It is a well-known tale line in nineteenth-century English novels: a hero needs to make a choice from cash and love, among the rich, materialistic, status-conscious girl who may well improve his social place and the poorer, altruistic, independent-minded girl whom he loves. Elsie B. Michie explains what this universal marriage plot finds approximately altering reactions to funds in British culture.

It was once within the novel that writers chanced on area to articulate the anxieties surrounding funds that constructed in addition to the increase of capitalism in nineteenth-century England. Michie focuses specifically at the personality of the rich heiress and the way she, not like her male counterpart, represents the tensions in British society among the need for wealth and development and the terror that financial improvement may blur the normal obstacles of social classes.

Michie explores how novelists of the interval captured with specific vividness England’s ambivalent emotional responses to its personal monetary successes and engaged questions just like these raised via political economists and ethical philosophers. each one bankruptcy reads a novelist along a modern philosopher, tracing the improvement of capitalism in Britain: Jane Austen and Adam Smith and the increase of industrial society, Frances Trollope and Thomas Robert Malthus and industrialism, Anthony Trollope and Walter Bagehot and the political impression of cash, Margaret Oliphant and John Stuart Mill and professionalism and managerial capitalism, and Henry James and Georg Simmel and the shift of monetary dominance from England to America.

Even the nice romantic novels of the 19th century can't disentangle themselves from the vulgar query of cash. Michie’s clean studying of the wedding plot, and the alternative among ladies at its middle, exhibits it to be as a lot approximately politics and economics because it is ready own choice.