Getting Married Was Grim, Too

No chapters this time. Sadie Stein steps out of the story to do the accounting, and the ledger runs dark. A militia occupies a small town and no battle ever touches the page: what is Austen doing with all those soldiers? Girls of fifteen and sixteen enter the marriage market, and one family, for financial reasons, puts all five daughters out at once. Then the entry that names the episode: what a wedding actually meant for a woman then, the risk nobody in the book says aloud, and the good reasons to refuse the institution. Stein ends with Austen herself, twenty-one and unworldly, and what that turns out to explain.