Pride and Prejudice, chapters 29-33

The Hunsford party is invited to dine at Rosings the day after their arrival, the unexpected honor of which has Mr. Collins in such a state he doesn’t know whether to faint, burst into song, or just run laps around the parsonage waving his hands above his head. “The power of displaying the grandeur of his patroness to his wondering visitors, was exactly what he wished for,” and the fact of it coming so soon is almost deranging—or would be, if he weren’t deranged already.

Sir William Lucas professes not to be surprised by the invitation, because of his intimate knowledge of “what the manners of the great really are…About the court, such instances of elegant breeding are not uncommon.” You recall that he was presented at court, right? If not, never mind, he’s sure to mention it again, once or twice or six hundred thousand times.

Mr. Collins spends the next day meticulously instructing everyone in “what they were to expect, that the sight of such rooms, so many servants, and so splendid a dinner might not wholly overpower them.” On Lizzy, he confers even more unctuous advice:

“Do not make yourself uneasy, my dear cousin, about your apparel. Lady Catherine is far from requiring that elegance of dress in us which becomes herself and her daughter…She likes to have the distinction of rank preserved.”

Lizzy allows Mr. Collins the distinction of having his front teeth preserved, which is more than many of us would do under similar circumstances. Or perhaps she simply isn’t quick enough to get her right hook in, because at this point Mr. Collins is a moving target, darting around the house like a gerbil in a Habitrail. “While they were dressing, he came two or three times to their different doors to recommend their being quick, as Lady Catherine very much objected to be kept waiting for her dinner.” You get the impression that if Lizzy doesn’t take him at his word, he might forcibly drag her away by her hair.

As they cross the park towards Rosings, with Mr. Collins pointing out everything of interest and where possible quantifying its cost, Sir William Lucas’s knees begin visibly to wobble, and poor Maria pretty much dissolves into peat-like clumps and has to be shoveled up into a wheelbarrow and ferried to the front door. As for Lizzy, however:

Her courage did not fail her. She had heard nothing of Lady Catherine that spoke her awful from any extraordinary talents or miraculous virtue, and the mere stateliness of money and rank she thought she could witness without trepidation.

That’s our gal! By this point in the novel, we’re just about ready for TEAM LIZZY sweatshirts.

Finally they all find themselves before the August Personage herself. The Lucases stand with their backs arched, like frightened cats; a loud noise might set them tearing off in different directions. But once again, “Lizzy found herself equal to the scene,” and has no trouble taking her hostess’s measure. Lady Catherine, she finds, is “a tall, large woman, with strongly marked features, which might once have been handsome…she was not conciliating, nor was her manner of receiving them, such as to make her visitors forget their inferior rank.”

But Lady Catherine's Olympian self-importance and her air of almost imperial disdain, are completely lacking in her daughter. Miss De Bourgh is “pale and sickly; her features, though not plain, were insignificant; and she spoke very little, except in a low voice, to Mrs. Jenkinson,” who is likewise a cipher. It’s as though Lady Catherine were some kind of psychic vampire, her formidable vitality being fed by the life forces of the two feeble, shrunken appendages at her side. You wouldn’t be surprised, really, to see her turn towards either one of them and suck away some of their aura through a straw.

The dinner scene is a comic tour de force. Mr. Collins is seated “at the bottom of the table, by her ladyship’s desire, and looked as if he felt that life could furnish nothing greater.” He proceeds to gush fulsomely over every dish, with Sir William doing his best to out-lickspittle him, “in a manner which Elizabeth wondered Lady Catherine could bear.” But her hostess bears it just fine; in fact she gobbles up their flattery just as eagerly as they wolf down their pride. It’s a weird kind of feeding frenzy, where the food is almost incidental.

For her part, Lizzy says nothing because there’s no one to speak to—there’s no conversation at the table except for Lady Catherine’s epic pronouncements, and the two gentlemen’s raptures over everything set before them. Miss De Bourgh, seated next to Lizzy, says not a word during the entire meal, and in fact we’re beginning to wonder if she’s capable of speech at all. Possibly if she attempted to say something, it might come out as a squeak or a howl or an oink. Or maybe Lizzy’s just not paying attention, and Miss De Bourgh is trying to communicate with her in some other way, such as spelling out HELP ME with her peas.

After dinner Lady Catherine continues to hold forth on a wide range of subjects, and Lizzy notes that “nothing was beneath this great lady’s attention which could furnish her with an occasion of dictating to others.” And like a garden hose turned on full blast, jumping around the room and soaking everybody, Lady Catherine’s attention occasionally lands on Lizzy.

She asked her at different times how many sisters she had, whether they were older or younger than herself, whether any of them were likely to be married, whether they were handsome, where they had been educated, what carriage her father kept, and what had been her mother’s maiden name?

Lizzy feels “all the impertinence of her questions, but answered them very composedly”—at least until Lady Catherine gets around to asking whether “any of her younger sisters are out”—meaning, out in society. Lizzy answers that all of them are, and then goes on to say that in her opinion, it would be “very hard upon younger sisters that they should not have their share of society and amusement because the elder may not have the means of inclination to marry early,” which is a pretty democratic thing to say, so of course it alarms Lady Catherine, whose notions of social hierarchy are slightly to the right of the average Egyptian pharaoh. Their exchange degenerates from there, with Lady Catherine going relentlessly at Lizzy as though she were a door hanging slightly off its hinge that might be banged back into proper function.

The evening concludes with cards. Lizzy is stuck at a table with the unenviable company of Maria, Miss De Bourgh, and Mrs. Jenkinson, who between them have about half the wit required to play the game, and a third the physical strength required to shuffle the deck. The other table is more animated:

Lady Catherine was generally speaking—stating the mistakes of the three others, or relating some anecdote of herself. Mr. Collins was employed in agreeing to everything her ladyship said, thanking her for every fish he won, and apologizing if he thought he won too many. Sir William did not say much. He was storing his memory with anecdotes and noble names.

Afterwards the party “gathered round the fire to hear Lady Catherine determine what weather they were to have on the morrow,” the implication being that the Almighty had better see to it or she’ll be rapping at the pearly gates first thing demanding to know why not.

This is very much my Jane Austen. This entire sequence is everything I love about her: the brio with which she depicts the absurdities of human vanity, the ruthlessness with which she dissects fatuousness and venality, the delight she takes in skewering ambition and mocking the mighty.

After this rich comic feast, she gives us a chapter or two to catch our breath. Sir William departs after a week’s stay at Hunsford, and Lizzy worries that Mr. Collins will now have more time to devote to her and Maria, but thankfully he passes most of his time “either at work in the garden, or in reading and writing, and looking out of the window in his own book room”—ah, the grueling life of a 19th century parson! His chief employment seems to be watching for Miss De Bourgh to drive by in her phaeton, at which time he invariably runs to inform Charlotte as though he’s just seen a comet or a herd of wildebeest, or something equally miraculous, “though it happened almost every day.”

Sometimes Lady Catherine descends on them to check out Charlotte’s housekeeping and to tell her she’s got it all wrong and draw up a new shopping list for her and rearrange the furniture and re-sod the lawn and while she’s at it Charlotte herself could stand to be an inch taller. Lizzy soon learns that while Lady Catherine “was not in the commission of the peace for the county, she was a most active magistrate in her own parish.”

…(W)henever any of the cottagers were disposed to be quarrelsome, discontented, or too poor, she sallied forth into the village to settle their differences, silence their complaints, and scold them into harmony and plenty.

After two relatively quiet weeks spent in this manner, Lizzy hears the news that Mr. Darcy is due at Rosings to visit his aunt. Lady Catherine “talked of his coming with the greatest satisfaction, spoke of him in terms of the highest admiration, and seemed almost angry to find that he had already been frequently seen by Miss Lucas and herself.” Lizzy looks forward to observing Darcy and Miss De Bourgh together, and to be able to judge how hopeless Caroline Bingley’s pursuit of him may be. You get the impression she’d be only too glad to write Caroline saying, “We are all in the happy expectation of there being soon an attachment between them, which all their friends and family must greet with earnest felicity. P.S. Payback’s a bitch, and so are you.”

News of Darcy’s arrival reaches the parsonage, followed almost immediately by Darcy himself. Charlotte says, “I may thank you, Eliza, for this piece of civility. Mr. Darcy would never have come so soon to wait upon me.” Lizzy replies with the Regency equivalent of “Ssshhhyeah, right,” but has no time to say more because Darcy’s now among them…accompanied by his cousin, one Colonel Fitzwilliam, who is “about thirty, not handsome, but in person and address most truly the gentleman.” He’s another stock Austen type: the appealing, but not too dazzling, man of the world who will, by his attentions to the heroine, show the hero her real worth. And he jumps right in, chatting up Lizzy with genial ease while Darcy sits silently by with his chest puffed up, like a waxwork of Napoleon Bonaparte. Lizzy, however, pierces through Darcy's deflecting aura long enough to impishly ask, “My eldest sister has been in town these three months. Have you never happened to see her there?” Mr. Darcy admits that he hasn’t been so fortunate, then starts looking very hard in the middle distance, as though using X-ray vision to detect an emergency that might require his swift intervention. And in fact he and Colonel Fitzwilliam depart soon after.

This is the last Lizzy sees of Darcy for some days. Colonel Fitzwilliam comes calling at the parsonage, where he’s definitely flavor of the month among the ladies, but he comes alone. Nor are they invited to Rosings again for almost a week, and when they arrive “Her ladyship received them civilly, but it was plain that their company was by no means so acceptable as when she could get nobody else”—and she virtually ignores them, speaking entirely to her nephews.

Colonel Fitzwilliam, however, fixes his attentions on Lizzy; and they talk “so agreeably of Kent and Hertfordshire, of traveling and staying at home, of new books and music, that Elizabeth had never been half so well entertained in that room before”—which very much does not escape Mr. Darcy’s notice. In fact, Lizzy and Fitzwilliam are having such a party together that it draws Lady Catherine’s notice, their merriment being in marked contrast to the mood on her side of the room, where her tongue is poised to lash out and obliterate the merest suggestion of mirth.

“What is that you are saying, Fitzwilliam? What is you are talking of? What are you telling Miss Bennet? Let me hear what it is.”

“We are speaking of music, madam,” said he, when no longer able to avoid a reply.

“Of music! Then pray speak aloud. It is of all subjects my delight. I must have my share in the conversation, if you are speaking of music. There are few people in England, I suppose, who have more true enjoyment of music than myself, or a better natural taste. If I had ever learned, I should have been a great proficient. And so would Anne, if her health had allowed her to apply. I am confident that she would have performed delightfully.”

This is the point at which, on my original reading of Pride and Prejudice, I nearly swooned with joy. Lady Catherine, up to now a merely world-class ogre, here becomes a comic creation of indisputable genius. This is a woman so imperious she will boldly trumpet achievements she’s never achieved. And not just her own; she’s equally ready to boast of her daughter’s superiority based on what she might have accomplished but in fact hasn’t. Even today it dizzies the mind to contemplate this kind of sociopathic arrogance—yet it’s a particularly brilliant stratagem, because it’s unarguable. Like, if I were to tell you, “Oh! The Internet would be so much more useful if only I had invented it.” Well, you can’t prove it wouldn’t—any more than I can prove it would. But no one’s going to ask Lady Catherine de Bourgh for substantiation. She could claim the ability to grow footmen from crystals under her bed, and everyone would just nod and try not to meet each others’ eyes.

Lady Catherine then browbeats Mr. Darcy about telling his sister Georgiana that she must practice if she’s to excel at the piano. Mr. Darcy reassures her that Georgiana practices “very constantly,” but Lady Catherine can’t believe anyone is doing anything properly if she’s not there to supervise it, and decides that “(W)hen I next write to her, I shall charge her not to neglect it on any account.” Then, unable to contain this extremely urgent advice till she’s next at her writing desk, she foists it on Lizzy, adding that since Charlotte doesn’t have a piano she can come to Rosings “and play on the pianoforte in Mrs. Jenkinson’s room. She would be in nobody’s way, you know, in that part of the house.” Even Darcy cringes.

