Compare And Contrast Letters To Alice With Pride And Prejudice

'Exploration [similar and contrasting] of the connections of values and contexts of Letters to Alice with Pride and Prejudice enhances one’s understanding of each text ' Do you agree?

Exploring connections can enrich one’s understanding, developing and influencing attitudes and responses towards the values and context of each text.

Both Fay Weldon’s 1984 epistolic novel Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen (hereafter ‘Letters’) and Jane Austen’s 1813 novel, Pride and Prejudice (hereafter ‘Pride’) exemplify this notion as the two texts are inherently intertwined together, enhancing the reader’s understanding as each layer is unravelled. Even despite the difference between the contextual social and cultural values of the texts, both

She highlights to Alice that she “must understand… the world in which Jane Austen was born”, analyzing and comparing the past historical to modern context. Weldon reinforces the urgency, absolute importance and purpose of marriage through the use of fragmented sentences, “So to marry was a great prize. It was a woman’s aim”. The analysis of Weldon’s interpretation to the context of ‘Pride’, assists the audience to assimilate the significant influence of marriage in ‘Pride’, by comparing the differences of marriage between Austen’s time and the modernized values of the 19th century. Weldon satirically says that marriage “is the stuff of our women’s magazines, but it was the stuff of their life, their very existence.” As well as this, Weldon through emotion language, creates a sense of empathy when she contrasts the women of the Georgian era against the modern women – “Women were born poor, and lived well only by their husbands’ favour”. These connections clearly demonstrate that through Weldon, the understanding of the value of marriage is greatly enhanced due to the comparison of Regency and modern marital