Jane Austen on Marrying Love, Money, and Writing
There are three ways to make a small fortune as a writer:
- Write a book that all readers tell everybody they know they must read.
- Write a series of books that keep building the audience for your work until you write the breakout book that gets you on the bestseller list.
- Start with a large fortune and write full-time.
I like to read myself to sleep with stories that offer an escape to gentler, simpler times, and are a pleasure to read. I’m reading the annotated Pride and Prejudice, and Elizabeth suggested I blog about it, and the day she suggested it, I found something to blog about.
In nineteenth-century England, marriage was the only honorable option for women from good families without money. Only marriage separated them from dependence on others or a job that was beneath them. So pity poor, high-strung Mrs. Bennet, the mother of five daughters, who can’t give them an income to support them or even a house to live in after Mr. Bennet dies.
Marrying her daughters off is the driving force of her life. But Elizabeth, the endearing heroine of Pride and Prejudice, is determined to marry for love, not money. So when she refuses to marry the impossible William Collins, even though he can provide a comfortable life and enable her family to stay in their house, her mother is furious. For a mother of five, security was essential, passion optional.
The Only Way to Marry Love and Money
One of life’s challenges is figuring out how to marry passion and profit, how to make a living doing something you love. When my heroine Elizabeth and I give talks, we ask writers how much money they want to earn a year from their writing. There are always writers who would be happy earning no money, just writing for the pleasure of it, and that’s fine.
It’s your time, life, and effort, and you should use them as you wish, especially when it’s a hobby you do in whatever time you can pry away from other obligations. You can write for love, money, both, or neither. There are lots of reasons to write, all of them valid. As long as you enjoy writing, whatever keeps you doing it is a good thing.
But since you probably won’t make a small fortune from your book, you have to be sutained by the love of writing it. As novelist Ursula LeGuin once said: “It is good to have a destination to journey toward, but it is the journey that counts, in the end.”
Jane Austen never found the love of her life, but her writing was a labor of and about love. I hope that, like her, you will write the books that you must and you alone can, and that they will create the fervent fans that Jane Austen had. Marry love and writing, and if your books are as good as you want them to be, the money will follow. On to the new year!
The Eighth San Francisco Writers Conference / A Celebration of Craft, Commerce & Community / President’s Day Weekend, February 18-20, 2011 / Mark Hopkins / Keynoters: Dorothy Allison & David Morrell / Pitch your book to agents and editors / Free feedback on your work / www.sfwriters.org / sfwriterscon@aol.com / blog: https://sfwriters.org/blog / Open to anyone: a day of in-depth classes on Monday, February 21 / Free MP3s at www.sfwriters.info
New! San Francisco Writers University: Where Writers Meet and You Learn, a project of the San Francisco Writers Conference / Laurie McLean, Dean / www.sfwritersu.com