After coffee Lizzy does in fact find herself on the bench, urged by Colonel Fitzwilliam to play for him. Once again, they seem to be having a better time than anyone else, and Darcy, exhausted by his aunt—for whom “I must have my share in the conversation” is code for “I will speak and you will shut your pie hole”—gradually moves away from her and stations himself by the piano. Within moments, he and Lizzy are at it again, tormenting each other in the most sparklingly brash dialogue ever written.

Lizzy accuses him of having come to stand over her in an effort to frighten her, but she refuses to succumb. “There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises with every attempt to intimidate me.”

He shoots back that she believes no such thing, she’s just showing off. “I have had the pleasure of your acquaintance long enough to know that you find great enjoyment in occasionally professing opinions which in fact are not your own.”

She hoots. “I am particularly unlucky in meeting with a person so well able to expose my real character, in a part of the world where I had hoped to pass myself off with some degree of credit.” But then she retaliates by exposing his character to Colonel Fitzwilliam, revealing how the first time she met him, at the ball in Meryton, he danced only four dances, though “to my certain knowledge, more than one young lady was sitting down in want of a partner.”

Darcy, beginning to sweat a little, insists that this was simply due to personal reserve; he didn’t know anyone, and “I am ill qualified to recommend myself to strangers.” Lizzy pounces on that, asking why someone of Mr. Darcy’s lofty position and manifest advantages is unqualified to recommend himself to strangers, and Colonel Fitzwilliam, taking Lizzy’s side (no fool, he) chimes in, “It is because he will not give himself the trouble.” Possibly he and Lizzy high-five after that one; Austen doesn't say.

Darcy’s now being both ganged up on and laughed at—his own particular double-barrel hell, sort of like what the rest of us might feel if we were stuck in an elevator with the cast of Jersey Shore. He tries to defend himself, insisting that unlike other people he doesn’t possess the talent for making conversation with strangers. “I cannot catch their tone of conversation, or appear interested in their concerns, as I often see done.” To which Elizabeth delivers a scathing smack-down:

“My fingers,” said Elizabeth, “do not move over this instrument in the masterly manner which I see so many women’s do. They have not the same force or rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I have always supposed it to be my own fault—because I would not take the trouble of practicing. It is not that I do not believe my fingers as capable as any other woman’s of superior execution.”

Darcy smiled and said, “You are perfectly right. You have employed your time much better. No one admitted to the privilege of hearing you can think anything wanting. We neither of us perform to strangers.”

At just about this point Colonel Fitzwilliam must realize he is oh so very out of the running where Lizzy is concerned. No one hearing her and Darcy go at each other hammer and tong could reach any other conclusion but that these two were utterly made for each other. Except, of course, the two idiots themselves, who persist in torturing each other, and themselves, for their own ridiculous reasons. Pride on his part, prejudice on hers. Austen, who sort of clobbered us over the head with sense and sensibility in her first novel, is here vastly more subtle about manipulating her theme.

I say that neither Lizzy nor Darcy is aware that they were made for each other; but Darcy at least realizes that there’s something between them that renders him to some degree powerless. He’s in the slow process of giving in to it, as we discover the next day when he comes calling at the parsonage and finds Lizzy alone. He apologizes for intruding; he’d thought to find all the ladies present. “They then sat down,” Austen tells us, “and when her inquiries after Rosings were made, seemed in danger of sinking into total silence.” This is a wonderful, and subtle, refutation of Darcy’s earlier statement, “We neither of us perform to strangers”—because in fact he and Lizzy seem able to speak to each other only with an audience; with that buffer removed, without a single other soul present to form an alternate point of reference, they’re marooned with the inescapable fact of each other, and it renders them both nearly mute. Lizzy is the better at small talk; she asks whether Mr. Bingley will return to Netherfield, and suggests that if he has no such plans “it would be better for the neighborhood that he should give up the place entirely, for then we might possibly get a settled family there.” Darcy’s replies are nearly monosyllabic.

But then he starts saying things that Lizzy can’t figure out. Speaking of Charlotte, he says “It must be very agreeable to her to be settled within so easy a distance of her own family and friends,” which astonishes Lizzy because Hunsford Parsonage is fifty miles from Lucas Lodge, which she’d scarcely call convenient. They debate the relative proximity of Charlotte’s family, and then Darcy scoots his chair closer to her and says, “You cannot have a right to such very strong local attachment. You cannot have been always at Longbourn.”

Lizzy has no idea how to respond. She couldn’t be more surprised if he leapt up from his chair and did the hokey-pokey. Fortunately they’re interrupted by Charlotte’s return, upon which Darcy slinks away with a mumbled excuse, like he’s been caught with his hand in the cookie jar; and Charlotte, who’s no fool and knows exactly how many beans make five, says, “My dear Eliza, he must be in love with you or he would never have called on us in this familiar way,” which makes Lizzy want to bend Charlotte’s arm behind her and say, “Take it back! Take it back!”

And on reflection even Charlotte begins to doubt this initial impression, because Mr. Darcy’s manner, when he does call, is so strained and silent; he might be in a gastroenterologist’s waiting room for all the pleasure he seems to derive from it.

In the days that follow, Elizabeth repeatedly runs into Mr. Darcy on her “ramble” in the park.

She felt all the perverseness of the mischance that should bring him where no one else was brought; and to prevent its ever happening again, took care to inform him at first that it was a favorite haunt of hers. How it could occur a second time therefore was very odd! Yet it did, and even a third.

You read this and think, “Well, duh, Lizbot! Now you’re just being stupid.” Except Darcy’s behavior during these meetings is scarcely the kind that would encourage her to think she’s scored a conquest. He remains stiff, formal, and silent. Put a well-dressed mannequin on wheels for her to drag along like a pull-toy, and there’d be no difference.

And when Darcy does deign to speak, he sounds like his brains are addled. He makes a reference to Rosings that seems to imply that on Lizzy’s next trip to Hertfordshire she’d be staying there, which Lizzy would probably not agree to even if Lady Catherine by some miracle offered it. Even if Lady Catherine offered it at gunpoint.

Eventually she concludes that Darcy must be presuming that when she returns to Kent, she’ll be married to Colonel Fitzwilliam. This makes her a bit guarded when she next meets the colonel, on the day before his departure. She tries to keep the conversation light but they end up treading dangerous waters, as when she teases Fitzwilliam for bemoaning his fate as an earl’s youngest son; surely he’s never experienced want or dependence! But he replies that while this may be true, he lacks self-determination; “Younger sons cannot marry where they like.” They have to wed where there’s money.

“Is this,” thought Elizabeth, “meant for me?” and she colored at the idea; but recovering herself, said in a lively tone, “And pray, what is the usual price of an earl’s younger son? Unless the elder brother is very sickly, I suppose you would not ask above fifty thousand pounds.”

But her ability to deflect perilous topics with a quip, fails her spectacularly later on, when they’re speaking about Darcy—Lizzy of course being the one to introduce him into the conversation (she keeps bringing up how proud and pushy he is, sure, but the point is she keeps bringing him up). Fitzwilliam says, “From something that he told me in our journey hither, I have reason to think Bingley very much indebted to him.” Lizzy’s ears perk up and she presses for details. The colonel obliges: “(H)e congratulated himself on having lately saved a friend from the inconveniences of a most imprudent marriage.” Lizzy, on full alert, now boldly asks for Darcy’s reasons; and if the colonel doesn’t supply them, she may kick his feet out from under him and pin him till the ground till he does. Fortunately, he immediately divulges: “I understood that there were some very strong objections against the lady.”

Lizzy is now propelled into such a turmoil of astonishment and anger that she all but loses cognizance of her companion. He could right walk off a cliff and it wouldn’t register. She’s consumed by righteous indignation, and by terrible shock—she’d presumed all along that Caroline Bingley had been the prime mover in her brother’s abandonment of Jane, with Darcy just an accessory; but it was the other way around. And she’s been being civil to him all this while, when she might have been spitting into his Earl Grey!

Back in her room at the parsonage, she obsesses over that phrase “very strong objections against the lady.” She’s not stupid; she knows Darcy can’t but regard her family as a pack of rampaging hyenas. But she’s convinced it’s their humble station, not their apparent insanity, that really gets to him. He’d “receive a deeper wound from the want of importance in his friend’s connections than from their want of sense,” and she has a point. If Mrs. Bennet were a duchess, none of her shrill rudeness and incessant talking would matter a damn to him; similarly, if Lady Catherine were merely a country widow, Darcy wouldn’t go anywhere near her, and would sneer in derision if he did.

Lizzy's so vexed by all this that she develops a headache, and accordingly bows out of accompanying the Collinses and Maria to tea at Rosings. This will have dramatic consequences in the next chapter, when Lizzy, who already has the distinction of enduring the most egregiously insulting marriage proposal in all of English literature, gets to beat her own record by suffering one exponentially worse. Good times!

Pride and Prejudice, chapters 24-28

“Hope was over, entirely over”—an uncharacteristically melodramatic outburst from this most astringent of authors; but it’s in relation to Jane Bennet, so she has to use stronger verbiage than usual to convince us that Jane’s still waters really do run deep. Some of us remain not entirely persuaded that her desolation is as bad as all that. Anything might snap her out of it. A hobby—say, butterfly collecting. If she could bear to put the pins in.

Anyway, the prompt for this declaration of hopelessness is a letter from Caroline Bingley announcing that she and her brother are settled in town for the winter so hasta la vista, baby, have a nice spinsterhood. She also goes on about Georgiana Darcy in an almost girl-crush kind of way, and keeps hinting that there’ll be a happy development very soon that will make them the fondest of sisters. Yeah, sure she’s just saying it to quash any ideas Jane may have about marrying her brother, but I can’t help wondering whether Caroline wouldn’t really mind having the kind of sisterly relationship with Georgiana that involves late-night pillow fights in underwear.

Seeing Jane in distress gets Lizzy righteously p.o.’ed, and for the first time her ire turns to Mr. Bingley himself. She “could not think without anger, hardly without contempt, on that easiness of temper, that want of proper resolution which now made him the slave of his designing friends, and led him to sacrifice his own happiness to the caprice of their inclinations.” I have to agree with her. Bingley’s one of nature’s patsies; a natural-born schlemiel. Next to him, the average Woody Allen hero is a titan of self-confidence and drive.

Meanwhile she has to contend with Jane being all noble-of-spirit and saying things like: “I have this comfort immediately, that it has not been more than an error of fancy on my side, and that it has done no harm to any one but myself.” Which makes you want to say, Not harm enough, sweetheart, and bean her with a hairbrush.

Lizzy herself has had quite enough of people behaving contrary to their established characters, and says so pretty bluntly, in one of the novel’s more famous passages:

“There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more I am dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of either merit or sense.”

She’s talking about Bingley, of course, but also about Charlotte, which brings Jane to Charlotte’s defense, arguing that there are up sides to her marriage to Mr. Collins that Lizzy is refusing to see: fortune, respectability, stability. She doesn’t add, but could, that Mr. Collins might also choke on a chicken bone at any time. Hey, it’s probably crossed Charlotte’s mind.

Lizzy ain’t havin’ it, though.

“You shall not defend her, though it is Charlotte Lucas. You shall not, for the sake of one individual, change the meaning of principle and integrity, nor endeavour to persuade yourself or me that selfishness is prudence, and insensibility of danger, security for happiness.”

She’s laying it on a bit thick here; but we need to see that Lizzy’s got some issues of her own. We need it because by this time we’re pretty much crazy about her. She’s good company—the best, in fact, Austen will ever give us (and don’t start in on me, please; we’re all entitled to have our favorites, and Lizzy’s mine. You don’t like it, start your own blog).

The conversation turns back to Jane’s own heartbreak, as Lizzy tries to convince her that Caroline and her sister are the snakes who have slithered between her and Mr. Bingley. Jane can’t bring herself to believe it. “Why should they try to influence him? They can only wish for his happiness, and if he is attached to me, no other woman can secure it.” Lizzy is ready with the answer for that:

“They may wish many things besides his happiness; they may wish his increase of wealth and consequence; they may wish him to marry a girl who has all the importance of money, great connections, and pride.”

But Jane is incapable of thinking ill of anyone, and pleads, “Let me take it In the best light, in the light in which it may be understood.” I think Jane may spend too much time staring directly into the sun.

