The Other Bennet Sister

by Janice Hadlow

How, she mused, are we to understand happiness, and the ways in which it is brought about?

Is it determined by inherited temperament? Or is it all a matter of chance, a quality arbitrarily bestowed on some but not on others? Do our circumstances matter? Are beauty and wealth more likely to produce happiness than goodness and self-sacrifice? And is there anything an individual can do to improve their own sense of contentment and satisfaction?

“I suppose all enquiry is a mixture of the intellectual and the personal. How can we know where one begins and the other ends? And surely, the search for happiness—for individual happiness—is one that concerns us all, does it not?”