In the last century, of the women whose achievements endure for us in one way or another, nearly all never married (Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Orne Jewett) or married late in their thirties (George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Brontë, Olive Schreiner). I can think of only four (George Sand, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Helen Hunt Jackson, and Elizabeth Gaskell) who married and had children as young women. All had servants.

I'm a Jewish Jane Austen.

'I didn't marry her family.'
'Of course not. But you always do. Dead or alive.'

Very unfortunately, she had no husband. She had never had a husband, and therefore did not kill a husband.

Ah, never to have married, and childless to have died!

One version of the Austen scenario holds that it is all about stalking and bringing down your man, but Jane Austen is not the editor of Cosmopolitan. The point is not to achieve the man at any cost. He is not the prey or the prize but the symbol of merit. The possibility that there may be no such man is always present. Part of our gratified surprise at the Austen happy ending is that there was a man around with the good sense to see that a woman without rich and powerful connections might be a pearl beyond price, a woman whose company was reward in itself. We know that she is good company because we have been seeing the world through her disabused eyes. We go on reading and watching Jane Austen because she is good for us.

"I shall never marry, Atticus."
"Why?"
"I might have children."

I did not marry the first girl that I fell in love with, because there was a tremendous religious conflict, at the time.
She was an atheist, and I was an agnostic.

Nothing more, — except that I don't believe I shall ever marry; I'm happy as I am, and love my liberty too well to be in any hurry to give it up for any mortal man.

"A 'career woman,'" Sylvie said, as if the two words had no place in the same sentence. "A spinster," she added, contemplating the word. Ursula wondered why her mother was working so hard to rile her. "Perhaps you will never marry," Sylvie said, as if in conclusion, as if Ursula's life was as good as over. "Would that be such a bad thing? 'The unmarried daughter,'" Ursula said, tucking into an iced fancy. "It was good enough for Jane Austen."

I don't believe I shall ever marry; I'm happy as I am, and love my liberty too well to be in any hurry to give it up for any mortal man.

Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts.

The inspector was suddenly reminded of his English literature classes as a teenager. The teacher dissecting Jane Austen while the boys looked bored and the girls swooned over Darcy. Certainly, there was enough pride and prejudice within this Sikh clan to write a number of sequels. Although Jane Austen had never felt the need to sully her books with premature death, or premature pregnancies for that matter.

No-body, it seems, thinks of an husband for Miss Barnevelt. She is sneeringly spoken of rather as a young fellow, than as a woman; and who will one day look out for a wife for herself. One reason indeed, she every-where gives, for being satisfied with being a woman; which is, that she cannot be married to a WOMAN.