Marriage as Transaction: The Two Ways a Novel of Manners Ends

Two great novels of manners, written a century apart, run on the same brutal premise: marriage is an economic transaction, social rules are unwritten but absolute, and a woman's freedom is the question the whole book is really asking. Roxane Gay reads The Age of Innocence for Rebind Classics; Sadie Stein reads Pride and Prejudice. Set side by side, Edith Wharton's gilded New York and Jane Austen's Hertfordshire turn out to be the same machine seen from two angles, and the difference in how each novel ends is the difference between an escape and a closing door.