Georgette Heyer Fans discussion
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The Nonesuch Oct 2019 Group Read Spoiler Thread
I agree with what you say! Yes, surely Lydia must have realised the danger of being a 'fallen woman'??I suppose, thinking about it, that she simply assumed that 'of course' her 'dear Wickham' would marry her. Maybe, for example, if she'd realised from the off that he never had any intention of doing so, she'd have backed off?
That said, she obviously doesn't have any 'moral objections' to 'living in sin'....though, again, if she were expecting that 'of course' they would be married, she probably wouldn't see it as 'sin'?
On the other hand again, 'premarital sex' ....even with your eventual husband .....must surely have been a 'bad thing' for a girl morally at least (as well as highly dangerous socially!)
I've always been puzzled by just why Wickham agrees to take her with him! OK, so she was 'free sex' (as opposed to his having to pay a prostitute), but unlike Georgina she had no wealth to acquire etc. Could he have envisaged any kind of payoff from the Bennets? He wouldn't have known Darcy would fork out for him (not realising the Lizzie-Darcy link).
I suppose at some point, had they not been discovered by Darcy in London eventually, Wickham would just have up sticks and walked out on Lydia (probably when the rent was due!).
I suppose Lydia, eventually, would have gone running off to the Gardiners for 'help' and expect to be taken back into the bosom of the family???
I'm enjoying the comparison of Lydia and Tiffany. The main difference I see between them is that Tiffany has Ancilla. Lydia has Mrs. Bennett. Ancilla keeps as tight a rein on Tiffany as she can, while Mrs. Bennett is willing to let Lydia do whatever she likes. Even though Lydia has two parents, Mr. Bennett is, by his own admission, unwilling to exert himself to discipline her.
Ancilla has learned how to say "no" to Tiffany in a way that doesn't sound like no because it appeals to her self-interest.
Mrs. Bennett is unwilling to say "no," but it's a moot point because Lydia refuses to hear it.
Elza wrote: "Ancilla has learned how to say "no" to Tiffany in a way that doesn't sound like no because it appeals to her self-interest."This is a good point! I think someone touched on this upthread but it's interesting that Ancilla makes no effort to actually try to teach Tiffany any genuine morality - she only uses whatever trick is at hand to manipulate Tiffany into the appearance of social grace. This seems a bit slack and underhand from Ancilla, but I don't get any impression from the text that we're meant to judge her for it. Would Ancilla raise her own children in such a way?
While we're comparing to Austen characters it reminds me of the Betrams - raised with all the appearence of morality - but without any deep understanding of it they soon go off the rails!
Beth-In-UK wrote: "On the other hand again, 'premarital sex' ....even with your eventual husband .....must surely have been a 'bad thing' for a girl morally at least (as well as highly dangerous socially!)"I can't remember where I read it, maybe Eavesdropping on Jane Austen's England, or maybe Courtship and Marriage in Jane Austen's World, but I did read that some enterprising historian compared a load of marriage records with baptismal records and found that first children were often born at seven months or less after the wedding. So it seems like people were often having premarital sex in the regency period - when they were sure of marriage to come.
Engagement was much more serious then than it is now. If a man broke off an engagement then a woman could sure him for breach of promise for quite a hefty sum.
Any historians who know better help me out!
I've always wondered why Wickham did it, not Lydia. I can excuse Lydia for being young, romantic, stupid, and trusting. But Wickham didn't seem stupid. Would being a known seducer of respectable girls have ruined his military career? Even when he married her they had to move North, away from everyone that they'd embarrassed (poor Colonel Forster!).
I think Ancilla was being practical - she knew Tiffany well enough to know teaching her actual morals was a lost cause. Maybe she had tried, back at the school? so she knew it wouldn't work and settled for manipulating Tiffany as best she could.
Jackie wrote: "Maybe she had tried, back at the school?"Yes, that's a good point!
