Money has little to do with happiness, insists impulsive Marianne Dashwood in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. It can only give pleasure, she says, where there is nothing else in life to provide it. Sir Mervyn King's hint that Jane Austen is a likely candidate to adorn the new £10 note raises the issue of whether the author of such subversive sentiments is a proper choice for such a responsibility. Surely someone like Emily Brontë, whose stock market investments on her family's behalf belie her unworldly image, or George Eliot, with her appetite for large advances and interest in Germany, might be a more business-friendly choice of novelist? Happily, Jane Austen was the creator not just of Marianne Dashwood but of her more practical sister Elinor, who understands that money has much to do with happiness and who ensured that the Dashwoods lived within their means in a manner that would impress even George Osborne.