by Helena Kelly
We’re so familiar with what happens between them that we fail to register quite how wholly improper much of their behaviour is. Theirs is an astonishingly frank, astonishingly intense relationship, and almost no one, except for the two of them, knows that it’s happening at all, certainly not the true extent of it. The news of their engagement comes as a complete shock to Elizabeth’s family; it’s met with flat incredulity.
Elizabeth, we know, is impatient of convention and established modes of behaviour, not for the sake of being contrary, but when she considers that they’re being clung to for no good reason. Her ‘lively, playful disposition […] delighted’, Jane informs us, ‘in anything ridiculous’. ‘I dearly love a laugh’, Elizabeth admits early in the novel, but when Darcy, instinctively recoiling, accuses her of mindless, unthinking mockery, she contradicts him. No. Her laughter has direction, purpose, even: ‘I hope I never ridicule what is wise and good. Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies, do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.’
The wisdom of the ages is, for Elizabeth, as open to doubt as anything else. Darcy at one point brings Shakespeare into a discussion about poetry. ‘I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love’, he says, half-quoting from Twelfth Night. But Elizabeth thinks otherwise: ‘Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away.’
Elizabeth is, fundamentally, a radical. She knows her own mind; she reserves the right to decide questions for herself. There are plenty of kinds of authority that she doesn’t recognise, or tolerates only as far as it suits her. On occasion we see her all but disciplining her own mother – ‘For heaven’s sake, madam, speak lower’, she says. This is not what dutiful daughters do. Elizabeth views even her father, the head of her family, with a critical eye. She had, Jane tells us, ‘never been blind to the impropriety of her father’s behaviour as a husband’, deeming it ‘highly reprehensible’. At one point, when she’s trying to persuade him not to let Lydia go to Brighton, she tells him, in essence, what an incompetent parent he is: ‘Excuse me, for I must speak plainly. If you, my dear father, will not take the trouble of checking her exuberant spirits, and of teaching her that her present pursuits are not to be the business of her life, she will soon be beyond the reach of amendment.’
When, towards the end of the novel, Lady Catherine appears on Elizabeth’s doorstep and demands that the younger woman undertake never to marry Darcy, her demands are couched in language that Burke would have recognised and approved, the kind of language he used himself in Reflections on the Revolution. It’s all obligation, obedience, claims, ‘honour, decorum, prudence’, ‘duty’, and ‘gratitude’. And it comes up against a completely different kind of language. ‘You have no right’, announces Elizabeth. ‘What is that to me?’ she asks. She is, she says, ‘only resolved to act in that manner, which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness.’ Society be damned – Darcy and Elizabeth’s relationship is nothing to do with anyone else.
Elizabeth’s undutifulness as a daughter, her laughter, her lack of reverence for Mr Collins, her lack of respect for Lady Catherine de Bourgh, they’re all of a piece. Elizabeth is, in short, constructed to be a conservative’s nightmare.
Elizabeth transgresses almost as much as Marianne Dashwood does, perhaps even more, but Jane never devises any punishment for her. There’s no illness, no betrayal, no watching the man she loves marry someone else while she makes do with second best. All Elizabeth is made to do is change her mind about Darcy when she’s presented with new evidence, which is completely in line with radical thinking. Jane seems, indeed, to have been very attached to Elizabeth – her comments on the character are the only definitive record we have of what she thought about any of her heroines.u ‘I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print’, she writes, in the first of her two letters penned straight after the novel’s publication, ‘& how I shall be able to tolerate those who do not like her at least, I do not know’. The majority of readers over the past 200 years have tended to agree with the author, but the approval has by no means been universal.
