[LMB] Age at first marriage

[Raye Johnsen]

--- "Dorian E. Gray" <israfel at eircom.net> wrote:

> Pete said...
> >
> > 200 years ago, Jane Austen seems not to have
> believed that wide 
> > differences in age were all that bad, at all.  In
> _Sense and Sensibility_, 
> > Marianne is 17 and Col. brandon is 35 when they
> meet, and they marry when 
> > she is 19 (and he must, thereby, be 37?).
> 
> True, and this kind of age difference is preserved
> in many of Georgette 
> Heyer's romances.  I think the biggest age gap is
> between Avon and Leonie 
> (20 years), but frequently the heroes are in their
> early 30s while the 
> heroines are 20-ish.  

IIRC, there were two points in a nobleman's life when
he tended to wed, more than any other time: the year
after he first came down from Cambridge or Oxford
(that is, when he graduated) and became involved in
the social side of the ton, at about 22 or 23 (the
year later is because he'd propose to some young
debutante during that first year and it'd take that
long for their mutual mamas to arrange the wedding),
or in his mid-thirties, when his father died and he
came into his title, and would start hunting for a
woman to provide him with heirs of his own.

It's quite reasonable to assume that the marriage
proposed by a young man of twenty-one, in those
circumstances, isn't going to work; chances are better
than good he's never met the girl before in his life,
he has no experience with girls from this social
stratum to tell what is nature and what is taught
behaviour, and, well, hormones.  That's not to say
that a marriage made that young *can't* work,
especially if he picks a girl who is herself twenty or
twenty-one, because *she* would have been around for a
few years at that stage and she'd have the experience
to pick the right man. 

It's worth noting also that Heyer also mentions
several marriages where the mid-thirties-to-teens
matches *didn't* work out, such as the marriage
between the hero's parents in 'False Colours' and the
heroine's parents' marriage in 'Venetia', as well as
in several short stories (and I'm sure there's more
but I can't remember them offhand).

Raye

raye_j at yahoo.com
http://windtear.livejournal.com
http://www.thejohnsens.com/index.html

I believe in dragons, unicorns, good men
and other mythical creatures.


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