eaders. First of all, for its power to acquire the material goods that can support the all-important signs of her ranks claims to genteel station; Second, as the prod of anxiety that focus its own potential for loss.

The heartbeat of romance lies in a good income. That is the universal truth about which there is no doubt in contemporary women’s fiction. The Dashwood women, for example, Elinor and Marianne, name their hearts’ desires: ‘About eighteen hundred or two thousand a year; not more than that;’ Marianne confides. ‘Two thousand a year!’ cries Elinor, shocked ‘ one is my wealth’.  Marianne defends two thousand a year as she specifies the consumer expenses appropriate to it; “I am sure I am not extravagant in my demands. A proper establishment of servants, a carriage perhaps two, and hunters, cannot be supported on less” ( Jane Austen, 2001 Sense and Sensibility: 56).

Elinor smiles to hear her younger sister ‘ describing so accurately,’ and so transparently, the exact consumer expenses suited to the potential income of her lover, the soon-to-prove-faithless Willoughby. But in her own turn, Elinor’s projection of ‘one thousand pound is the income of the prosperous clergyman family that she longs to be mistress of.’ In the concluding pages Marianne gets her two thousand ponds a year, though from a different lover, and Elinor gets her one thousand a year, or suitably near it.

In the more intimate domestic negotiations of the novel, women’s fiction turns to the particular relationship that women have with money ----that is, no legal title to it for married women, and rights severely curtailed for unmarried women. In a frustrating social irony, the pseudo-gentry women find herself responsible for the management of the household, but prevented by law and custom from exercising any significant control over the management of the family’s income, a male prerogative. If money affairs go badly, as they certainly will with a feckless foolish improvident man like Willoughby. The women are still responsible for the economic consequences, a victim herself of course, but still responsible. Elinor has no illusions about this harsh double bind when she consoles Marianne for the loss of Willoughby. “Had you married, you must have been poor. His demands and your inexperience tighter on a small very small income, must brought on distress

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