Mr. Bennet’s take on the matter is predictably misanthropic.

“So, Lizzy,” said he one day, “your sister is crossed in love, I find. I congratulate her. Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed in love a little now and then. It is something to think of, and gives her a sort of distinction among her companions. When is your turn to come? You will hardly bear to be long outdone by Jane…Let Wickham be your man. He is a pleasant fellow, and would jilt you creditably.”

Lizzy, obviously accustomed to this kind of acerbic badinage with the old man, shoots back that not everyone can have Jane’s good luck, and Mr. Bennet admits the truth of this; “but it is a comfort to think that whatever of that kind may befall you, you have an affectionate mother who will always make the most of it.”

By now all Meryton has heard the news that Bingley and his circle will no longer return to Netherfield; and simultaneously the full scope of Mr. Darcy’s culpability in l’affaire Wickham becomes current, which tanks his already foundering reputation among the locals. Wickham himself becomes the toast of the town. Which pretty much tells you all you need to know about the town.

Such is the state of affairs when Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner arrive to spend Christmas at Longbourn. This is Mrs. Bennet’s brother (“a sensible, gentlemanlike man, greatly superior to his sister as well by nature as education”) and his wife (“an amiable, intelligent, elegant woman and a great favourite with all her Longbourn nieces”). They’re a couple of peaches, really; not a word to be said against them, and in fact “the Netherfield ladies would have had difficulty in believing that a man who lived by trade, and within view of his own warehouses, could have been so well bred and agreeable.” No word about what he might think of them. But he’s a gallant, courteous man, so maybe he’d just presume their corsets were too tight.

To Mrs. Bennet, the Gardiners' arrival offers two fresh sets of ears into which to pour her tale of woe: a pair of daughters on the brink of marriage, only to have it all go up in smoke. Jane isn’t to blame, of course, because she did her best to snare Bingley, but Lizzy just threw away her chance at Mr. Collins. Most blameworthy of all in the matter, in Mrs. Bennet’s view, are Charlotte and her family: “The Lucases are very artful people indeed, sister. They are all for what they can get. I am sorry to say it of them, but so it is.” I believe this is what is called, in psychological circles, projection.

The Gardiners are a kind of stroke of genius for the narrative; emotions have been running so high, and incident piling up even higher, that it comes as a relief to have suddenly these two still, serene presences layered in like a balm. They give the narrative a much-needed pause, without which it might have escalated into a kind of opera buffa or even Grand Guignol. They also, by their solidity and shrewdness, remind us of how frantic and foolish everyone else has been acting.

Most useful of all, they’re able to serve as course-correctors for Lizzy. She is, as we’ve seen, far too clever for her own good (which is part of her slightly jagged charm), and hardly anyone else in the novel is smart enough to call her on it—save possibly Mr. Bennet, but he lacks the inclination. (In fact he may actually prefer Lizzy at full tilt.) But when Lizzy trots out her usual routine for Aunt Gardiner, she’s not allowed to take it very far; as for instance when she protests that Bingley’s abandonment of Jane must be the work of saboteurs, because he’d been so violently in love with her just a few days before. Mrs. Gardiner shoots back:

“But that expression of ‘violently in love’ is so hackneyed, so doubtful, so indefinite, that it gives me very little idea. It is as often applied to feelings which arise, from an half-hour’s acquaintance as to a real, strong attachment. Pray, how violent was Mr. Bingley’s love?”

It’s a mild kind of shock to see someone subject Lizzy to the Socratic method and force her to define her terms. It’s equally pleasurable to see Lizzy rise to the occasion; confronted with an actual grown-up speaking to her in grown-up terms, she’s able to summon sufficient maturity to meet her on level ground. Aunt Gardiner’s conversation adds heft to Lizzy’s.

Another example of this rapport occurs after Mrs. Gardiner’s had a chance to observe Lizzy and Wickham together. “You are too sensible a girl, Lizzy, to fall in love merely because you are warned against it”—wonderful line!—“and, therefore, I am not afraid of speaking to you openly…Do not involve yourself, or endeavour to involve him in an affection which the want of fortune would make so very imprudent.”

Lizzy can’t help noting the seriousness of her tone. “Yes,” says Mrs. Gardiner, “and I hope to engage you to be serious likewise.” Lizzy breezily reassures her that Wickham “shall not be in love with me, if I can prevent it,” and immediately Mrs. Gardiner nails her for flippancy. “I beg your pardon,” she says, “I will try again.” And she does, vowing in more sober terms to be on her guard against any va-va-voomage with Wickham.

“…(B)ut since we see every day that where there is affection, young people are seldom withheld by immediate want of fortune from entering into engagements with each other, how can I promise to be wiser than so many of my fellow creatures if I am tempted, or how am I even to know that it would be wisdom to resist? All that I can promise you, therefore, is not to be in a hurry.”

Now that the Gardiners have splashed all our faces with a little cold water, we’re ready for the burlesque to resume. And right on cue, Mr. Collins comes charging back to Hertfordshire to claim his blushing bride. Now that she’s on the point of leaving, Charlotte finally experiences something like regret, and in a startling departure from her regular dispassionate manner, makes so emotional appeal for Lizzy to visit her in Hunsford that Lizzy is embarrassed into agreeing to it. “My father and Maria are to come to me in March,” Charlotte tells her, “and I hope you will consent to be of the party. Indeed, Eliza, you will be as welcome to me as either of them.”

Then, the wedding! Expecting one of those tour de force Austen set pieces?...Well, here it is, in its entirety:

The wedding took place; the bride and bridegroom set off for Kent from the church door, and everybody had as much to say or to hear on the subject as usual.

Granted, it’s just Mr. Collins’s wedding; but in fact this is about as much detail as Austen ever expends on describing any such occasion, ever. Weddings bore her; and the unrelenting vulgarity of our modern wedding industry—which strives to turn each marriage ceremony into the kind of blockbuster apotheosis that makes grand opera look like a campfire singalong—would appall her into derisive laughter. For Austen, weddings are just the contract signing; the legitimization of the transaction. She has a highly pragmatic point of view, and she understands achingly well that what weddings are chiefly about, is property, not passion.

Meantime, Aunt and Uncle Gardiner have taken Jane back to London in an attempt to raise her spirits. Mr. Bingley is in London too, of course, but the Gardiners live in an unfashionable neighborhood (within view of Mr. Gardiner’s warehouses, remember, so we can just imagine) and it’s unlikely they’ll run into each other. Still, convention dictates that Jane call on Caroline, which she does after having written her several times to no reply. Caroline is astonished to see her and scolds her for not having given her notice she was in town, which, to poor daft Jane, is just proof that her letters never reached her. (Caroline might have said, “I wish I’d known you were here, Jane, but all our mail was eaten by the invisible beast who lives under the stairs,” and Jane would’ve bought that too.) She’s also arrived just as Caroline and her sister are going out (liar, liar, petticoat on fire), so a proper visit will have to wait till they return the call. Weeks pass, and Lizzy receives a letter from Jane:

“Caroline did not return my visit till yesterday; and not a note, not a line, did I receive in the meantime. When she did come, it was very evident that she had no pleasure in it; she made a slight, formal apology for not calling before, said not a word of wishing to see me again, and was in every respect so altered a creature that when she went away, I was perfectly resolved to continue the acquaintance no longer…But I pity her, because I am very sure that anxiety for her brother is the cause of it.”

Later in the letter, ruminating on Caroline’s behavior since their acquaintance began, she says, “If I were not afraid of judging harshly, I should be almost tempted to say that there is a strong appearance of duplicity in all this.” You begin to wonder what, exactly, Caroline would have to do to earn Jane’s unconditional disapproval. Maybe blow a gaping hole in her midsection with a cannon. But then again Jane might just say, with her dying breath, “I cannot blame her, for I am sure I was in the way.”

As Jane’s friendship with Caroline skids to a halt, Lizzy’s with Wickham wanes; he’s found someone else to flirt with, and a more material prospect besides: a certain Miss King, who has a clear ten thousand a year. Lizzy is philosophical; she writes to Mrs. Gardiner:

“…I should at present detest his very name, and wish him all manner of evil. But my feelings are not only cordial towards him; they are even impartial towards Miss King. I cannot find that I hate her at all, or that I am in the least unwilling to think her a very good sort of girl. There can be no love in all this.”

Shortly thereafter Lizzy begins her promised journey to Hunsford, in the company of Charlotte’s father and sister. Maria is “a good-humoured girl, but as empty-headed as himself,” and Sir William “could tell her nothing new of the wonders of his presentation and knighthood”. As a result they “were listened to with about as much delight as the rattle of the chaise.” Poor Lizzy, stuck in the 19th Century when an iPod would've come in so handy.

In half a day they reach London, where they stop to visit the Gardiners and Jane. Lizzy is surprised to find that Mrs. Gardiner is less sanguine about Wickham’s abandonment of her, than she is herself. His turning his baby-blues on a rich heiress seems, Mrs. Gardiner says, too nakedly mercenary. Lizzy finds herself actually defending him:

“Pray, my dear aunt, what is the difference in matrimonial affairs between the mercenary and the prudent motive? Where does discretion end, and avarice begin? Last Christmas you were afraid of his marrying me, because it would be imprudent; and now, because he is trying to get a girl with only ten thousand pounds, you want to find out that he is mercenary.”

And besides, Lizzy argues, if Miss King doesn’t object, why should they?...To which Mrs. Gardiner argues that this only shows some deficiency in the girl’s character. Lizzy, worn down by a morning with the Lucases (so much so that Mrs. Gardiner might want to check her sherry decanter later), finally gives in and says, “Well…have it as you choose. He shall be mercenary, and she shall be foolish.” She, for her part, is sick and tired of worrying herself over the Wickhams and Bingleys of the world, and declares:

“Thank Heaven! I am going to-morrow where I shall find a man who has not one agreeable quality, who was neither manner nor sense to recommend him. Stupid men are the only ones worth knowing, after all.”

“Take care, Lizzy; that speech savours strongly of disappointment.”

Scarcely anyone in the novel speaks to Lizzy this way—daring to look beneath the effervescence of her manner and gauge her real meaning. Charlotte does; and, interestingly…so does Darcy. Lizzy hasn’t quite connected those dots yet.

The visit concludes with the Gardiners inviting Lizzy to accompany them on a summer tour of the lake district, which Lizzy accepts rhapsodically. I mean, she all but cartwheels. You'd think she'd just been handed an airline ticket to Vegas.

The next day brings Lizzy (and Lucas pere et soeur) to Hunsford Parsonage, where they’re met at the door by Charlotte and Mr. Collins; in fact Mr. Collins all but knocks his wife over in his zeal to greet them. Lizzy discovers that “her cousin’s manners were not altered by his marriage; his formal civility was just what it had been, and he detained her for some minutes” to inquire minutely after her family; then “as soon as they were in the parlour, he welcomed them a second time with ostentatious formality to his humble abode, and punctually repeated all his wife’s offers of refreshment.”

Elizabeth was prepared to see him in his glory; and she could not help fancying that in displaying the good proportion of the room, its aspect and its furniture, he addressed himself particularly to her, as if wishing to make her feel what she had lost in refusing him. But…she was not able to gratifiy him by any sigh of repentance.

Lizzy watches Charlotte keenly for her reaction to her husband’s manifold absurdities, perhaps expecting her to fling herself down a staircase in shame, or maybe just get right in his face and bark "Shut up!" But no, decorum is preserved: “Once or twice she could discern a faint blush; but in general Charlotte wisely did not hear.” You can just bring yourself to believe this. Mr. Collins being one of Austen’s ceaseless talkers—a character type in which she excels above any other; it makes me sorry she never wrote for the stage—it’s entirely credible that after a while his voice becomes, for Charlotte, a kind of background hum; white noise. Then there’s this subtle hint at how she endures him:

To work in his garden was one of his most respectable pleasures; and Elizabeth admired the command of countenance with which Charlotte talked of the healthfulness of the exercises, and owned she encouraged it as much as possible.

Mr. Collins conducts a tour of the grounds, and “every view was pointed out with a minuteness which left beauty entirely behind.”

But of all the views which his garden, or which the country, or the kingdom could boast, none were to be compared with the prospect of Rosings, afforded by an opening in the trees that bordered the park nearly opposite the front of his house. It was a handsome modern building, well situated on rising ground.

