Waiting Together: Pride and Prejudice

This article did a good job pointing out underlying themes about gender in Pride and Prejudice.On one hand it made me realize some things about the story that I hadn't really thought of before. The main points that it makes about the women often just sitting around waiting for the men, and thus the men really driving the plot forward, made a lot of sense. I thought there was a lot of good analysis of the Bennet family house. The author writes about how the Bennet house is barely described at all, it's the opposite of a warm family home, instead it is an emotionless place that everyone would rather leave. There are a lot of good examples that show how their home is nothing more than a place to be until they can go and get married, I had never really noticed this but after reading this article it makes perfect sense.

On the other hand I feel like this article didn't have much to say. Overall it was making points about the role of women in the society at the time, and how male dominated it was. I was thinking to myself, yeah everyone knows that society then was really male dominated and all, so what else is she trying to say? She also reads into a lot of the text of the story, finding meaning in all sorts of passages. I think it's true there is some information of the subtext, even when it is unintentional by the author it can reflect the author's culture and background. However, Jane Austen was twenty or something when she wrote this and ultimately it feels like a story about love and relationships. There is some deep meaning and cultural relevance in the story, but I doubt the author was trying to create all these statements with her book. So when I read articles like this sometimes it feels like they try too hard to find deep meaning in the text of stories when there aren't any.

Questions: 1. Was Jane Austen concerned with presenting any of the issues mentioned in the article in her book Pride and Prejudice as she wrote it? How much subtext of the story is intentional?
2. Does the author of the article assume Jane Austen wrote with these issues in mind, or did they arise simply from the setting and context of the story? (The way the author writes the article I can't tell if she thinks Jane Austen willfully wrote in a way to present these issues or if she just wrote a story that people can now analyze and read into.)