they say things like ‘Why didn’t Elizabeth and Jane get jobs? Why were they always going on about getting husbands?’
Elizabeth said No to Mr Collins and flouted the conventions of the time. A young woman must look out for a young man with prospects and marry him. Love shouldn’t – and for centuries didn’t – come into it.
To say ‘I don’t love him’ was a recent right.
Which brings us to the core of this novel. A poor young woman, literary, of discrimination, proud of it, saying she will not marry except for love was a direct heiress of the Enlightenment and particularly of Jean Jacques Rousseau and most particularly of La Nouvelle Héloïse. This writer, this novel, had realigned women’s expectations and their self-definition. It was not only in the field of romantic love and marriage that Rousseau had changed manners and morals, for aristocratic women were already in Austen’s time breastfeeding their infants and aspired to educate their children rationally.
This novel, Pride and Prejudice, breaks new ground because of the new morality flourishing everywhere – for instance, in Fielding’s Tom Jones. When Elizabeth refuses Darcy’s first proposal, she tells him he is not gentlemanly. It could be argued that he was being honest when he frankly confessed the reasons why he had been reluctant to propose: surely the new morality must mean that he should be admired by Elizabeth, because he was being honest. Openness was a great good. To be open with your lover was to be in credit for the future.
Darcy was articulating the values of his class. Elizabeth was a misalliance, not because of her looks and education, both as good as his, but because of her vulgar relations – an uncle in trade, her unfortunate mother and sisters. Yet one has to notice that his aunt Lady Catherine de Bourgh has nothing to learn of vulgarity: she is a crude, stupid woman. And Darcy does not criticise the behaviour of his friend Bingley’s sister, who is setting her cap at him, not at all better than that of Elizabeth’s silly sisters. If this novel were published now, the reviewers would surely note these inconsistencies. Did they then? Were they in such awe of Darcy’s wealth and position they did not criticise him? Perhaps to be wealthy and noble was enough: he was a gentleman.
But Elizabeth told him he was not being gentlemanly.
Elizabeth refuses Darcy out of a new morality, superior to his, and while obeying the stultifying eyes-lowered maidenly correctness demanded by the situation, she clearly does not feel inferior to him, even while he is telling her she is.
Elizabeth is using a definition of a gentleman that we have lost: it was once powerful and even now we hear echoes of an old excellence. The ideal came from chivalry. Honour was the key, and while Falstaff mocked, nevertheless he was a knight and honour defined his position socially if not on the battlefield. Honour: one kept one’s word, was always honest, a man’s word is his bond – now that’s a laugh, these days. One succoured the weak and defended them against the wicked. Respect must be paid where it was earned. Respect was due to women that came from the Courts of Love and from the Troubadours. All these nuances were in Elizabeth’s passionate and scornful refusal of Darcy – a middle-class girl, speaking to an aristocrat.
There was a novel I remember from when I was a girl, John Halifax, Gentleman by Mrs Craik; it was about a lower-class person earning the right to the appellation because of his honourable behaviour and his aspirations. It was a popular novel: once, the title gentleman was something to be aimed for.
Here we have this uppity young woman Elizabeth, first refusing to marry a disagreeable man, though she could secure her family’s future by doing it, and then saying no to a very rich nobleman because of his arrogant behaviour. This was, indeed, a new thing in the novel. This was why Pride and Prejudice was so immediately popular: it defined, in the person of Elizabeth Bennet, how young women were thinking about themselves, as violent a change as happened later, in the twenties and then the sixties.
Certainly her mother and three of her sisters could not understand Elizabeth. Her mother, Mrs Bennet, a figure of fun throughout, is at the same time dangerous, because her silliness exposes her daughters to risk and obloquy. She belongs to a different world from Elizabeth, and Jane, and her own husband. This family is split. Elizabeth, Jane, Mr Bennet – a gentleman – judge people and situations from a fine and sensitive discrimination. Lydia, the youngest daughter, who elopes with an attractive young officer, talks only of having fun. So does her sister Kitty. They have their counterparts today: their descendants are in multitudes. A good time – that’s the thing. Lydia and Kitty could not understand Elizabeth’s and Jane’s idea of a good time. But wait – here we have to remember that the severe Mary Mitford described Jane Austen as a ‘silly husband-hunting butterfly’. So it took time to stiffen her into ‘a perpendicular precise taciturn piece of single blessedness’ and she wrote about the silliness of Lydia and Kitty from her own experience and memories. She had not always been the quiet observer. There is another sister, Mary, who aspires to be more than a husband-hunting butterfly, but she is a silly would-be bluestocking, quoting aphorisms like a Chinese cracker. Quite a gallery of women here: Elizabeth who knows how to love well and wisely; beautiful Jane, with none of Elizabeth’s cleverness, but with a more patient and forgiving heart; Lydia who will grow up to be as tiresome as her mother; Kitty who longs for fun; Mary, a bookish fool. There is Darcy’s sister, scarcely delineated, except perhaps to prove that the sisters of aristocrats may also run away with handsome officers, and Bingley’s stupid sister, and Lady Catherine, the crass tyrant. Charlotte, Elizabeth’s friend, marries Mr Collins because he is a good catch, and she hasn’t the backbone to be a single woman.
And the men? Mr Bennet, from whom Elizabeth has got her sagacity and good sense, is a weak man, one of those whose ironical judgements on their own behaviour must compensate for their deficiencies. Bingley is rich, handsome and weak. The villain Wickham is unscrupulous and conceited. Elizabeth’s uncle is a serious, intelligent man. The officers in the regiment in their scarlet coats are like a chorus to the action.
So, when you look at it, Elizabeth is the only female with anything like the moral size and weight to take on Darcy, and he is the only man equal to her.
And now here comes my personal caveat, but I am not the only one to think Darcy would not marry Elizabeth. Aristocrats do not marry poor middle-class girls much encumbered with disagreeable relatives. Yes, you believe it for the space and time of the tale, and that is all that is needed. Lords marry chorus girls and models, as we have seen so often in this country, enlivening the annals of the doings of high society. ‘New Blood’ they have been heard to cry, justifying misalliances. Some of these marriages have had a fairy-tale quality. Very beautiful girls, from nowhere, marrying lords in their castles? It all appeals to our nursery memories.
We may wonder – and I’ve read critics who do just that – whether Pride and Prejudice may fairly be classed among the novels now described as ‘Chick-lit’, girls hunting for husbands, a sophisticated and witty version. Barbara Cartland, the grande dame of the genre, when asked why her stories always had the same plot replied, ‘There is only one plot. You need a girl who knows she is underestimated, in love with a difficult, problematical or wicked hero who recognises her worth. She will cure him, she is sure, but the story must end with the wedding, before she discovers that no, she will not change him.’ That fits.
We may acknowledge that the marriage market in Austen’s England, while far from what girls in Europe would recognise, is similar to what goes on now, for instance, in India, in many Islamic countries, and in parts of Africa.
We may entertain ourselves with imagining a meeting between Jane Austen and Jean Jacques Rousseau. Would he recognise that in this apparently prim maidenly lady were united the two strands of the Enlightenment, Romance and Reason? Would she see the debt her heroines owed to him even if they had never read a word of him or even heard of him?
One thing has changed utterly. Jane Austen’s landscape is more alien than the mountains and deserts that television invites us to travel in. We move about, country to country, continent to continent, and think nothing of it. Then, to visit a family a few miles off was a big thing. I can understand this, because when I was a girl in Africa, the early rattling cars, the poor roads, some of them not more than wheelmarks through grass, meant that