We knows Austen’s real estate fetish well enough by now, to recognize that last sentence as damning with faint praise. She’s setting us up to be underwhelmed by Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s much touted grandeur. Though sadly we don’t get any advance dish from Charlotte; she dutifully takes the party line, as much as her integrity will allow, saying only that Lady Catherine is “a very respectable, sensible woman indeed.” You get the feeling she rehearsed it in a mirror to get the proper neutral facial expression down.

Despite this, the visit takes some of the chill off the relations between the two friends, and “Elizabeth in the solitude of her chamber had to meditate upon Charlotte’s degree of contentment, to understand her address in guiding, and composure in bearing with her husband, and to acknowledge that it was all done very well.” Charlotte has achieved a kind of independence, which Lizzy herself yet lacks; and while Lizzy can’t quite envy her, she acknowledges its value. In this I think she’s pretty clearly speaking for her creator as well.

The next day there’s a great tumult—Maria shrieking so loudly that Lizzy, hurling herself downstairs, says, “I expected at least that the pigs were got into the garden, and here is nothing but Lady Catherine and her daughter.” The nine-year-old in me wants to say, “And the difference is…?” but I’ll try to restrain him.

In fact it’s not Lady Catherine but Mrs. Jenkinson, who looks after Miss De Bourgh, who requires looking after because of her poor health. Lizzy, noting her sickly, cross appearance, cackles to herself, imagining her married to Darcy. “Yes, she will do for him very well. She will make him a very proper wife.” It’s unworthy of her, but we love her a little bit for it. We can’t help it, we like us some bitchy Lizzy.

Miss De Bourgh’s visit goes on for a while, though she doesn’t descend from the phaeton, thus keeping Charlotte out in the cold; and meantime Sir William Lucas, “to Elizabeth’s high diversion, was stationed in the doorway in earnest contemplation of the greatness before him, and constantly bowing whenever Miss De Bourgh looked that way.”

Any time a novelist effects a change of scene, the way that Austen has just moved her narrative from Longbourn to Hunsford, it necessitates a certain amount of reshuffling; she has to get all her pieces in place before the action of the plot can recommence. Austen has made the best of it here, keeping us laughing just enough to hold us in abeyance for the next round of fireworks. Which begins next time out, as she at long last brings to the fore Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and we get to judge for ourselves what kind of dame she is. I’m not one for spoilers, but here’s a hint: think the Antichrist in a silk pelisse.

Pride and Prejudice, chapters 19-23

Ladies and gentlemen, savor the moment: Jane Austen, the doe-eyed, dewy-cheeked, peaches-and-cream mother goddess of Regency romance, is about to dramatize her first marriage proposal. I advise you to set aside your hankies; you won’t be needing them, unless it’s to help prevent you coughing up a lung. Because what follows is as brutally, cringe-makingly hilarious as any episode of Curb Your Enthuasiam.

Mr. Collins decides, the day after the disastrous ball at Netherfield, that the time has come to declare himself to Lizzy.

Having resolved to do it without loss of time, as his leave of absence extended only to the following Saturday, and having no feelings of diffidence to make it distressing to himself even at the moment, he set about it in a very orderly manner, with all the observances which he supposed a regular part of the business.

Ah, the ardent lover!

He finds Lizzy at breakfast with her mother and Kitty, and asks to be granted to favor of addressing her alone. Lizzy, knowing what’s coming, tries every possible gambit to escape the encounter short of actually climbing out the window, but her mother is adamant: “Lizzy, I insist upon your staying and hearing Mr. Collins.” In Austen’s world, the authority of a parent is unassailable, even a parent whose I.Q. is a few digits lower than her shoe size, so Lizzy is good and stuck. But she realizes it’s probably “wisest to get it over as soon and as quietly as possible,” and so sits down and steels herself. Possibly she sneaks in a good, stiff shot of rye; I know that’d be my action item.

Mr. Collins then launches into his epic, or at least epic-length, pronouncement of his violent affection, which taken out of context might be mistaken for a member of Parliament recommending corn subsidies. “Almost as soon as I entered the house I singled you out as the companion of my future life,” he says. Love that “almost.” After a bit more preamble, he gets down to brass tacks:

“My reasons for marrying are, first, that I think it the right thing for every clergyman in easy circumstances (like myself) to set the example of matrimony in his parish. Second, that I am convinced it will add very greatly to my happiness; and thirdly, which perhaps I ought to have mentioned earlier, that it is the particular advice and recommendation of the very noble lady whom I have the honour of calling patroness. Twice has she condescended to give me her opinion (unasked too!) on this subject; and it was but the very Saturday night before I left Hunsford—between our pools at quadrille, while Mrs. Jenkinson was arranging Miss De Bourgh’s footstool, that she said, ‘Mr. Collins, you must marry…Choose properly, choose a gentlewoman for my sake; and for your own, let be an active, useful sort of person, not brought up high, but able to make a small income go a long way. This is my advice. Find such a woman as soon as you can, bring her to Hunsford, and I will visit her.’”

And, what raptures, Mr. Collins thinks he’s found just such a humble little workhorse in Lizzy. “(Y)our wit and vivacity,” he tells her, “I think must be acceptable to (Lady Catherine), especially when tempered with the silence and respect which her rank will inevitably excite.”

Lizzy has, by some great summoning of inner strength, not yet hurled anything across the room at him, so he’s emboldened to continue in an even more condescending vein, touching the minuscule income she would bring to the marriage:

“To fortune I am perfectly indifferent…On that head, therefore, I will be uniformly silent; and you may assure yourself that no ungenerous reproach shall ever pass my lips when we are married.”

Lizzy, deciding it “absolutely necessary to interrupt him now” (possibly with a Howitzer) reminds him that she has yet to make an answer, and does so now, gratefully but firmly refusing him in the most definitive manner possible. But Mr. Collins’s self-regard is so stratospheric that Lizzy’s flat rejection appears to him nothing more than coquetry; he knows very well “that it is usual with young ladies to reject the addresses of the man whom they secretly mean to accept,” not only the first but sometimes the second and third time as well. Accordingly he’s not discouraged; he knows he will eventually prevail.

So Lizzy is forced to restate her refusal in increasingly blunt language (“You could not make me happy, and I am convinced that I am the last woman in the world who would make you so”), which in turn forces Mr. Collins to do the same:

“…(Y)ou should take it into farther consideration that in spite of your manifold attractions, it is by no means certain that another offer of marriage may ever be made you…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.”

The more adamantly she digs in her heels, the more maddeningly Mr. Collins insists on seeing her as flirtatiously frolicking around him, teasing his nose with a plume. In the end, she throws up her hands (a better alternative might've been to throw up her breakfast—that would've cooled his ardor) and walks out on him.

Mrs. Bennet, seeing Lizzy leave the room, rushes back in to congratulate and thank Mr. Collins and possibly garland his head with flowers and exalt him in song. She’s quite taken aback when he tells her the actual result of the interview; but after recovering from this thunderbolt, she reassures him he needn’t worry, Lizzy will see reason. “She is a very headstrong foolish girl, and does not know her own interest; but I will make her know it.” To which Mr. Collins replies, if she’s really so headstrong and foolish, maybe Mrs. Bennet needn’t bother.

Sensing a much-longed-for fish wriggling off the hook, Mrs. Bennet goes into panic mode, rushing about the house in a furor, raising the alarm; I picture her dashing into the kitchen and beating a all the pots with a wooden spoon, like a Regency run-up to Stomp. Eventually she grabs Lizzy by the arm, hauls her into Mr. Bennet’s library, where that gentleman had probably hoped to hunker down for the next geologic age or so, and dumps the whole matter unceremoniously into his lap. Thus forced into the patriarchal role he usually evades, he reluctantly rises to the occasion, calling Lizzy forward.

“I understand that Mr. Collins has made you an offer of marriage. Is it true?” Elizabeth replied that it was. “Very well—and this offer of marriage you have refused?”

“I have, Sir.”

“Very well. We now come to the point. Your mother insists upon your accepting it. Is it not so, Mrs. Bennet?”

“Yes, or I will never see her again.”

“An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents.—Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.”

Possibly my favorite scene in all of Austen. Top five, for sure.

Despite this seemingly crippling setback, Mrs. Bennet doesn’t give in, but keeps battering away at Elizabeth like a broken shutter in a thunderstorm. “I have done with you this very day,” she howls. “I told you so in the library, you know, that I should never speak to you again, and you will find me as good as my word.” Of course, when Mrs. Bennet says “I will never speak to you again,” what she means is, “I will harangue you day and night without any respite except to take an occasional life-preserving breath,” which is exactly what she does. “Nobody can tell what I suffer!” she laments at the conclusion of one such rant. “But it is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied.”

As for Mr. Collins, we’re told that his pride is dinged, but since his regard for Lizzy is “quite imaginary” he suffers in no other way. In the end he’s perfectly easy about withdrawing his suit, saying, with typical pomposity, that “resignation is never so perfect as when the blessing denied begins to lose somewhat of its value in our estimation.” Snarky as that sounds, it’s a notch or two nicer than the things he said when he was actually asking her to marry him.

You might think Mr. Collins would now be anxious to leave Longbourn—either slinking away without ceremony, or departing with a great show of majestic contempt; but in fact he has no intention of leaving at all. “He was always to have gone on Saturday, and to Saturday he still meant to stay.” It’s part and parcel of his character that, as tone-deaf as he is to human relationships, it doesn’t occur to him that his continued presence among his cousins is well beyond awkward. The Bennets thus learn the meaning of the phrase “the elephant in the room," though in their case with the help of an actual elephant.

Meantime Lizzy takes solace in the return of Mr. Wickham, who explains his absence from the Netherfield ball thus:

“I found…as the time drew near that I had better not meet Mr. Darcy; that to be in the same room, the same party with him for so many hours together, might be more than I could bear, and that scenes might arise unpleasant to more than myself.”

So…he’s a philanthropist, not a coward. Rrrright, got it. But alas Lizzy, dazzled again by those eyes and that chin, “highly approved his forbearance,” not bothering to notice, much less question, the contradictions and evasions in his story. Or his use of the passive voice ("scenes might arise," indeed) always a favorite gambit among the cretins in our world. As when government officials say, "Mistakes were made," the implication being, Those darn mistakes, how'd they get in?

Lizzy has no such trouble analyzing a letter that arrives for Jane, in which Caroline Bingley announces the departure of the entire Netherfield party for London, with no plan of coming back again. “I do not pretend to regret anything I shall leave in Hertfordshire, except your society, my dearest friend,” she writes, and it’s pretty impressive that she sounds as clangingly insincere on the page as she does in person. You get the impression she’s lost the ability to produce a simple declarative sentence; bitchy disingenuousness has locked on to her DNA like a retrovirus. If you came upon her wasting away in a desert wailing, “Please, please, I need water,” your reaction would be, “Geez, sarcastic much? What did I do?”

Even worse for Jane, Caroline continues by saying how everyone is looking forward to seeing Mr. Darcy’s sister, that paragon of perfectness, Georgiana, and how much cause they all have to hope for an attachment between that lady and her brother. Jane—perhaps the only human being on the face of the earth naïve enough to take Caroline Bingley at her word (in today’s world she’d be busy sending her bank account number to Nigerian princes)—is devastated by this news, but Lizzy isn’t fooled for a moment:

“Miss Bingley sees that her brother is in love with you, and wants him to marry Miss Darcy. She follows him to town in the hope of keeping him there, and tries to persuade you that he does not care about you…No one who has ever seen you together can doubt his affection. Miss Bingley I am sure cannot…Could she have seen half as much love in Mr. Darcy for herself, she would have ordered her wedding clothes…(S)he is the more anxious to get Miss Darcy for her brother, from the notion that when there has been one intermarriage, she may have less trouble in achieving a second; in which there is certainly some ingenuity, and I dare say it would succeed, if Miss De Bourgh were out of the way.”

Jane feels marginally better on hearing this; then plummets back into dismay again.

“But, my dear sister, can I be happy, even supposing the best, in accepting a man whose sisters and friends are all wishing him to marry elsewhere?”

