I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year.
 William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847). copy citation

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Author William Makepeace Thackeray
Source Vanity Fair
Topic women wealth
Date 1847
Language English
Reference
Note
Weblink https://www.gutenberg.org/files/599/599-h/599-h.htm

Context

“She sang Handel and Haydn to the family of evenings, and engaged in a large piece of worsted work, as if she had been born to the business and as if this kind of life was to continue with her until she should sink to the grave in a polite old age, leaving regrets and a great quantity of consols behind her—as if there were not cares and duns, schemes, shifts, and poverty waiting outside the park gates, to pounce upon her when she issued into the world again.
"It isn't difficult to be a country gentleman's wife," Rebecca thought. "I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year. I could dawdle about in the nursery and count the apricots on the wall. I could water plants in a green-house and pick off dead leaves from the geraniums. I could ask old women about their rheumatisms and order half-a-crown's worth of soup for the poor.” source

Meaning and analysis

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