In common with both Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility, the evidence points very much to Pride and Prejudice never having obtained the readership it was intended for, to its having been published out of its time. The literary magazines didn’t, in 1813, discuss Elizabeth as a radical heroine, though the Critical Review remarked on her ‘quickness of perception’ and ‘strength of mind’ and identified her as the ‘Beatrice of the tale’ – comparing her to the heroine of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, another strong-willed, self-assured woman with determined ideas of her own and a tongue sharp enough to puncture any inflated ego she encounters. The reviewer was convinced, however, that Elizabeth’s ‘independence of character […] is kept within the proper line of decorum’.
But there was at least one contemporary reader who thought Elizabeth shockingly indecorous, badly judged – a woman called Mary Russell Mitford who was herself a writer and so perhaps more attuned to exactly what Jane was doing in the novel. Mitford rather admired Jane, as a novelist, but she couldn’t stand Elizabeth:
It is impossible not to feel in every line of Pride and Prejudice, in every word of ‘Elizabeth’, the entire want of taste which could produce so pert, so worldly a heroine as the beloved of such a man as Darcy. Wickham is equally bad. Oh! they were just fit for each other, and I cannot forgive that delightful Darcy for parting them. Darcy […] is of all characters the best designed and the best sustained.v
Darcy is, though, by no means the paragon that Mitford seems to be suggesting here. As he says himself, ‘I have faults enough’. Certainly he isn’t a conservative paragon, and though he resolves the difficulties of the plot, he doesn’t do so in a way conservatives would have been able to really approve of. He has pride in his birth, he has prejudices in favour of rank, he appeals, at times, to recognised authority, and to ‘natural’ – generally accepted, time-honoured – ideas, but Jane makes it apparent from early on that he is ‘clever’, too clever, ultimately, to reject the justice of Elizabeth’s criticisms and arguments.
In fact there are indications that he’s receptive to new ideas even before he begins to be seriously attracted to Elizabeth. Darcy is, we learn, ‘always buying books’. He cannot, he says, ‘comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these’. What books does he buy? He is, we learn in this scene, guardian to a very much younger sister. Rather endearingly, and rather radically, too, he buys books about bringing up young women, written by older women. Not for him the old-fashioned, male-authored conduct books such as Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women, which Jane mentions elsewhere in Pride and Prejudice. Darcy ends the lengthy discussion about female accomplishments, which takes place in the drawing room at Netherfield, by pronouncing that dancing and modern languages are all well and good, but that a truly accomplished woman ‘must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading’. It’s a clear reference to a work by Hester Chapone called Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, which details how girls can educate themselves through a proper programme of reading. Jane herself was presumably aware that Chapone had been praised by no less a radical than Mary Wollstonecraft in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman and many of Jane’s readers would have been aware of that too.
Darcy is excited by Elizabeth’s unconventionality – it speaks deeply to some hidden, largely repressed part of his own character. He can’t stop himself arguing with her, about women’s accomplishments, about poetry, about Scottish dancing, about music, about other people, about themselves. In Kent, he deliberately and repeatedly seeks her out. He visits her at the parsonage house and walks alone with her in the park at Rosings. As Elizabeth crossly summarises these occasions in her own mind, ‘it was not merely a few formal inquiries and an awkward pause and then away,
but he actually thought it necessary to turn back and walk with her’. After her rejection of his proposal, and their subsequent furious argument, he again accosts her privately, and hands her a long letter. It takes up the best part of a chapter; it’s more than 2,500 words long. He hands it to her, we’re told, ‘soon after breakfast’. He began to write it ‘at eight o’clock in the morning’ – that’s when it’s dated. Earlier on, Bingley jokingly explains that Darcy doesn’t write ‘with ease’, that he ‘studies too much for words of four syllables’. But this letter is written in far too short a period of time to have been ‘studied’. It’s written from the heart. Giving it to Elizabeth at all is a terrible idea, shockingly risky, both in that he might be seen handing it to her, giving rise to all sorts of gossip, and in that it talks frankly about the reputation-destroying conduct of his own sister. Darcy wants – he needs – to explain himself.