I dunno, I just feel like in some ways Ancilla is actually harmful for Tiffany. Like, the way that Ancilla tries to scotch the Tiffany/Julian relationship by telling Tiffany that she shouldn't settle for a mere baron, she deserves nothing less than a Marquis. And then later she has a good laugh with Waldo about Tiffany's absurd plan to marry any peer she can get her hands on - as if Ancilla hadn't been actively encouraging her in that plan!
Kinda two-faced and bitchy?
I wouldn't say Ancilla was actively encouraging her, more like diverting her? I think Ancilla is 'clever' in the way she 'handles' Tiffany, but it is more like putting a bandaid on a wound, it won't last, and isn't really addressing the actual problem, which is Tiffany's appalling narcissism and selfishness.
Also, the band aid won't last because Tiffany will soon 'wise up' to what Ancilla is doing (or anyone else who tries to 'soft soap' her in that way). She will swiftly become completely 'unmanageable'.
I would agree that as you say, Ancilla's strategy could be actually harmful, because it is not a cure, only a sop.
I suspect Wickham probably didn't do much of the seducing! I suspect it was Lydia who made all the running! I think Wickham probably was a bit stupid in ruining Lydia, because yes, that would have got out, no doubt about it, and that might well have jeoparidsed his chances of a lucrative marriage (which really was his only chance now of fortune, having frittered away what he got from the Darcy's).
He must have realised that it was only because Darcy would not want to publicise the near-elopement with Georgiana that he was able to pretend that he was squeaky clean.
By the way, I don't buy Darcy's own confession to Elizabeth that he didn't tell anyone about what Wickham had done because of a dislike of talking about his own family ....in that, had he done so, it would have been Georgiana's reputation that could have been damaged. Yes, a 15 y/o girl is 'innocent' (well, not if you're Lidia of course!)(interesting they are the same age - see below!), but mud sticks, etc etc. It would not have helped Georgiana that she so nearly eloped with a bounder.
Re Georgiana and Lydia being the same age (or when they were involved with Wickham), something I've never thought about before but which has just struck me, is there an element, I wonder of even greater 'dodginess' about Wickham, that he seemed to 'like' very young girls????????? I'd not thought about it before, and yes, maybe the big positive for him about very young girls was not necessarily his own er 'sexual preferences' (???) but that they were young enough to be taken in by him.
Which again begs the question, had Lizzie Bennett Wickham before she met Darcy (who of course puts her back up), would she have been so deceived by him herself?
That's a really interesting point about the Bertram girls! They, too, lacked any maternal guidance at all - the mother is one brain cell removed from an idiot (kindly, but almost catatonically stupid), and of course Mrs Norris is simply a 'bad angel' from the off.
Lady Bertram is perhaps Mrs Underhill to the nth degree???
Re sex before marriage - the baptismal records are a bit 'chicken and egg' to my mind! It could be, yes, that once engaged one was 'OK' to have sex, and so get pregnant, or it could be that after getting pregnant marriage had to follow on pretty smartish or shot guns would be extracted from gun cases etc etc! I seem to recall that 'amongst the lower orders' it was a lot less important to be a 'virgin bride'. Maybe because that was there was no property to inherit, therefore controlling female sexuality was less critical for them? It was only where there was property to inherit that a man needed to know for certain that any children were biologically his.
On the other hand again, maybe amongst the lower orders, fertility was important - the more children the more workers in the family, etc, so waiting to see if the woman you were planning to marry could get pregnant before you married her, was prudent. The pregnancy could have been the 'proof' that the man needed to reassure him on that!
It would be interesting to know what percentage of 'upper class' children were born at 7 months!
As an aside, sometimes a shot gun marriage could have amazing consequences. After all, if the 18 year old Will Shakespeare hadn't got the (26?) Anne Hathaway pregnant, he might never run off to London to become the greatest playwright in the English language! After all, if you ruin your life at 18 (and I can't believe it was anything other than a total and complete disaster for him!), what else is there to do?
