Mr. Bennett's Library

 

Don't you like to think that Mr Bennet had read William Godwin, sometime in that study where he always locked himself? and been familiar with Mary Wollstonecraft? What knowledge might Lizzie have had of Vindication of the Rights of Women? Did Jane Austen herself? I would imagine Lizzie would be conversant with issues of, say, abolition which was a frequent topic of conversation amongst the socially aware. It would have been hard to miss Thomas Day's abolitionist poems in the paper already a generation earlier. 

The French Revolution and The Declaration of the Rights of Man were very recent affairs. As was Olympe de Gouge's Declaration of the Rights of Women, Mr Bennet would have, may have, thought about such things in his reading, through far more likely to have followed them through the lens of Edmund Burke (though Burke was, we often forget, himself a Whig). 

And then what access did Lizzie have? Surely she was allowed to borrow from her father's books, Burke and Day, one would imagine. But Wollstonecraft? The proto-feminists? What would she have made of them and what might have been her discussions with Jane? I don't see the Bennets surrounded by edgy intellectuals or even that possibility of such out at Longbourne, though Aunt and Uncle Gardiner would have been a source for such discussions and possibly more whiggish than Mr Bennett. Although what his political party might have been, I wonder. Perhaps I presume him more conservative than he was.

I'm holding out hope that the Pemberley library held all this and more. 

What do you think?