A more conservative character, in a more conservative novel, wouldn’t accept that his behaviour needed to be explained. Nor would he be open to being reformed. The conduct of a character like Darcy wouldn’t be open to criticism in a conservative novel. Darcy is older than Elizabeth by seven or eight years. He is ‘a landlord, a master’ with ‘many people’s happiness […] in his guardianship’ and the ‘power to bestow’ either ‘pleasure or pain’, just as he chooses. He is rich, he owns a great estate, he’s descended from a noble house and, Jane invites her readers to imagine, related to influential political figures.
But he listens to Elizabeth – the second daughter of a country gentleman, with no fortune, with a silly vulgar mother, with a host of low-status relations. He makes himself vulnerable to her. He learns from her – ‘What do I not owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled.’
Eighteenth-century writers were deeply uneasy about making their upper-class characters marry out.w There are few exigencies to which they aren’t reduced, in their desperation to achieve social parity between hero and heroine. Children are switched at nurse; villainous uncles hide the rightful heirs; foundlings turn out to be related to the local landowner after all; fortunes appear; marriage certificates are discovered; guardians marry their wards; cousins marry each other.
Jane doesn’t do this in Pride and Prejudice.
The marriage between Darcy and Elizabeth is not, as her father fears it might be, ‘unequal’. Each comes to admire and respect the other. Their relationship begins with a refusal to accept social inequality, and it ends with it, too.
True, Elizabeth is, when they’re first engaged, a touch hesitant about being herself with Darcy – ‘he had yet to learn to be laughed at, and it was rather too early to begin’ – and, too, she feels the need to ‘shield’ Darcy from her mother and her aunt Mrs Phillips, trying anxiously ‘to keep him to herself, and to those of her family with whom he might converse without mortification’. But she needn’t have worried. Darcy’s reform is complete. Elizabeth soon returns to her ‘lively, sportive manner’, taking ‘liberties with her husband’.
Is it coincidence that Jane, at the end of Pride and Prejudice, mentions ‘liberties’ and equality in marriage as well as giving huge prominence to sibling and sibling-in-law relationships – thus echoing, faintly, the French revolutionary call for liberty, equality and fraternity? I don’t think it is. She informs us specifically that the personalities of Wickham and Lydia ‘suffered no revolution’. She leaves her readers to decide which, among the other characters, do experience it. And Jane wanted, remember, readers who were not ‘dull elves’, as Scott put it in Marmion, readers who were both able and willing to follow the clues in the text through to the obvious conclusion.
Darcy refuses, for the sake of his sister, to accept Wickham as a guest, and one imagines he avoids offering frequent invitations to his mother-in-law, but all the other relations he was originally so reluctant to acquire – Elizabeth’s father, her younger sisters, even Lydia – they are welcomed to his house. Lady Catherine, by contrast, is admitted only on sufferance, and because Elizabeth wishes it. Of the new, extended family that Elizabeth and Darcy create, the family members that Darcy is happiest with, apart from his sister, the ones he is ‘on the most intimate terms’ with, the ones he is ‘sensible of the warmest gratitude towards’ are, in the end, the Gardiners, the low connections in trade. Pemberley isn’t ‘polluted’, as Lady Catherine fears. Instead, it keeps the best of the old, and welcomes the best of the new.
Almost every reader who encounters Darcy and Elizabeth finds them wonderfully attractive characters. Their independent personalities, their wit and intelligence, their occasional wrong-headedness, their ability to examine their own behaviour and where it stems from, and to try to do better, their mutually supportive and rewarding marriage, these are aspects that accord almost perfectly with modern Western ideals of self-expression and happiness within marriage. But they are wonderful. Jane never, in her other novels, offers us such a perfect marriage between hero and heroine as she gives us here. Elizabeth and Darcy were written to be not just characters, but symbols as well.