Still on this subject, given the very high rate of infant mortality up until modern times, there must have been a significant percentage of those 'shot-gun' marriages in which the triggering pregnancy resulted in a baby that never grew up at all. That must have been pretty galling for both the man and the woman!
"But they weren't exactly living openly, were they? They were living hiddenly. Mr Bennett couldn't trace them, only Darcy because he had some clue about Wickham's old accomplice (I forget her name)."But the problem was that 'everyone' knew that Lydia had run off with Wickham (or the other way round, knowing Lydia!)!! The colonel's wife writes to the Bennets saying that Lydia has put herself in the 'protection' of Wickham, so 'everyone' knew, as in those who knew Lydia in Brighton, and then of course it would swiftly get back to Meryton. Scandal travels fast!
And then, too, the longer that Wickham and Lydia remained hidden (ie, 'unfound') the bigger the scandal! It meant that 'everyone' would know she hadn't just spent ONE night with him, but night after night after night!!!
I wonder what would have happened to the Bennets had the marriage not taken place (ie, Wickham not being paid off). Lizzie and Jane admit to each other it would significantly reduce their chance of marrying well, or even at all, but would they all have to move from Longborn? If so, where to? (they could have let the place presumably, as Sir Walter Eliot does Kellynch Hall, though on a smaller scale). I can't think even far up north, etc, that the news would not have followed them eventually.
If they stayed at Longborn would they have been socially ostracised for having a 'fallen daughter'?
There must have been families to whom this social disgrace did, indeed, happen, so I wonder what the social 'code' of the day would have exacted?
As for Lydia, presumably Mrs Bennett would have wanted her back in the bosom of her family - but Lydia would, just as Tiffany does in a much slighter way, have had to face up to being no longer 'socially desirable'. (But, conversely, VERY desirable to all the lads in the neighbourhood!!!!)
I suspect that even a socially disgraced Lydia, whether at Longborn or packed off elsewhere (like Maria Bertram post Henry Crawford crim con), would have remained ungovernable and a complete handful. I doubt she would ever repent!
I've heard both that the lower and the upper classes were more lenient about extra and pre marital sex, each than the other. I also read that at roughly the same period there was a belief among the better off that the poor were promiscuous, but among a certain type of working poor, the reverse was true. It must have varied somewhat by region and time. Still, based on my own observations in the pre- reliable birth control period, there might have been a certain amount of family drama on the revelation of a pregnancy in an unmarried daughter, but if the father was a steady lad who intended to (and did) marry her, everything settled down pretty quickly. If marriage wasn't an option, family adopti meon of the infant was the rule. Sometimes families could be surprisingly understanding. One of my ancestors, in what was said to be a morally strict area, had an illigitimate child. He died shortly after his son was born, but the boy and his mother seem to have been accepted as part of the family.
Yes, I think there were general rules, and then individual family rules, so to speak. As you say, a lot would depend on just who you had extramarital sex with! If it was more 'pre-marital', and the bloke was someone it would be fine to marry, and were probably going to anyway, then a seventh month baby wasn't really a problem. Sure, a few tongues would wag, but it wasnt' really a social disgrace, just a bit premature!But if the father were someone out of your class, whom you would never marry, or who would never marry you, then I suspect it was different.
Like you, I have an ancestress who worked as a maid in a 'big house' and had a fling with the son of the house.....there was no question he could marry her, but her family obtained acknowledgement of paternity from his parents (he was only a teenager apparently - as was she - I feel sorry for the pair of them....these days it would be nothing at all, and anyway, she probably would have used contraception, or he would have). The family paid the girl's family a sum of money towards the child, who was, so we understand, raised by the maternal grandparents.
I think the latter was pretty common, right into the last century. I believe the author, Catherine Cookson, from a very working class 'Geordie' family in Newcastle Upon Tyne, grew up not realising that her 'elder sister' was actually her mother!
It was probably easier to get away with that sort of sleight of hand if women had loads of children, because it was not uncommon for a woman to have her last child as she menopaused, when her first child was also of childbearing age.