“You must decide for yourself,” said Elizabeth, “and if upon mature deliberation, you find that the misery of disobliging his two sisters is more than equivalent to the happiness of being his wife, I advise you by all means to refuse him.”

This is one of those moments—and there are many—when you’re reminded that Austen was a child of the Enlightenment, and wrote from that serene, sunlit point of view. Lizzy doesn’t tell Jane, as the chest-thumping, shadow-haunted Romantics would have her do, that capital-L love is its own highest value and must overrule all else, no matter the cost. No; Lizzy merely advises Jane to weigh the consequences to herself, and does so in such a way as to carry her point with a laugh.

While Lizzy consoles Jane in her unhappiness, Charlotte Lucas is performing the same function for Mr. Collins, which earns her Lizzy’s fervent gratitude. But what Lizzy doesn’t know is that Charlotte has an ulterior motive: she’s out to snag Mr. Collins on the rebound. And she’s been so solicitous of him that “she would have felt sure of her success if he had not been to leave Hertfordshire so very soon. But here she did injustice to the fire and independence of his character, for it led him to escape out of Longbourn House with admirable shyness, and hasten to Lucas Lodge to throw himself at her feet.” I’d pay cash money to see Mr. Collins throw himself at anything; but as it happens he might have spared himself the effort. Charlotte very much does not require wooing; quite the opposite.

The stupidity with which he was favoured by nature must guard his courtship from any charm that could make a woman wish for its continuance; and Miss Lucas, who accepted him solely from the pure and disinterested desire of an establishment, cared not how soon that establishment were gained.

In case we miss the point, we’re reminded soon after that Mr. Collins “was neither sensible nor agreeable; his society was irksome, and his attachment to her must be imaginary. But still he would be her husband.” And for women in early 19th Century England, it was pretty much husband or nothing.

Without thinking highly of either men or of matrimony, marriage had always been (Charlotte’s) object; it was the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservation from want.

This is one of the bleaker storylines in the Austen canon, made all the more so by occurring in the author's most sparklingly bright novel. But it serves a purpose: Charlotte, with eyes wide open, has made the rational choice—the choice Lizzy disdained. If we’re to feel the full measure of Lizzy’s ultimate triumph, we have to understand the fate she escapes: that of choosing either dependent spinsterhood, or selling herself for security. Austen herself must have keenly felt the pull of these competing imperatives; my guess is that she hoped, through her writing, to achieve sufficient independence to avoid either. Unfortunately, her income was never up to the task.

Meanwhile, Charlotte asks Mr. Collins not to reveal their engagement to the Bennets, so that she can tell Lizzy of it first. Thus, on the eve of his departure, when Mrs. Bennet offers him the hospitality of their house whenever he chooses to return, he astonishes her by not only accepting, but by intending to do so “as soon as possible”. She’d only offered out of politeness, the way you and I tell people “Drop by anytime,” though both we and they know we’d pretty much have to kill them if they ever pulled a stunt like that. As for Mr. Bennet, he’s so alarmed by the idea of Mr. Collins coming back that he tries to frighten him out of it by the only means possible: invoking Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

“Risk anything rather than her displeasure; and if you find it likely to be raised by your coming to us again, which I should think exceedingly probable, stay quietly at home, and be satisfied that we shall take no offense.”

Mary, meantime, is considering that she may be next in line for Mr. Collins’s attentions, and she’s totally up for it.

She rated his abilities much higher than any of the others; there was a solidity in his reflections which often struck her, and though by no means so clever as herself, she thought that if encouraged to read and improve himself by such an example as hers, he might become a very agreeable companion.

Oh, if only. If two people ever deserved each other, we’ve got them right here. But possibly their similarities might have made it too much for us. I mean, there’s a reason they never use Yosemite Sam and the Tasmanian Devil in the same cartoon.

Alas for Mary, Charlotte calls the next day to dash her hopes and to flabbergast Lizzy—who cries out, “Engaged to Mr. Collins! my dear Charlotte—impossible!” Which is Austenspeak for Beeyotch, are you high? Charlotte does her best to rise above “so direct a reproach” and calmly, dispassionately lays out her case. But Lizzy still struggles to accept the match; it seems to her completely out-of-balance—as if Charlotte had just announced sex-change therapy, or taken up spinning classes. She’s humiliated for her friend, and finds that she has “sunk in her esteem”.

But if her reaction is strong, Mrs. Bennet’s is freakin' volcanic:

In the first place, she persisted in disbelieving the whole of the matter; secondly, she was very sure that Mr. Collins had been taken in; thirdly, she trusted that they would never be happy together, and fourthly that the match might be broken off. Two inferences, however, were plainly deduced from the whole: one, that Elizabeth was the real cause of all the mischief; and the other, that she herself had been barbarously used by them all; and on these two points she principally dwelt during the rest of the day.

Mr. Bennet responds with more equanimity. He is gratified to discover “that Charlotte Lucas, whom he had been used to think tolerably sensible, was as foolish as his wife, and more foolish than his daughter!”

Now that Lizzy is “persuaded that no real confidence could ever subsist” between Charlotte and her anymore, she turns “with fonder regard to her sister, of whose rectitude and delicacy she was sure her opinion could never be shaken.” Which is just as well, because Jane needs her support more than ever as time passes and, with it, any hope of Mr. Bingley’s return. Lizzy herself begins to entertain doubts about Bingley; it occurs to her that his pliable, agreeable nature might have succumbed to the thuggish influence of his sisters and Mr. Darcy—aided and abetted by “the attractions of Miss Darcy and the amusements of London”. And this is a possibility we ourselves entertain, knowing as we do that Bingley might be persuaded, in a weak moment, and with firm enough conviction, that left is right, and beef is chicken, and hands are feet.

Worse, the rumor of his coming no more to Netherfield has gained currency in Meryton, “which highly incensed Mrs. Bennet and which she never failed to contradict as a most scandalous falsehood.” Pity Mrs. Bennet; she has a whole smorgasbord of devils to beset her now, chief of which is the fact that she will, because of the entail on Longbourn House, live to see Charlotte Lucas take her place there. For this anxiety, at least, her husband has the antidote: “My dear, do not give way to such gloomy thoughts. Let us hope for better things. Let us flatter ourselves that I may be the survivor.”

But amidst all this torment, relief is on the way. Next time out, we meet some extended family members who are not only not demented, Felliniesque freaks, but who seem to be pretty decent, upright, straight-talking sorts. Amazingly, they won’t bore us at all. Stay tuned for Aunt and Uncle Gardiner.

Pride and Prejudice, chapters 16-18

From breathless bootlicker to breathtaking bounder: having introduced Mr. Collins, Austen now moves on to Mr. Wickham, whom we met last time just long enough for him to flash a dazzling smile and twinkle his baby blues. Apparently everyone in Meryton got the same treatment, because when he shows up with his fellow officers for a dinner party at Aunt and Uncle Philips’s, half the room is primed to swoon, the other half to scream, like bobby-socksers for the young Sinatra. Pushed to the periphery by this star power, Mr. Collins is left with Mrs. Philips as his sole admirer, and even that’s at risk when he attempts to extol the furnishings of her apartment by declaring “he might almost have supposed himself in the small summer breakfast parlour at Rosings,” which falls rather flat with his hostess till he hastily expounds on the magnificence of said breakfast parlour, in which “the chimney-piece alone had cost eight hundred pounds.”

Mr. Wickham, meanwhile, has chosen Lizzy to sit with, which is just fine by her, as she thinks he is so all that: “Mr. Wickham was as far beyond (the rest of the militia) as they were superior to broad-faced stuffy uncle Philips, breathing port wine, who followed them into the room.” This is more than a tad uncharitable, considering broad-faced stuffy uncle Philips is paying to feed and entertain her tonight. But then I’ve often noticed a kind of chauvinism in Austen; handsome, trim, dashing young men might be dangerous or untrustworthy or in some other degree deficient…but men who aren’t handsome, trim, dashing, or young, are worth pretty much worth flap all. I have a mental picture of Austen, seated at some assembly next to a short, red-faced, flabby forty-year-old and doing her level best to pretend they’re on separate planets. Absence of male beauty seems to strike her as almost a moral failing, worthy of the most ruthless derision (think of that famous passage from one of her letters to her sister Cassandra: “Mrs. Hall of Sherbourn was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected oweing to a fright—I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband”). She does eventually outgrow this girlish prejudice; so much so that in her last novel, Persuasion, she actively mocks Sir Walter Eliot’s drag-queen-like preoccupation with his appearance, as well as his horror at the sun-weathered face of Admiral Croft, whose craggy maturity represents a new kind of male ideal for his creator.

But in the meantime she’s beguiled by a pretty fella, as is Lizzy, who’s so taken with Mr. Wickham’s lounge-lizard charm that she feels even “the commonest, dullest, most threadbare topic might be rendered interesting by the skill of the speaker.” Or by being able to watch the cleft in his chin while he speaks. Who we kidding here, Lizzbot.

What Lizzy’s dying to ask him, of course, is how he knows Mr. Darcy, and what’s responsible for the perceptible Sharks vs. Jets vibe between them; but she doesn’t dare inquire. Never mind, as it happens Wickham is only too happy to bring up the subject himself; a bit circuitously at first—he asks “in a hesitant manner how long Mr. Darcy had been staying there.” But once he ascertains that Lizzy is no fan of the man, he’s off to the races—he can’t trash-talk fast enough. He could be Conan let loose on Leno. Or vice-versa.

We learn that Darcy and Wickham grew up together; Wickham’s father was the steward of Darcy’s father’s estate, and Darcy senior was so fond of the young Wickham that he came close to preferring him to his own son, earning Wickham the younger Darcy’s enmity. In fact Mr. Darcy promised to help advance the young man’s career in the church by presenting him with a clerical living that was in his gift (which in those days meant income for life and jack to do for it—every gentleman’s dream). But by the time the living was free, Darcy senior had died and left the gift (along with everything else) to Darcy junior—who summarily awarded it elsewhere. Wickham has as a result been forced to endure the inhuman indignity of finding some kind of active profession, which is what’s brought him to Meryton.

“Society, I own, is necessary to me. I have been a disappointed man, and my spirits will not bear solitude. I must have employment and society. A military life is not what I was intended for, but circumstances have now made it eligible.”

Yes, he really is this shameless. I mean, cue the goddamn violins already.

Yet Lizzy happily drinks the Kool-Aid. Swallows it down and asks for more, please. She’s so scandalized she can barely sit still. She seems ready at any moment to lead a mob of villagers with torches on Netherfield, to drive Darcy from the house and run him a cliff. She keeps remarking on her outrage, as if its intensity surprises even her; certainly it’s in marked contrast to Wickham’s own attitude, which is a kind of wounded resignation. This is really quite brilliant of him; whip someone else into furious indignation on his behalf, so he can sit quietly by and look adorably pitiable, like a puppy with its leg in a splint.

Lizzy hopes his plans to join the militia won’t be scuttled by Darcy’s presence here. “Oh! no,” he assures her, “it is not for me to be driven away by Mr. Darcy. If he wishes to avoid seeing me, he must go.”

At some point in this long confessional, Mr. Collins is heard to crow the name “Lady Catherine de Bourgh” (imagine) which surprises Wickham. “You know of course,” he tells Lizzy, “that Lady Catherine…and Lady Anne Darcy were sisters, consequently that she is aunt to the present Mr. Darcy.” Lizzy replies that she did not know, but is keen to hear more, and Wickham is only too willing to oblige. “Her daughter, Miss De Bourgh, will have a very large fortune, and it is believed that she and her cousin will unite the two estates.” Which information amuses Lizzy, as it means all Caroline Bingley’s jumping through fiery hoops to snare Darcy, is predestined to failure.

The evening ends with Lizzy’s head full of Wickham. She’s like a twelve-year-old after a Jonas Brothers concert. If she had a poster of him, she’d hang it above her bed. The next day she tells Jane his story of woe, and since Jane is equally incapable of believing Darcy wicked or Wickham a liar, this has the same effect you see in old science-fiction movies when contradictory information is fed to a computer: she starts to rattle and shake, and smoke billows out of her ears. Eventually she decides that nothing remains “but to think well of them both, and to defend the conduct of each, and throw into the account of accident or mistake, whatever could not be otherwise explained.” She’s like Lewis Carroll’s White Queen, who strives to believe six impossible things before breakfast.

