodcut illustration of Mansfield Park, Chapter 11 by Joan Hassall

At the end of Jane Austen’s novels, readers are left with romance and a sense of justice. The good are rewarded with love, money, and a happy ending, while the evil are punished according to their shortcomings.

The justice enacted at the expense of Lydia Bennet, the flirtatious, impulsive, and silly sister of Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet, and Maria Bertram, the vain, classist, and naive cousin of Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price, is not justice at all, even though it feels like the kind of karma readers want to savor.
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Their fates are not actually results of their personal faults and poor choices, but the typical, calculated outcome of a cruel patriarchal justice system fueled by an equally unforgiving society. The effects of these “sentences” follow the women and their families forever in a way that modern readers can rarely comprehend, while others reap benefits from their social demise. 
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