Again, this happened back in my family, where an uncle was very nearly younger than his own nephew!
(Must be very odd, I would think, to be a young pregnant woman and to have your mum pregnant as well! Weird!)
My Grandmother and Aunt were expecting at the same time, and I had a coworker with the same situation - it still happens :)
My great grandmother reared quite a few children in this situation. Farmers daughters in the area who ''got into trouble'' with farm labourers were mainly the mothers of these children. The child would be handed over to my great grandmother at night and she would be given money to rear them as her own. She was a wonderful person and had twelve children herself. There's a story behind her life that you wouldn't read in a book.
How interesting! What was your great-grandmother's situation or position, that she became the go-to person for informally adopting these children?
Teresa, sounds like a happier ending than being despatched to one of those cruel Magdelane homes for fallen women run by vindictive nuns!!!
Critterbee - the mums must have been young when they had the daughters that then were pregnant at the same time as themselves!!!!!
Tadiana, she was a farm labourers wife. None of the children were ever adopted. She just reared them and they went out into the world later and that was it. There was one that ended up being included in the family for life. Her descendants are still around today. They think they're our cousins, they were never told, but my Mother told me about it. She was kinda the historian of the family. Told me lots of things over the years. You would really have to know my great grandmother's life story to understand a lot of it. Honestly, you couldn't make it up!!!
Hmm, my Grandmother was 26 when she had her first child, and 47 when she had her last child. 47 seems kinda old to have a child, but I know it is becoming more common for women are having babies after 50.
Oh, there were no big houses in my story! My ancestor was born to an extremely impoverished branch of a New England family in 1817. He was plagued by bad health - some of it supposedly caused by a head injury in childhood, and died at 24 after surgery. His own father was an alcoholic - there's a letter from his mother refusing to live with his father, although she says his children would help him if he "Left off Drinking Rum and behaves as a man should". My ancestor fell in love with a woman born in 1800 who had a withered arm and had been raised partly on a poor farm because her own family was so poor. Their son never knew his father, who died when he was an infant, and he and his mother were raised with the help of the town (public assistance of the day) and sometimes relatives. He started to support his mother early, working as a farm laborer, but had enough education that he eventually became a teacher and then had a religious conversion and became a clergyman. It's really an extraordinary story about how ordinary people managed in quite difficult circumstances.Yes, the family adoption by (often) the maternal grandparents was quite a common option here in eastern Canada too, right up to the 20th century, when marriage was not an option. I knew people raised like that - I think mostly they knew their biological parentage early on, although you do hear stories of people to whom the revelation came as a shock. You can guess at such situations in old census records, although without a birth certificate you can't prove it, and even with a birth certificate you couldn't usually identify the biological father because he wouldn't be listed. Someone asked me about tracing his ancestry in such a case, but I couldn't help him. He had heard tales that he was descended from a certain man, but anyone who would know for sure is dead, and without a marriage, the father wasn't identified anywhere.
The idea of a "change of life baby" was well-known, and most women in this area married in the early 20s and started having babies immediately. So when you look at the records and think "If that child was a change of life baby, the mother sure started menopause really late!" And then you notice other children, daughters who were in the late teens or early twenties when their little sibling was born - it's a good bet the youngest was actually a grandchild of the listed mother.
I don't think it was really hiding the baby or any kind of sleight of hand. People in small rural communities knew perfectly well who was pregnant, and could probably guess at the father. In fact, "going to visit Auntie" as it used to be called was sometimes looked down on as hypocrisy. I remember the gossips in my old home town saying that so-and-so SAID she was going to visit relatives, but everyone knew she was really pregnant and trying to hide it. Who did she think she was fooling? Note, the gossip wasn't about how evil she was to have had extramarital sex!!
Goodness, there are some very interesting ancestors here!The most exciting one I'm aware of in my family is a great-grandmother who abandoned her husband (a clerk) to run off with a cavalry officer. She left her young daughter (my grandmother) behind, though. Very sad for her.
