Posted by The Law School
22 July 2025On 11 July 2025 the University of Exeter’s Bracton Centre for Legal History Research hosted the annual Law and Humanities roundtable at Reed Hall. This year the theme was ‘Jane Austen’s Legal World’, commemorating the 250th anniversary of the author’s birth in 1775.
Law and Humanities editor David Gurnham and Bracton Centre director Rebecca Probert welcomed attendees. Over the course of the day, the papers presented underscored the depth and accuracy of Austen’s legal knowledge in a range of areas.
Anne Bottomley (Kent) examined three of Austen’s female characters: Fanny Price, on the margins of the family in Mansfield Park; Harriet Smith in Emma, described as a child of ‘some-one’ but legally a child of ‘no-one’; and Miss Lambe in the unfinished Sanditon, an heiress of Anglo-Antigan mixed heritage – linking the latter to the ‘reputed children’ of plantation owners (like Sir Thomas in Mansfield Park). Nichola McNulty (Bath Spa) explored Austen’s portrayal of women’s rights in the family home through the lens of feminist jurisprudence. She noted Austen’s subtle but persistent feminist battle cry, advocating for women’s rights in the family home through the voice of her heroines and often through their mothers – including Mrs Bennet, all too often dismissed as simply silly.
John Avery Jones examined how a knowledge of ecclesiastical law can increase one’s understanding of Austen’s novels – in particular the law of simony, underpinning the frequent sales of presentations to a living, and the minimum age for ordination, providing evidence of people’s ages. He also set Austen’s own will in the context of the contemporary rules on probate and legacy duty. Rebecca Probert (Exeter) then showed how Austen expected her readers to know the law on weddings, separations, and divorce – and why Elizabeth and Darcy did not get married by special licence, despite Mrs Bennet’s hopes. She also posited that the depiction of the relationship between Edmund and Fanny in Mansfield Park was designed to raise questions about cousin marriage.
After lunch, Elena Cooper, the Arts Reviews Editor for Law and Humanities, gave a presentation on the journal’s Arts Reviews section. The final three papers all addressed different aspects of property and inheritance in Austen’s novels. Marco Mazzocca (Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice), discussed how Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility offer a literary examination of property law and its role in perpetuating gendered inequalities under the guise of rational order, with law in Austen’s world being not merely a set of rules but a cultural narrative. Pauline Marshall (Sorbonne) focused on the representation of inheritance and more particularly the system of ‘entail’ in Pride & Prejudice, noting that Austen’s female characters spend far more time discussing entails than her male characters, and how the entail is the central force driving the plot as the Bennet daughters’ inability to inherit their father’s estate forces them to seek financially secure marriages to avoid poverty. Jolene Zigarovich (University of Northern Iowa) concluded the day with a more positive discussion of female economic power, discussing female-to-female bequests in wills. She identified women who inherit, distribute, or are gifted money and property from other women in Austen’s fiction (Sanditon, Sense and Sensibility) or who are heiresses in their own right (Emma).