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DURING JANE AUSTEN’S LIFETIME, THE WORD “SURROGATE” signified almost entirely in a narrow judicial context, to designate a substitute judge or other temporary court officer (OED). Romantic culture never employs “surrogate” to name acts of substitute parenting, and Austen herself never uses the word surrogate, in any sense. 1 When Romantic culture speaks about substitute parenting, it instead typically uses forms of the word “foster,” which in its root sense—food—substitutes one material substance, breast-milk, for another material substance, blood, as the primary marker of kinship. Johnson’s Dictionary offers several columns of definitions in this category: foster-child, foster-mother, foster-brother, foster-father, foster-sister, fosterage, to foster. Austen, however, never uses any form of the word “foster” in the published fiction, which at first glance seems to place her novels at a measurable remove from a normative Romantic discourse on the subject of surrogate parenting. When writing about parents and children, Austen does use the word “adopt” in a handful of instances, however, and I will turn to one of those notable moments before I finish, when Frank Churchill at Box Hill commissions Emma to locate a wife for him in these peculiar terms: “‘Find somebody for me. I am in no hurry. Adopt her, educate her’” (406).
But even here, with the word “adopt,” there is a primary interpretive obstacle. Distinct in England from continental jurisprudence, formal adoption as we understand and practice it today was not recognized in English common law, which understands identity and status as permanently rooted in blood and biology. By “formal adoption,” I mean the modern legal procedure whereby a child with no biological connection to a parent or set of parents is declared by the state to be the full legal equivalent of a natural child of that parent or parents, with all attendant rights and responsibilities. Formal adoption as such was not legalized in Great Britain until 1926, a surprisingly late date (Behlmer). (The first adoption laws in North America were passed in Massachusetts in the 1850s.) Before the twentieth century, surrogate parenting in Britain was a wide spectrum of practices, ranging from extra-legal, ad hoc arrangements to the legal provisions of guardianship for orphans. In equity, blood kinship always loomed as a trump card in all such cases. Adoption as...