It's truly sobering to hear how grim so many people's lives were. Shows how well off we are (mostly!) in comparison. Nick, I suspect she had no option, as in, she wouldn' have been allowed any contact with her daughter anyway.
I know to us it seems the worst cruelty to abandon a child, but I guess in households that were relatively 'wealthy' (eg, if your g.grandmother ran off with an officer?), parents usually didn't have a great deal of contact with their own children anyway, so, hopefully, an 'abandoned' child would not 'miss' their mother that much?
But maybe that is too hopeful!
It also doesn't allow for the grief of the abandoning mum (if she felt any). Anna Karenina definitely grieves for her abandoned son.
It could be that the threat of losing your children, more than losing your social respectability, was more effective in keeping wives 'in line'????
Sometimes it was best all round if the child was left in what seemed a good stable place. Sometimes there were legal reasons - the father had custody, sometimes he insisted on it out of bitterness, sometimes he had more or less well-founded suspicions about the care the child would get from a stepfather. Heyer used these as plot devices. I knew women who gave up babies when official closed adoptions took over from private family arrangements. Some grieved the loss, some didn't do much. So many possibilities and stories, and in many real life cases we'll never know the details. A novel gives a possible story!
Beth-In-UK wrote: "It could be that the threat of losing your children, more than losing your social respectability, was more effective in keeping wives 'in line'????."Oh yeah, I think this was very true historically. There are some pretty sad books about it out there like: Wedlock. We're very lucky to live in a time when kids have more rights.
Cheryl wrote: "Heyer used these as plot devices.."
I always like it in Sylvester - That madcap romp around France.
I was a census-taker way back when, and I had a 52 year old mother and father with a 4 month old baby - theirs, as I tactfully asked, and since there were no other relatives living with them, and I had no reason to believe that they were liars, I believed them. She could easily by that time have already been a grandmother, too; in fact, a great-grandmother!
From what I have read, for the landed classes pre-marital sex for women was the end of their chances (if found out). Once they had provided the heir (plus an extra or two), it depended on the family whether extra-marital sex was a huge issue in this era. Emily, Lady Cowper, for example, had a long running, but discreet affair with Palmerston, and her younger children were said to resemble Palmerston (one changed his surname to Palmerston's as well!) but was one of the Almack's patronesses and one of the social elite.
The middle classes placed more emphasis on respectability, both before and after marriage.
For those without any inheritance, pregnancy and proof of fertility often was the trigger for marriage.
My claim to fame in matters of respectability was a great-grandfather who was - maybe! - a bigamist!
My mother's grandparents separated in the 1930s, he moved looking for work during the Depression When he found a job she joined him for a while, but with 4 young children decided to go back to live near her family where she had more support. Their relationship did not survive, but divorce for the working class did not exist at that time.
At some point he lived (for the rest of his life) with another woman and she was known as his wife (a long way from where his wife and children lived). Whether he married her bigamously, or she simply put a ring on her finger and they moved to a new area as husband and wife, no-one quite knows!
He visited his son once (my mother's father) when my mother was a child, and was referred to in her hearing as a friend of her father. A couple of years later she asked her mother when her grandfather had died (she had assumed he was dead) and her mother gave her one of 'those' looks and said that he hadn't died and my mother knew not to ask any more! At some point she found out that the 'friend' who had visited was actually her grandfather...
My mother has done quite a lot of family research, another relative (great-lots of great-uncle) was hanged for murder, others were officially recorded on the census as 'mudlarks' - they scavanged for anything sale-able in the mud of the Thames at low tide. We did have some respectable ancestors as well, though! But once you get back pre-welfare state, unless you were in the small % of the population that had some access to family resources, survival outweighed respectability.
