When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam
Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her
good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Darcy has
involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Bingley
and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined to dislike him more than
ever. In the sparkling comedy of manners that follows, Jane Austen
shows the folly of judging by first impressions and superbly evokes the
friendships, gossip and snobberies of provincial middle-class life.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
Next to the exhortation at the beginning of
Moby-Dick, “Call me Ishmael,” the first sentence of Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice
must be among the most quoted in literature. And certainly what
Melville did for whaling Austen does for marriage–tracing the
intricacies (not to mention the economics) of 19th-century British
mating rituals with a sure hand and an unblinking eye. As usual,
Austen trains her sights on a country village and a few families–in
this case, the Bennets, the Philips, and the Lucases. Into their midst
comes Mr. Bingley, a single man of good fortune, and his friend, Mr.
Darcy, who is even richer. Mrs. Bennet, who married above her station,
sees their arrival as an opportunity to marry off at least one of her
five daughters. Bingley is complaisant and easily charmed by the eldest
Bennet girl, Jane; Darcy, however, is harder to please. Put off by
Mrs. Bennet’s vulgarity and the untoward behavior of the three younger
daughters, he is unable to see the true worth of the older girls, Jane
and Elizabeth. His excessive pride offends Lizzy, who is more than
willing to believe the worst that other people have to say of him; when
George Wickham, a soldier stationed in the village, does indeed have a
discreditable tale to tell, his words fall on fertile ground.
Having set up the central misunderstanding of the novel, Austen
then brings in her cast of fascinating secondary characters: Mr.
Collins, the sycophantic clergyman who aspires to Lizzy’s hand but
settles for her best friend, Charlotte, instead; Lady Catherine de
Bourgh, Mr. Darcy’s insufferably snobbish aunt; and the Gardiners, Jane
and Elizabeth’s low-born but noble-hearted aunt and uncle. Some of
Austen’s best comedy comes from mixing and matching these
representatives of different classes and economic strata, demonstrating
the hypocrisy at the heart of so many social interactions. And though
the novel is rife with romantic misunderstandings, rejected proposals,
disastrous elopements, and a requisite happy ending for those who
deserve one, Austen never gets so carried away with the romance that
she loses sight of the hard economic realities of 19th-century
matrimonial maneuvering. Good marriages for penniless girls such as the
Bennets are hard to come by, and even Lizzy, who comes to sincerely
value Mr. Darcy, remarks when asked when she first began to love him:
“It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began.
But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds
at Pemberley.” She may be joking, but there’s more than a little truth
to her sentiment, as well. Jane Austen considered Elizabeth Bennet
“as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print”. Readers of
Pride and Prejudice would be hard-pressed to disagree.
–Alix WilberWhen
Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she
thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks
and lively mind. When she later discovers that Darcy has involved
himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Bingley and her
beloved sister Jane, she is determined to dislike him more than ever. In
the sparkling comedy of manners that follows, Jane Austen shows the
folly of judging by first impressions and superbly evokes the
friendships, gossip and snobberies of provincial middle-class life.
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Pride and Prejudice