Any reader fully sensitised to the loaded language of revolution and counter-revolution would have read Pride and Prejudice for what it is – a revolutionary fairy tale, a fantasy of how, with reform, with radical rethinking, society can be safely remodelled. Darcy, who represents both the politically powerful nobility and the landed gentry, has to embrace change – to embrace Elizabeth and her laughter. He has to be, as he says, ‘properly humbled’; he has to recognise that worth lies in morality and behaviour, not in bloodlines. His pride set aside, his prejudices, for the most part, dismantled, it’s Darcy who, symbolically, removes the threat represented by the militia when he buys the militia officer Wickham a transfer into the regular army, stationed in Newcastle, in the far north of England, and liable to be sent overseas.
If society were reformed, and the revolution to take place bloodlessly, then there would be no need to worry that popular disaffection would flourish, and no way the government could justify retaining an armed force to subdue its own people. Once peace returns, as it does – duly, symbolically – at the end of the novel, Elizabeth and Darcy can continue their radical marriage, freed from senseless or inconsistent rules and conventions. Together they will read, and debate, and remain open to new ideas, ready to cast off prejudices which no longer fit. It’s a fairy-tale ending; it’s a sweet-natured one. No one – not even Wickham, not Lady Catherine – is punished.
It’s a fairy tale.
Back in the real world, with two novels published, Jane had her sights set on a subject that was by far less sweet. Her next book, Mansfield Park, was to shock some of her readers immeasurably.
Footnotes
a Based on Jane Austen’s letter to Cassandra Austen (24th December 1798).
b One notable exception is Mark Twain, who once wrote in a letter that every time he read the book, he wanted to dig Jane up and ‘beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone’.
c Letter to Cassandra Austen; dated only with ‘February 4th’, though the year of composition is clearly, from internal references, 1813.
d Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742, sometimes called the first English novel) is a notable, but hardly solitary, example.
e One positively glowing ‘Memoir of General Buonaparte’ had been printed in the magazine of the London Corresponding Society, the group which really did want to have a revolution and overthrow the British government. (The moral and political magazine of the London Corresponding Society (1796–1797, Volume 1).)
f The story appears in more than one place; the museum now in Chawton Cottage, where Jane lived, used to have it in a letter, mounted on the wall in what’s supposed to have been Jane’s bedroom.
g Mr Weston, in Emma, we’re told, once served for some time in the militia as a captain, some 20 or 25 years before the story starts. It is, as we’ll see, difficult to date Emma’s setting with any certainty.
h It was possib
le to insure against being drawn for the militia. A premium of 25 shillings would allow you to evade service if you wished (see, for example, the Hereford Journal, 1st February 1797).
i The story that the French mistook the Welshwomen, dressed in red shawls and tall black hats, for soldiers, is charming, but absent from early sources.
j Reading Mercury, 7th November 1796; the report also appeared in at least half a dozen other newspapers.
k In theory militia officers were meant to be landowners – which neither the fictional Wickham nor the real Henry Austen were – but the rule was easily and frequently got round.
l ‘“Pride,” observed Mary […] “is a very common failing, I believe. By all that I have ever read, I am convinced that it is very common indeed; that human nature is particularly prone to it, and that there are very few of us who do not cherish a feeling of self-complacency on the score of some quality or other, real or imaginary. Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”’
m This turnabout, though genuine, seems very abrupt. Burke’s behaviour was at times erratic through the 1780s and it has been suggested, both by historians and by his contemporaries, that he was suffering from mental health issues.
n In one of many aristocratic peculiarities, the daughters of a duke, marquis, or earl are, for example, Lady Mary Crawley, Lady Edith Crawley, and Lady Sybil Crawley. Marriage alters only their surnames, unless they marry a man who has a superior noble title of his own. Younger sons of an earl, though, are ‘The Honourable’, a title which they can share with their wives but which only ever really appears on letters. I’ve come across sneers that Jane made a mistake with Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s title; she didn’t. Colonel Fitzwilliam’s apparent lack of a title is also entirely correct.