Mind Picker: Pride and Prejudice

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

I read some Jane Austen novels (and a selection of other “classics”) when I was teenager (for my self-improvement, if not my ultimate enjoyment), and they’re mostly all swirled together in my memory as fine, romantic, stodgy reads. Pride and Prejudice has the distinction of being so present in pop culture that I didn’t really need to reread this book to know what it was about, but it turns out that I did need to reread this from my current vantage (of maturity, life experience, and exposure to “difficult” writing and history) in order to really know what it is about. Austen revolutionised the English novel — in particular through her “innovative use of free indirect discourse as a style of third-person narrative”; I may not be able to define that, but I felt and appreciated the intimacy and realism Austen’s writing provides — and what she captures here of gentlewomen’s confined reality during Regency England was entirely satisfying to my literary and sociological interests. And it made me laugh, repeatedly. Of course this isn’t a universal story of the average person (whose miserable existence would be taken up by Dickens fifty years later), but Austen was writing of her own class, writing what she knew, and golden restraints are still restraints when used by the patriarchy to control women’s speech, movement, and lives. I feel no need to go over the plot of this OG enemies-to-lovers tale that everyone knows, but I am going to use this space to record what struck me personally this time through — who knows? Maybe I’ll reread this again in thirty or forty years and want something to compare my then thoughts with — and will note that five stars represent what I think of Pride and Prejudice as an artefact and not my absolute pleasure with this reading experience.

Mr Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character. Her mind was less difficult to develope. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news.

Mrs Bennet might have been a gossipy, uncouth, ninnywitted hypochondriac, but her concerns were genuine: With five daughters (aged from about fifteen to twenty-two at the outset?), and a husband whose estate was entailed to a distant cousin — meaning that when Mr Bennet died, his wife and family would be left homeless and with small incomes as he had produced no male heir — Mrs Bennet was desperate to see her daughters married; and ideally, at least one of them married to a man with a fortune large enough to take care of them all. This wasn’t far off of Austen’s own circumstances: When her father (a poor but respected rector from a good family line) died, Jane, her unmarried sister, Cassandra, and their mother became dependent on Jane’s brothers’ support, eventually settling into a cottage together on one brother’s estate. With no respectable means for women of the genteel class to support themselves — even Austen’s novels were published anonymously, as writing and seeking to publish were seen as unseemly and unfeminine — of course Mrs Bennet was obsessively looking for matches for her daughters (Mr Bennet, with his ironic detachment and desire to do no more than read in his library every day without distractions from domestic matters, was by far the more negligent parent).

I found it intriguing that Austen explores this situation primarily from the POV of Elizabeth Bennet: the strong-willed second-oldest daughter who eventually refuses not one but two offers of marriage from suitors who could have solved everyone’s problems if only she would have them. It was unsurprising that this character would refuse the odious and obsequious Mr Collins — the cousin who was to inherit Longbourn upon Mr Bennet’s death — even if it’s hard to imagine that an actual young woman in her position would have had the freedom to deny him:

My situation in life, my connections with the family of de Bourgh, and my relationship to your own, are circumstances highly in my favour; and you should take it into further consideration, that in spite of your manifold attractions, it is by no means certain that another offer of marriage may ever be made you. Your portion is unhappily so small that it will in all likelihood undo the effects of your loveliness and amiable qualifications. As I must therefore conclude that you are not serious in your rejection of me, I shall choose to attribute it to your wish of increasing my love by suspense, according to the usual practice of elegant females.

(And I do appreciate that Austen has a twenty-seven-year old friend of the family accept this proposal: Lizzie might believe that she can hold out for a love match, but most young women would have felt more pragmatic as their “marriageable years” waned and their prospects dimmed.) To the crux of the title (which Austen apparently borrowed from a passage in Fanny Burney's Cecilia upon the advice of her publisher): Elizabeth and Darcy are each prideful in their own ways (as Lizzie’s sister, Mary, explains, “Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”), and while each have high opinions of their own worth, they each form bad first impressions of the other (she thinks him cold and prideful, he thinks her plain and common; incidentally, “First Impressions” was the original title for this book), and this initial “prejudice” will colour what each thinks of the other, even until the moment that Darcy finds himself proposing to the young woman whom he continues to think of as beneath him:

Elizabeth’s astonishment was beyond expression. She stared, coloured, doubted, and was silent. This he considered sufficient encouragement; and the avowal of all that he felt, and had long felt for her, immediately followed. He spoke well; but there were feelings besides those of the heart to be detailed; and he was not more eloquent on the subject of tenderness than of pride. His sense of her inferiority — of its being a degradation — of the family obstacles which had always opposed to inclination, were dwelt on with a warmth which seemed due to the consequence he was wounding, but was very unlikely to recommend his suit.

I enjoyed the verbal sparring and the arch humour between Elizabeth and Darcy, and I also enjoyed the fun that was made of the most self-satisfied characters — Mr Collins and Mrs Bennet, for sure, but also Lady Catherine (who in her worst excesses was only protecting the rights of her own daughter, sickly as she was, to marry well.) I was intrigued by the amount that was left unsaid between people because propriety forbade it (Does she actually care for me? Would he actually propose to me if he knew my heart?), and it was suitably frustrating to see how people’s impressions of one another (their prejudices) were formed because good manners prevented frankness. Perhaps it was unrealistic, after all, for Austen to pair off the poor-but-deserving Bennet sisters with the two most eligible bachelors to ever breeze through Meryton, but at least they were, ultimately, love matches. (Jane Austen herself never married, and like Elizabeth, turned down a proposal that would have been most advantageous had the suitor not been, according to her first biographer, “a man very hard to like, let alone love”.) I did appreciate that, as aloof as Mr Bennet was from the family, when it came to his favourite, Elizabeth, he hoped Darcy would prove to be a better match than he had found within his own marriage, saying, “My child, let me not have the grief of seeing you unable to respect your partner in life. You know not what you are about.” Easy for a man to say, especially when his “unrespectable” partner is left with all the legwork of getting their daughters settled:

Happy for all her maternal feelings was the day on which Mrs. Bennet got rid of her two most deserving daughters. With what delighted pride she afterwards visited Mrs. Bingley, and talked of Mrs. Darcy, may be guessed. I wish I could say, for the sake of her family, that the accomplishment of her earnest desire in the establishment of so many of her children produced so happy an effect as to make her a sensible, amiable, well-informed woman for the rest of her life; though perhaps it was lucky for her husband, who might not have relished domestic felicity in so unusual a form, that she still was occasionally nervous and invariably silly.

Again, I did very much appreciate this time around what I learned of the times that Austen was writing in — fast on the heels of the French and American Revolutions, the “natural rights of man” never did include women, and the landed gentry in England must have seen the end coming for their own way of living — and Pride and Prejudice not only explores those times, intriguingly, from a female POV, but it does so with immense entertainment value. I loved the whole thing and ought to dust off more of the Austen that has long resided on my shelves, waiting for a reread and rethink.