Many of her complaints have a core of perfectly reasonable stuff to them. They're just surrounded by so much garbage (and so little practical thought or actions about how to respond) that the signal to noise ratio as a whole is fairly low.
You know what Austen lady has perfectly reasonable complaints that aren't taken seriously, partly because she's a woman? Anne Elliot's sister Mary Musgrove. She's portrayed as a whining attention-seeker. But I noticed the last time I read it that a lot of her complaints are actually reasonable when you don't just assume she's a whining attention-seeker. Such as her complaint, when her son has a bad fall, that she's the one expected to stay home and nurse him just because she's the mother, while her husband can go off to a dinner party with no censure. As for her health--because she's got no "obvious" physical symptoms, and it fluctuates, the general assumption within the novel and many readers is that she's just a hypochondriac and/or faking it for maximum effect. But there are a lot of disorders that a) they didn't have any clue about back then, b) don't have obvious physical signs like fever or chills or coughing, c) can be very debilitating, and d) are more likely to be found in women. Fibromyalgia, for example.
She's not a very pleasant person. She's very self-centered and absurdly status-conscious (although less so than Sir Walter or Miss Elliot). But that doesn't mean she's wrong or a hypochondriac.
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You know what Austen lady has perfectly reasonable complaints that aren't taken seriously, partly because she's a woman? Anne Elliot's sister Mary Musgrove. She's portrayed as a whining attention-seeker. But I noticed the last time I read it that a lot of her complaints are actually reasonable when you don't just assume she's a whining attention-seeker. Such as her complaint, when her son has a bad fall, that she's the one expected to stay home and nurse him just because she's the mother, while her husband can go off to a dinner party with no censure. As for her health--because she's got no "obvious" physical symptoms, and it fluctuates, the general assumption within the novel and many readers is that she's just a hypochondriac and/or faking it for maximum effect. But there are a lot of disorders that a) they didn't have any clue about back then, b) don't have obvious physical signs like fever or chills or coughing, c) can be very debilitating, and d) are more likely to be found in women. Fibromyalgia, for example.
She's not a very pleasant person. She's very self-centered and absurdly status-conscious (although less so than Sir Walter or Miss Elliot). But that doesn't mean she's wrong or a hypochondriac.