“They have both,” she tells Lizzy, “been deceived, I dare say…Interested people have perhaps misrepresented each to the other.” Which prompts Lizzy to ask how, then, she would defend these hypothetical “interested people.” “Do clear them too,” she quips, “or we shall be obliged to think ill of somebody.”

But Jane won’t be mocked out of her conviction, even though Lizzy keeps laying on the pressure. At one point she sighs:

“It is difficult indeed—it is distressing. One does not know what to think.”

“I beg your pardon; one knows exactly what to think.”

This brief exchange is a wonderful distillation of the sisters—their characters and, interestingly, their chief failings. Jane is unable to believe the worst of anybody; Lizzy is only too ready to.

Their conversation is cut short by the arrival of Bingley and his sisters, who issue a personal invitation to attend the promised ball at Netherfield—a prospect that is, Austen tells us, “extremely agreeable to every female of the family.” Yes, even Mary. By her own standards she’s fairly clawing the place apart in anticipation of the day:

“I think it no sacrifice to join occasionally in evening engagements. Society has claims on us all; and I profess myself one of those who consider intervals of recreation and amusement as desirable for everybody.”

Lizzie is so high-spirited at the idea of soon dancing the night away with Wickham that, even though she “did not often speak unnecessarily to Mr. Collins,” she can’t help asking him if he thinks it quite proper for a clergyman to accept an invitation to a ball. His reply:

“I am by no means of opinion,” said he, “that a ball of this kind, given by a young man of character, to respectable people, can have any evil tendency; and I am so far from objecting to dancing myself that I shall hope to be honoured with the hands of all my fair cousins in the course of the evening…”

In fact he requests Lizzy’s favor for the first two dances, which she’d been hoping to save for Mr. Wickham; so she now bitterly regrets the “liveliness” that prompted her to say anything more to Mr. Collins than “One side, chuckles” on the staircase. Even more mortifying, however, is that on reflection she begins to understand that his asking her for these opening dances is due to something more than gallantry:

It now struck her that she was selected from among her sisters as worthy of being the mistress of Hunsford Parsonage, and of assisting to form a quadrille table at Rosings, in the absence of more eligible visitors.

It isn’t long before Mrs. Bennet is broadly hinting that she’s all in favor of such a match. Lizzy pretends obliviousness, and for the moment contents herself with going along as usual, keeping her head low and hoping Mr. Collins doesn’t make an offer—or that he falls into a manhole, or spontaneously combusts or something. Her focus remains on the ball, and on a full evening spent in the company of Wickham.

But on the night in question, she arrives at Netherfield to find Wickham isn’t there. She initially assumes he wasn’t invited, at Darcy’s insistence (again: all too ready to believe the worst about someone), till she overhears Captain Denny saying that Wickham went to London on business the day before, and hasn’t yet returned. Though he adds, with a “significant smile”:

“I do not imagine his business would have called him away just now, if he had not wished to avoid a certain gentleman here.”

So Darcy is behind Wickham’s absence, if indirectly. Conveniently ignoring the fact that Wickham flatly told her Darcy would have to avoid him, not the other way around, Lizzy goes into a major snit on his behalf. It’s all the excuse she needs to treat Darcy with the bare minimum of civility when he approaches her. “Attention, forbearance, patience with Darcy was injury to Wickham.” Her coldness doesn’t put Darcy off, however; possibly the fire in her eyes even turns him on a little. And so he slinks up behind her as she chats with Charlotte, and without warning asks her for a dance; she “took so much surprise in his application for her hand that, without knowing what she did she accepted him.” She immediately regrets not having had the presence of mind to think of a way of turning him down—spitting at him, maybe, or moving her chair onto his foot—but Charlotte, ever the voice of reason, advises her “not to be a simpleton and allow her fancy for Wickham to make her appear unpleasant in the eyes of a man of ten times his consequence.” At this point, Charlotte’s pretty well established herself as the story’s Cassandra—not Cassandra Austen; I mean the Trojan princess who was gifted with foresight but cursed always to have her warnings ignored.

Lizzy and Darcy have their dance, and at first it’s an awkward one. Lizzy is determined to remain utterly silent, but soon realizes “it would be a greater punishment to her partner to oblige him to talk.”

So they talk. And what talk! They thrust, they parry, they draw blood, they retreat; there’s not a moment that doesn’t scintillate. Beatrice and Benedict were never better, and in their rhythms you can hear the whole genre of 1930s screwball comedy being born.

“It is your turn to say something now, Mr. Darcy. I have talked about the dance, and you ought to make some kind of remark on the size of the room, or the number of couples.”

He smiled, and assured her that whatever she wished him to say should be said.

“Very well.—That reply will do for the present.—Perhaps by and by I may observe that private balls are much pleasanter than public ones.—But now we may be silent.”

“Do you talk by rule, then, while you are dancing?”

“Sometimes. One must speak a little, you know.”

It’s like listening to William Powell and Carole Lombard. Or Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda.

Lizzy, who’s got more than a little debbil-chile in her, can’t resist bringing up Wickham, just to see Darcy’s reaction. “A deeper shade of hauteur overspread his features,” Austen tells us, and I really hope she took the day off after that, because man, she earned it; what a freaking brilliant turn of phrase.

“Mr. Wickham is blessed with such happy manner as may insure his making friends—whether he may be equally capable of retaining them is less certain.”

“He has been so unlucky as to lose your friendship,” replied Elizabeth with emphasis, “and in a manner which he is likely to suffer from all his life.”

Fortunately they’re now interrupted by Sir William Lucas, or God knows what might have happened. One or both might have had their hair burst into flames. But Sir William, while preventing this, actually sets something worse in motion when, in the midst of his interminable account of how seeing Darcy and Lizzy dance has given him more sheer happiness than any human being has ever known in the entire history of the universe, he makes an allusion to a “certain desirable event” and glances knowingly at Jane and Bingley, who are of course tucked away in a corner talking only to each other. (We’re never privy to these intimate chats, which is just as well, as I suspect if we listened for thirty seconds we’d be compelled to plunge chopsticks into our ears. I’m willing to bet they go something like this: “I like soup. Do you like soup?” “I love soup! Do you like baby duckies?” “I love baby duckies!”) Darcy, now advised of a general expectation of an engagement, goes on red alert.

A short while later Caroline Bingley slithers up to warn Lizzy about becoming too enamored of Mr. Wickham, who is, she has it on the very best authority, a thoroughly awful piece of work.

“I pity you, Miss Eliza, for this discovery of your favorite’s guilt; but really considering his descent, one could not expect much better.”

“His guilt and his descent appear by your account to be the same,” said Elizabeth angrily; “for I have heard you accuse him of nothing worse than of being the son of Mr. Darcy’s steward, and of that, I can assure you, he informed me himself.”

So far, the ball Lizzy so looked forward to has been nothing but a series of petty disappointments and grating annoyances. Little does she know that what she’s been through so far is a kind of Arcadian romp compared to what comes next; because for the remainder of the party, her relations will put her through a virtual gauntlet of mortification. It’s like the clock strikes ten and, poof!— the Bennet clan becomes the Addams Family.

Mr. Collins leads the charge. He’s delighted to have discovered “that there is now in the room a near relation of my patroness,” and he declares to Lizzy’s horror that he will now go and introduce himself to Mr. Darcy, and “entreat his pardon for not having done it earlier…It will be quite in my power to assure him that her ladyship was quite well yesterday sennight.” Because, you know, Mr. Darcy might be losing sleep worrying about just that.

Lizzy tries to persuade him that there’s no cause for notice to be taken on either side, and if there were Mr. Darcy should initiate it, as “the superior in consequence.” But Mr. Collins dismisses this with his patented brand of pompous cravenness—or craven pomposity, it’s really your pick:

“I consider the clerical office as equal in point of dignity with the highest rank in the kingdom—provided that a proper humility of behaviour is at the same time maintained.”

He then goes and makes such a show of self-abasement towards Darcy, while at the same time wielding his connection to Lady Catherine like a bludgeon, that Darcy can only stare at him “with unrestrained wonder.”

Mrs. Bennet is next; she sits at the dinner table trumpeting her pleasure at the coming nuptials of Jane and Mr. Bingley, which is “such a promising thing for her younger daughters, as Jane’s marrying so greatly must throw them in the way of other rich men”. When Lizzy tries to hush her, advising her that Mr. Darcy can hear every word, Mrs. Bennet retorts, even more shrilly:

“What is Mr. Darcy to me, pray, that I should be afraid of him? I am sure we owe him no such particular civility as to be obliged to say nothing he may not like to hear.”

Then it’s Mary’s turn. After “very little entreaty,” she stakes her claim at the piano and begins to perform—croaking out a tune while banging away at the keys as though trying to drown out her own voice. After she finishes, she turns and scans the guests for “the merest hint of a hope that she might be prevailed on to favour them again,” and obtaining this—possibly somebody sneezes, or breaks wind—she happily launches into another number; so that her father—seeing Lizzy’s agonies—goes and all but slams the lid on her fingers, saying, “That will do extremely well, child. You have delighted us long enough.”

By this time Mr. Collins has got his second wind, and now undertakes a loud dissertation on the duties and obligations of a clergyman that begins around the time of the dessert course and concludes the following Tuesday.

You know you've got a disaster on your hands when the best behaved Bennet is Lydia. To Lizzy, “it appeared that had her family made an agreement to expose themselves as much as they could during the evening, it would have been impossible for them to play their parts with more spirit or finer success.” She’s painfully aware of the effect it’s had on Darcy and the two Bingley sisters, whose faces tell all; if they’d had cellular phones, they’d have been madly texting each other all night with OMG’s and NFW’s.

The final mortification comes when Mrs. Bennet somehow arranges it so that they have to wait for their carriage a quarter of an hour longer than everyone else. So they’re not just the guests from hell, they’re the guests who won’t leave. The Bingley sisters stand off to one side and yawn theatrically while ignoring everything Mrs. Bennet says (which can’t be easy—it must be like trying to ignore a swarm of bees) and Darcy acts like he thinks if he just stands still enough, everyone will forget he’s there.

And yet, with the notable exception of Lizzy, none of the family seems to realize the devastation they’ve made of their reputations tonight. In fact Mrs. Bennet thinks she’s had a kind of triumph. She “quitted the house under the delightful persuasion that…she should undoubtedly see her daughter settled at Netherfield in the course of three or four months.” And another daughter settled as well, though that providing less pleasure:

Elizabeth was the least dear to her of all her children; and though the man and the match were quite good enough for her, the worth of each was eclipsed by Mr. Bingley and Netherfield.

Mrs. Bennet is about to learn not to count her chickens before they hatch.

Actually, who am I kidding; Mrs. Bennet isn’t ever going to learn anything.

Pride and Prejudice, chapters 11-15

By Lizzy’s third day at Netherfield, things have gotten very tense. Jane’s condition is improving—she’s even able to come downstairs for a while, to be fluttered over by Mr. Bingley, whose attentions she no doubt returns with more idiot smiling—but the atmosphere between Darcy and Lizzy is now virtually flammable. In a regular old dopey romance novel this would be just the thing to linger over; but this is a comedy of manners, and we’re here to laugh, not get all swoony. Thus we have the high comic relief of Caroline Bingley, who, dizzy for Darcy, continues to interpose herself between the two romantic adversaries, hop-skipping about to divert their attention from each other, completely clueless that should they by chance both turn their eyes on each other while she’s in the way, she’d go up like a matchstick, whoompf.

Even in the quiet moments, when each member of the Netherfield party is occupied by solitary pursuits, Caroline doesn’t disappoint; she positions herself close to Darcy and basically does everything but shoot rubber bands at him to get him to notice her.

Miss Bingley’s attention was quite as much engaged in watching Darcy’s progress through his book, as in reading her own; and she was perpetually either making some inquiry, or, looking at his page. She could not win him, however, to any conversation; he merely answered her question, and read on. At length, quite exhausted by the attempt to be amused with her own book, which she had only chosen because it was the second volume of his, she gave a great yawn and said, “How pleasant it is to spend an evening in this way! I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”

No one made any reply.