Jenny wrote: "But about The Nonesuch ...."Ancilla is doing what she's being paid to do. Teach Tiffany how to act like a lady and Ancilla has to use special tactics to do it. Tiffany didn't have parents to teach her how to behave but she must have had a nurse who should have taught the child manners. The difference between Tiffany and Lydia Bennet is that Tiffany is crafty. She knows what she wants and how to get it. Lydia isn't that smart. She sees an opportunity and grabs it. She believed Wickham was going to marry her and didn't understand or think about how her actions affected the rest of the family. She's also younger than Tiffany and hasn't been to London or to school the way Tiffany has. I imagine Mrs. Bennet was much like Lydia in her youth.
Jenny wrote: "But about The Nonesuch ...."Haha--I don't have much to add to this discussion, but I did thoroughly enjoy the book. Very much a Cinderella tale--and if Heyer wrote any others so clearly in that vein, I'm not remembering them.
QNPoohBear wrote: "Ancilla is doing what she's being paid to do. Teach Tiffany how to act like a lady and Ancilla has to use special tactics to do it."I was going to object that a governess is surely supposed to teach a girl how to be a lady - not just how to act like one. But actually, I think you're right. By the time Tiffany's family hire Ancilla they're just profoundly grateful to find someone who can exert any control at all, and it's partially why they're paying her so much.
I think Tiffany is already too set in her ways, and the family is just trying damage control.
Ancilla is Charlotte's governess and Tiffany's companion. She isn't paid to teach Tiffany- just hold on to the girl until Aunt Burford is ready to bring Tiffany "out" in the spring. Tiffany is too much spoiled. I think Courtenay is good for her because he tells it like it is. They're always arguing and he sees right through her. Might they end up together after all?
QNPoohBear wrote: "Ancilla is Charlotte's governess and Tiffany's companion. She isn't paid to teach Tiffany- just hold on to the girl until Aunt Burford is ready to bring Tiffany "out" in the spring. Tiffany is too ..."Whoa, mind. blown.
They would be perfect, what a story that would make - forced proximity, enemies to lovers, happily ever after. Can Tiffany set sail and get blown off course to some desert island, where she develops compassion for others as she fights to survive, and Courtenay sees how much she grows, and then they are rescued and marry and retire to Tunbridge Wells!
Defo agree Tiffany is cleverer than Lydia who is, indeed, basically stupid. (And desperately irritating to everyone else!)
I love it, Critterbee! QNPoohBear's idea is blowing my mind, too.
QNPoohBear wrote: "Ancilla is Charlotte's governess and Tiffany's companion."I don't think so? The Burford's employed Ancilla to take care of Tiffany, so anything she does for Charlotte is just a favour to Mrs Underhill. Another reason why Mrs Underhill is so grateful to her.
I do seem to remember Mrs Underhill calling Ancilla a governess-companion on occasion, but it's pretty clear that Ancilla is in a position of authority over Tiffany, who is not 'out', so she's more than just a companion?
(Dammit - the downside of reading paper books is that I can't easily use the search function to check!)
Nick wrote: "QNPoohBear wrote: "Ancilla is Charlotte's governess and Tiffany's companion."I don't think so? The Burford's employed Ancilla to take care of Tiffany, so anything she does for Charlotte is just a..."
That's how I remember it, too, Nick; it even seems as though I remember Mrs. Underhill mentioning Ancilla's condescension, niceness, something, in teaching Charlotte, too?
Do you really think Tiffany would put up with a governess? There's a reason Ancilla is paid so much more than other governess/companions! Tiffany went to school and they couldn't handle her. She got kicked out and she spent time in London. Tiffany sees herself as being more worldly than she is and anyone who knows teenagers know they won't do anything they're told. I think Ancilla is doing the best she can to make sure Tiffany doesn't ruin her reputation before her comeout but isn't really teaching Tiffany anything.
There is a section early in the book where Ancilla's position is explained: Tiffany had been expelled from school, and behaved so badly in her London uncle's house that her aunt demanded she be sent away immediately. She was sent to the Underhills with Ancilla in tow because her London relatives needed someone to keep her somewhat in line (not ruin her reputation badly enough to preclude marriage). The Underhills talk about Tiffany's horrible tantrums that throw the whole house out of whack, and Mrs. Underhill is also afraid that if Tiffany feels ill-used, she will complain to her London uncle and demand to be taken away - which Mrs. U doesn't want. As Mrs. U is her employer, Ancilla has to deal with T in a way that doesn't contradict Mrs. U's needs...
