India, June 21 -- Dear Reader,

When I first read Pride and Prejudice, I admired Mr. Bennet.

There he was, sitting in his library surrounded by books, urbane and ironic, taking pithy potshots at Mrs. Bennet, fixated on getting her five daughters married.

Only much later did I realize that Mr. Bennet is too lofty to concern himself with his daughters' prospects, leaving Mrs. Bennet to do the frantic, socially humiliating work of matchmaking. Because the truth was that marriage was one of the only avenues for advancement for women at that time; staying unmarried would mean being a dependent poor relation or at best a governess.

This is the great double standard of both literature and life: we vilify the flawed mothers who stay in the tre...