Finally, in sheer desperation, Caroline strong-arms Lizzy into helping her draw Darcy’s attention; a gambit that sadly backfires, because it sets off a bout of teasing that rapidly degenerates into their most heated exchange yet, during which Caroline wisely melts into the background, perhaps suddenly fearing the loss of one or more limbs. These two pages of increasingly acid accusations conclude with Lizzy telling Darcy that his defect is “a propensity to hate everyone.”

“And yours,” he replied with a smile, “is willfully to misunderstand them.”

I’m not sure how many thousands of schoolchildren have scrawled out these lines in a book report, with the words “statement of theme” somewhere attached, but I wish I had a nickel.

After this bout of fire-breathing, Darcy, we’re told, “began to feel the danger of paying Elizabeth too much attention.” Um, ya think? Accordingly he summons all his resolve and manages to ignore her completely for the remainder of her stay…which it turns out isn’t long, because Lizzy’s own take-away from the confrontation is a determination to get the high holy hell outta Dodge, even if it means she has to personally carry Jane home on her back through another monsoon, or twenty.

But that won’t be necessary if Mr. Bingley will just lend them his carriage for the trip. And so Bingley is applied to the next morning; but before he can respond Caroline, oozing insincerity from every pore—hell, there’s insincerity visibly pooling beneath her chair—says what a shame they have to go so soon and couldn’t they stay just one more night?...Which suggestion her brother leaps on with all the ardor of a hungry puppy, so that Lizzy has to give in, leaving Caroline “sorry that she had proposed the delay, for her jealousy and dislike of one sister much exceeded her affection for the other.” This is the ironic genius of Caroline Bingley. She’s a shallow, haughty, vengeful woman, and might have served perfectly well as a foil for Lizzy just so; but Austen has given her an additional, unexpected comic twist: she’s unfailingly, unwittingly self-destructive. Time and again she sets out to harm Lizzy, and time and again hurts only herself in the process—as though she were continually hurling a boomerang at her, incapable of learning it’s just going to whirl around and smack her in the face instead. She's Wile E. Coyote to Lizzy's Road Runner.

At this point, it’s difficult to decide who my favorite character in the novel might be; Austen has heaped on us so many outstanding freaks and monsters. There’s Caroline; Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, independently or in tandem; even the lethally prolix Mary, who’s had only a few spotlight moments in the narrative so far—surely because if she spoke much oftener, she’d suck all the energy right out of the sun and bring about a premature end to life on Earth.

But now, what joy, Austen introduces a new character who makes all the others look like amateurs.

It begins with the Bennet family reassembled at Longbourn. Mr. Bennet interrupts breakfast to announce that he hopes his wife has “ordered a good dinner to-day, because I have reason to expect an addition to our family party.” Mrs. Bennet immediately assumes this must mean Charlotte Lucas, and is sure her everyday meal service is good enough for her (Charlotte gets respect from no one in this novel; no one). Mr. Bennet tells her that in fact, “The person of whom I speak is a gentleman and a stranger.” She now decides, with great delight (and with no clear grasp of the word “stranger’) that it must be Mr. Bingley. So that her husband is forced to correct her a second time, interrupting her transports to say, “It is not Mr. Bingley…it is a person whom I never saw in the whole course of my life.” Which is enough to stump his wife, who, given her complete ignorance of her husband’s affairs, can have no idea what sort of person might be entirely new to him. Before she can think to blurt “The tsar of Russia!” her daughters have enticed the news from him: “It is from my cousin, Mr. Collins, who, when I am dead, may turn you all out of this house as soon as he pleases.”

From the heights of rapture Mrs. Bennet now descends into furious indignation. Of course she does; think of the way Mr. Bennet has just presented this news it to her. He plucks her like a violin to get exactly the tone he desires, and it’s always the most shrill and discordant one.

Jane and Elizabeth try to placate their mother by explaining the nature of an entail. “They had often attempted it before, but it was a subject on which Mrs. Bennet was beyond the reach of reason”—making it different from every other subject exactly how?—and so “she continued to rail bitterly against the cruelty of settling an estate away from a family of five daughters, in favour of a man whom nobody cared anything about.”

Mr. Bennet assures his wife that her feelings for Mr. Collins will soften once she’s heard the contents of a letter he’s written, which Mr. Bennet received a month earlier. This might have an astute reader wondering why, if he’s known of Mr. Collins’s impending visit for so long, he’s chosen to refrain from telling his wife about it till the morning of their guest’s arrival, when she’ll have to scramble to put on a better dinner. In fact it’s just another example of Mr. Bennet’s unashamed sadism. He actually enjoys distressing his wife. If it were remotely possible, he’d have preferred Mr. Collins to burst out of Mrs. Bennet’s wardrobe at night, after she’d gone to bed.

Mr. Collins’ letter is summarily read aloud. He has, we learn, taken holy orders, and been fortunate enough to obtain a living from one Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Being thus settled, he’d now like to mend the breach that existed between his late father and Mr. Bennet.

“As a clergyman…I feel it my duty to promote and establish the blessing of peace in all families within the reach of my influence; and on these grounds I flatter myself that my present overtures of goodwill are highly commendable…I cannot be otherwise than concerned at being the means of injuring your amiable daughters, and…assure you of my readiness to make them every possible amends—but of this hereafter.”

“I cannot make him out,” says Lizzy; “There is something very pompous in his style.—And what can he mean by apologizing for being next in the entail?—We cannot suppose he would help it, if he could.—Can he be a sensible man, sir?” To which Mr. Bennet replies:

“No, my dear; I think not. I have great hopes of finding him quite the reverse. There is a mixture of servility and self-importance in his letter, which promises well. I am impatient to see him.”

He appears—punctually, we’re told—and is “a tall, heavy-looking young man of five and twenty. His air was grave and stately, and his manners were very formal.” The strange mixture of obsequiousness and self-congratulation he displayed in his letter is, we now discover, pretty much the way he expresses himself in person as well; and in fact he’s mastered the very difficult art of making one serve the other. His fawning compliments to Mrs. Bennet on the impeccable taste of her household are, he assures her, compliments indeed, because of the intimate knowledge he has of the taste of Lady Catherine, who is a virtual titaness of style.

It is in fact on the subject of Lady Catherine that Mr. Collins proves himself—to Mr. Bennet’s great satisfaction, and ours—an inexhaustible blowhard, an oleaginous brute. The hilariously trivial anecdotes of Lady Catherine’s attentions to him are meant to do double duty: to demonstrate his own humility before so exalted a personage; and to overawe the Bennets with his connection to her. Lady Catherine has, we are told, “asked him twice to dine at Rosings, and had sent for him only the Saturday before to make up her pool of quadrille in the evening.” We can imagine the wide-eyed self-satisfaction with which such thrilling news in conveyed. Mr. Collins is, in short, a courtier by nature, and a thoroughly cretinous example of that odious breed. Here he is on the subject of Lady Catherine’s daughter, Anne:

“She is a most charming young lady indeed. Lady Catherine herself says that in point of true beauty, Miss De Bourgh is far superior to the handsomest of her sex, because there is that in her features which marks the woman of distinguished birth. She is unfortunately of a sickly constitution, which has prevented her making that progress in many accomplishments, which she could not otherwise have failed of, as I am informed by the lady who superintended her education, and who still resides with them. But she is perfectly amiable, and often condescends to drive by my humble abode in her little phaeton and ponies.”

Mr. Collins isn’t just a courtier, he’s a proud one. He actually brags about it, telling the Bennets that he is “happy on every occasion to offer those little delicate compliments which are always acceptable to ladies…it is a sort of attention which I conceive myself peculiarly bound to pay.” (His compliments are, by the way, neither little nor delicate; they’re fulsomely loaded whoppers. Here’s one: “I have more than once observed to Lady Catherine that her charming daughter seemed born to be a duchess, and that most elevated rank, instead of giving her consequence, would be adorned by her.” Sweet creeping Jesus.)

Unable to restrain himself, Mr. Bennet says, “May I ask whether these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment, or are the result of previous study?” And Mr. Collins, blissfully unaware that he’s being tweaked, replies:

“They arise chiefly from what is passing at the time, and though I sometimes amuse myself with suggesting and arranging such little elegant compliments as may be adapted to ordinary occasions, I always wish to give them as unstudied an air as possible.”

Mr. Bennet’s expectations are “fully answered. His cousin was as absurd as he had hoped, and he listened to him with the keenest enjoyment”. Mr. Bennet’s daughters, however, are less taken with him; in particular the two youngest, for whom no male not in a red coat has any value at all, and certainly not some preening gasbag of a clergyman. Whenever he speaks, all they hear is a kind of multisyllabic drone; he might as well be addressing them in Swahili. Lydia, bored out of her mind, makes the grave error of making some remark to her mother while Mr. Collins is reading aloud to them from Fordyce’s Sermons, and he goes into a horrid sulk about it. It seems somehow right that, in addition to being an unregenerate sycophant, he’s a great big baby.

He’s also trouble. Because we now learn that he’s come to Longbourn with the intention of marrying one of its daughters.

This was his plan of amends—of atonement—for inheriting their father’s estate; and he thought it an excellent one, full of eligibility and suitableness, and excessively generous and disinterested on his own part.

He settles first on Jane, as the eldest and loveliest; but Mrs. Bennet, apprised of his plan (and we can just imagine the Snoopy dance she does later, when she’s alone), gently informs him that Jane is likely to be soon engaged. “Mr. Collins had only to change from Jane to Elizabeth,” we’re told, “and it was soon done—done while Mrs. Bennet was stirring the fire.” Every once in a while a single detail—a grace note—rings out with Austen’s genius; that “done while Mrs. Bennet was stirring the fire” is one of them.

And so we have, in Mr. Collins, one of English literature’s supremely realized buffoons; he’s so finely and richly drawn, we might even call him Shakespearean. He’s not quite Falstaff (who is?), but he’s definitely the equal of Malvolio; I’d even say his superior. What especially comes through, in the sheer brio with which he’s written, is Austen’s enjoyment of this extraordinary creation of hers; I can imagine her putting down her pen and doubling over with laughter after she finishes each of his heroically fatuous soliloquys. She obviously knows she’s struck gold in him, and she mines it with palpable pleasure.

Now comes an outing to Meryton, formulated by Lydia, who hasn’t laid eyes on a red coat in probably half a day or longer and is beginning to look rather wan, like a vampire deprived of fresh blood. All the sisters—except, of course, Mary, whose intellect is too unwieldy to carry out of doors—agree to go along; and Mr. Bennet, who’s had Mr. Collins following him around like a spaniel all day, puffing and crooning and repeating “Lady Catherine de Bourgh” like a mantra, pointedly invites his guest to accompany his daughters. (Though prepared, he tells Lizzy, “to meet with folly and conceit in every other room in the house, he was used to be free from them” in the sacred space of his library.) Fortunately Mr. Collins accepts the invitation; otherwise the genre of the Victorian murder novel might have been invented some thirty years early.

In Meryton, the party run into Mr. Denny, a favorite officer of Lydia and Kitty, who remarkably doesn’t turn tail and flee for his life at the sight of them. In Denny’s company is an unfamiliar gentleman, a Mr. Wickham, who has just arrived with the intention of accepting a commission in the corps.

This was exactly as it should be; for the young man wanted only regimentals to make him completely charming. His appearance was greatly in his favour; he had all the best part of beauty, a fine countenance, a good figure, and very pleasing address.

Kitty and Lydia are already circling this Mr. Wickham, all but tying bibs around their necks in anticipation of what a fine meal he’ll make, when who should ride up the street but Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy. The former, seeing Jane, hurries on over to exchange a few civilities and, no doubt, several hundred thousand smiles; and the latter is bound to follow, but is resolute that he will not look at Lizzy. There is, for a few moments, a general milling about as the party accommodates the newcomers, during which, unseen by anyone but Lizzy, Darcy and Wickham catch sight of each other. “Both changed colour, one looked white, the other red,” we’re told, without being informed which hue was whose. This is followed by an extremely frosty mutual acknowledgment—a barely perceptible touching of the hats; just enough to avoid being a direct snub.