And Aniclla is being responsible by not teaching/ encouraging Tiffany to be manipulative and conniving, which she would if she figured out how to do that - luckily, she is not that bright. :S
Critterbee❇ wrote: "And Aniclla is being responsible by not teaching/ encouraging Tiffany to be manipulative and conniving,"Ha, so setting aside whether Ancilla's official role is governess, companion, or animal-handler, I think this is the pivot of my point. I think Ancilla is encouraging Tiffany to be the worst version of herself, although I totally understand that she's doing it in an effort to keep Tiffany under control.
Like, she encourages Tiffany to think herself too good for a Baron (to scotch any romance with Julian). She reminds Tiffany that her blue dress will clash with the green drawingroom (to get Tiffany to give up on going out to dinner). She tells Tiffany that girls who boast of their beauty are less attractive to men. I think there are more instances like this. In every case, Ancilla is encouraging Tiffany to think in selfish, vain terms, which is useful for controlling her now, but in the long run is only fixing her worst habits of mind.
Ancilla's methods were the only means that worked at all - everything else had been tried and failed.
Nick wrote: "Critterbee❇ wrote: "And Aniclla is being responsible by not teaching/ encouraging Tiffany to be manipulative and conniving,"Ha, so setting aside whether Ancilla's official role is governess, comp..."
Nick, Ancilla was using the *only* methods that worked on Tiffany at that point. Tiffany has shown herself impervious to appeals to her better self to the point that Ancilla even says somewhere that she doubts Tiffany *has* a better self (am paraphrasing) - and Ancilla knows that her methods are dubious - she says that too, to Waldo. But says those are the only methods that work now, given her lack of actual authority over Tiffany.
Maith wrote: "those are the only methods that work now, given her lack of actual authority over Tiffany"Jackie wrote: "Ancilla's methods were the only means that worked at all - everything else had been tried and failed."
Hmm, yes, it probably does depend on how much authority the Burford's have given Ancilla, doesn't it? And how upset Mrs Underhill will be by any unpleasantness in her house.
At one point Ancilla says something like, she's tried everything and she can't just lock Tiffany in her room because she'll only climb out the window. Which just makes me think, why not lock the window too? In Vilette, in the mid-1850s, Lucy Snowe exerts her authority over naughty school-girls by locking them in the supply cupboard!
Is nobody authorised to confiscate Tiffany's favourite dresses, or withhold her pin money, or ground her?
Lots of people make comparisons to Scarlett O'Hara, which I think are very apt, but even Scarlett often felt guilty about her behaviour because her mother set her a good example and taught her what a lady ought to be.
I suppose, in a way, I feel sorry for Tiffany. Lots of characters in the book look forward with relish to the day when Tiffany goes to far and gets her comeuppance, and I feel like it really won't be entirely her own fault because nobody ever even tried to teach her right from wrong.
I think if those items truly belonged to her (dresses, pin money) and they were withheld, Tiffany would make a case with her uncles and likely be allowed to have her things regardless. That would make her feel more justified and stronger in her conviction that whatever she wanted, she should have.If Tiffany made a scene about being mistreated, that would damage the entire family, and Mrs. U is already so conscious of her social standing - it means so much to her - that she would shrink from any public scandal.
What a situation! I don't see a way out of it, with Tiffany herself wanting to change.
Georgette Heyer Fans
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But they weren't exactly living openly, were they? They were living hiddenly. Mr Bennett couldn't trace them, only Darcy because he had some clue about Wickham's old accomplice (I forget her name).
Lydia was thoughtless and silly and reckless, but she did sincerely believe that she was going to be married to Wickham. I can see that she would've thought herself the heroine of a wild romance rather than seedy immorality.