Lizzy is astonished by what she’s seen; but there’s scarcely time to reflect on it, for as soon as Bingley and Darcy have departed, Denny and Wickham do likewise, and the original party is summarily ushered into the apartment of their Aunt Philips for an emergency summit of urgent military gossip. Mrs. Philips is the sister of Mrs. Bennet, and is several degrees less batty than that lady, presumably because she’s not laden with a full marching band of unmarried daughters; in fact, she appears to be childless. But she’s still a pretty ditzy piece of work; for one thing, she goes all girlish over Mr. Collins, being so “awed by such an excess of good breeding” that she momentarily forgets about officers, to her nieces’ annoyance.

Mr. Collins, for his part, is reciprocally impressed, and on his return to Longbourn gratifies Mrs. Bennet by declaring that he has never in his life met a finer and more elegant woman than Mrs. Philips, with the obvious exception of…oh, you know.

Pride and Prejudice, chapters 6-10

Finally, by Chapter 6, we have the first inkling of anything that might be termed “romance” in this novel by the supposed queen of that genre. And what is it?...Mr. Bingley, who’s basically a man-sized plush toy, has fallen for Jane, the vanilla ice-cream cone of the Bennet sisters. There’s not enough erotic spark here to charge an AA battery. Sure, Jane returns the sentiment, but this is so far from evidence of a grand passion that Lizzy reflects:

…that it was not likely to be discovered by the world in general, since Jane united with great strength of feeling a composure of temper and a uniform cheerfulness of manner, which would guard her from the suspicions of the impertinent.

In other words, she smiles. A lot. In fact, I get the distinct impression Jane smiles more or less 24/7. Like she’s been lobotomized, or injected with Joker venom.

Charlotte Lucas recognizes the peril in a woman presenting as chaste a face to a wooer as propriety demands she present to the public:

“If a woman conceals her affection with the same skill from the object of it, she may lose the opportunity of fixing him…In nine cases out of ten, a woman had better show more affection than she feels. Bingley likes your sister undoubtedly; but he may never do more than like her, if she does not help him on.”

Lizzy, of course, disagrees. One of the aspects of the novel no one seems to comment on, is the invariably crappy way Lizzy treats Charlotte throughout. She airily dismisses her advice, not even pausing to consider that advice is pretty much all Charlotte’s got to offer. When their discussion broadens to encompass romantic accord in general, Charlotte says, pretty brilliantly, I think:

“Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance. If the dispositions of the parties are ever so well known to each other, or ever so similar beforehand, it does not advance their felicity in the least. They always continue to grow sufficiently unlike afterwards to have their share of vexation, and it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life.”

Lizzy just laughs at this and says, “You know it is not sound, and that you would never act in this way yourself.” This is one of the little moments of ironic foreshadowing that Austen sows through the narrative (as in the previous chapter, when Lizzy tells her mother she can safely promise her never to dance with Mr. Darcy).

In the meantime, Darcy, having now been forced several times into the company of the Bennets by the smallness of local society, finds his resistance to Lizzy’s charms gradually eroding. He had “no sooner…made it clear to himself and his friends that she had hardly a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes. To this discovery succeeded some others equally mortifying.” Invariably, when Pride and Prejudice is adapted to film, the role of Lizzy is given to some sparklingly pretty actress; but it’s clear from this passage, and others, that Lizzy isn’t pretty in the conventional sense at all. There’s a French term, jolie laide—literally, “pretty-ugly”—that is applied to women whose unusual or ungainly features combine, by some feminine alchemy, to create an allure more distinctive and oftentimes more powerful than conventional beauties can manage. It’s ridiculous, for instance, to imagine Mr. Darcy disdaining at first sight a Lizzy who looks like Keira Knightley; but a Lizzy who looks like Sarah Jessica Parker…? Then it makes sense that her brightness, quickness, and incandescence would only become apparent on a second or third meeting—and would accordingly have a more profound impact, by being both delayed and unexpected.

Lizzy is of course unaware of this transformation in Darcy’s opinion of her, but she can’t help noticing that he’s always looking at her now, and even eavesdropping on her conversations. So she chooses the opportunity of a large party at Sir William Lucas’s to confront him playfully on the subject, telling Charlotte, “He has a very satirical eye, and if I do not begin by being impertinent myself, I shall soon grow afraid of him.” This is the opening salvo in their battle of wits, a battle in which—though they don’t yet know it—their hearts are at stake. Darcy and Elizabeth are thus firmly in the tradition of the sparring lovers, an enduringly popular genre that goes back at least to Shakespeare (Katherine and Petruchio, Beatrice and Benedict) and right on up to modern times (the most iconic example being Tracy and Hepburn). But it’s a comic tradition, a comedic genre; the lovers always end up in perfect accord, and because we’re never in the slightest doubt about it, we don’t feel the scalding heat of sexual attraction, or the torments of thwarted desire. Jane Austen is one-hundred percent Apollonian; the Dionysian genre of the romance novel is as alien to her as, say, science-fiction, or pornography. Despite recent attempts to turn Pride and Prejudice into Wuthering Heights, it remains what it is: not the story of a grand passion overriding the obstacles before it, but a comedy of manners—or rather, bad manners. Prejudice and pride, to name them. They’re an affront to Apollonian order. When Darcy and Elizabeth finally do come together, their petty venalities wrung out of them, the effect isn’t one of epic consummation, but of smiling serenity.

In the meantime, they seem, in the time-honored tradition of the genre, to be the only two people who are unaware of how perfectly matched they are. Mr. Bingley’s unmarried sister, Caroline, who’s clearly set her cap at Darcy (and not just her cap: her gloves, her shoes, her skirt, her petticoat, and pretty much anything else she can fling his way, like a middle-aged woman at a Tom Jones concert circa 1969) is the first to pick up on the revealing spikes in tension anytime Darcy and Lizzy get within ten yards of each other. Sensing the danger to her own interest, she confronts it head on, combating it in a highly unusual manner: by forcing Darcy to see it clear to the end—in her view, the inconceivable end: marriage to Lizzy, and association of the Darcy name with the Bennet family. “You will have a charming mother-in-law, indeed,” she teases him, “and of course she will always be at Pemberley with you.”

The rest of the Bennet clan aren’t idle while all this is going on. We hear now that a militia regiment has arrived in Meryton for the winter, which effectively deranges Lydia and Kitty; from this point on they're like bulls in the ring, charging madly at anything that flaps red. And Jane receives an invitation to come to Netherfield and dine with Mr. Bingley’s sisters while Bingley himself, along with Darcy, are out dining with the officers.

Mrs. Bennet is delighted by the invitation, because it gets Jane under Mr. Bingley’s roof; the only problem is, Bingley himself won’t be there. Never mind, that’s a mere technicality to Mrs. Bennet, who might rouse herself to invent cold fusion if it meant marrying off one of her daughters. She notices that the sky looks ominous, and therefore insists that Jane go to Netherfield on horseback instead of by carriage; with any luck, there’ll be a rainstorm and she’ll be forced to spend the night.

The stratagem works a bit more thoroughly than she’d planned, because the storm breaks while Jane is en route, so that she arrives completely soaked, takes a chill, and is soon sufficiently unwell to warrant bed rest till she feels better. Mr. Bennet acidly consoles his wife that should Jane worsen and die, at least it will have been in pursuit of Mr. Bingley.

Hearing of Jane’s illness, Lizzy decides to go and see her. “How can you be so silly,” cries Mrs. Bennet, “as to think of such a thing in all this dirt! You will not be fit to be seen when you get there.” Lizzy retorts that she’ll be fit to be seen by Jane, which is all that counts. She then spurns her father’s grudging offer of a carriage, remarking that the walk is only three miles. Then Mary interjects:

“I admire the activity of your benevolence…but every impulse of feeling should be guided by reason; and, in my opinion, exertion should always be in proportion to what is required.”

The only thing funnier than this gaseous declamation is the response of the Bennet clan: they completely ignore her.

Lizzy sets off—accompanied for the first part of the journey by Lydia and Kitty, on their way into Meryton to molest some more officers—and we see her “jumping over stiles and springing over puddles…and finding herself at last within view of the house, with weary ankles, dirty stockings, and a face glowing with the warmth of the exercise.”

Her effect on the Netherfield party, assembled for breakfast, is sensational. To Bingley’s sisters she might as well be the Swamp Thing, shambling into the parlor dripping with moss and algae. The idea that she actually walked all the way from Longbourn is utterly incredible to them; were she now to sprout wings and fly around the room, they couldn’t be any more astonished.

They greet her with the kind of politeness that conveys contempt more effectively than a mouthful of vitriol. But Darcy, we’re told, is “divided between admiration of the brilliancy which the exercise had given to her complexion, and doubt as to the occasion’s justifying her coming so far alone.”

We’re aware now of what’s going on. Austen doesn’t usually show her hand so blatantly, but here you can almost sense her daring you to disapprove. Jane’s illness is really just an excuse to get Lizzy inside Netherfield—enemy territory, as it were. She, the free-spirited country girl, shows up ankle-deep in mud, her features glowing (which is just Nineteenth Century for sweating like a horse), and somehow has to survive in a lion’s den of cruel wit, vicious competition, and unforgiving fashion. The only way to manage it is the way she settles on naturally: by not caring. Let Bingley’s sisters spit poison about her behind her back; let Darcy turn his withering, scornful looks on her; let Bingley’s brother-in-law, Mr. Hurst, despise her for preferring a plain dish to a ragout. None of them matters a damn to her.

In fact Darcy’s looks aren’t scornful; they may be reluctant, and they’re very likely defensive, but that’s only because he finds himself fascinated without being able to account for it. He’s helpless in the grip of…something. And he’s not soon evading it, either. When Jane proves unwilling to part with Lizzy at the end of the afternoon, Lizzy is prevailed upon to stay for dinner; and then to stay the night. And the next day she’s urged to send for clothes so that she can stay indefinitely.

This turns Pemberley into a kind of arena, in which Darcy and Lizzy play out their drama of attraction-repulsion, using the only weapons available to them: mockery, ridicule, and humiliation. Caroline Bingley does her best to fan the flames (“Miss Eliza Bennet,” she sneers when Lizzy declines to join them at the card table, “despises cards. She is a great reader and has no pleasure in anything else”).

At one point Caroline turns the topic of conversation to Darcy’s sister, Georgiana—not the first time she’s tried to use this paragon of female virtuosity to make Lizzy look bad by comparison. “It is amazing to me,” says Mr. Bingley, on hearing Miss Darcy’s praises sung, “how young ladies can all have the patience to be so very accomplished as they all are…I am sure I never heard a young lady spoken of for the first time without being informed that she was very accomplished.”

This brings both Caroline and Darcy down on him like a flyswatter, declaring that for a lady to be truly accomplished she must possess a whole menu of virtues, talents, and achievements which they then proceed, over the course of nearly two-thirds of a page, to enumerate, stopping just shy of insisting that any woman worthy of praise must be able to translate Virgil into semaphore. “I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women,” Lizzy says. “I rather wonder now at your knowing any.” Caroline Bingley almost hops up and down in her seat, so happy is she to have been given this cudgel to use against her; and as soon as Lizzy leaves the room, she sneers:

“Eliza Bennet…is one of those young ladies who seek to recommend themselves to the other sex by undervaluing their own; and with many men, I dare say, it succeeds. But in my opinion, it is a paltry device, a very mean art.”

“Undoubtedly,” replied Darcy, to whom this remark was chiefly addressed, “there is meanness in all the arts which ladies sometimes condescend to employ for captivation. Whatever bears affinity to cunning is despicable.”

Miss Bingley was not so entirely satisfied with this reply as to continue the subject.

Given the active scorn of the Bingley sisters and the persistent friction between herself and Darcy, it’s difficult to imagine Lizzy’s enforced stay at Nethefield being any more uncomfortable—barring, say, her accidentally setting the house on fire or shooting Darcy’s dog, both of which she’s presumably got the presence of mind to avoid. But uh-oh, we’ve forgotten the worst potential mortification of all: a visit from Mama.

Sure enough Mrs. Bennet sails in—already talking—to see how Jane is doing, and if that isn’t bad enough she’s brought along Lydia and Kitty, which in Lizzy’s current state is just one Horseman of the Apocalypse short of a foursome. Mrs. Bennet satisfies herself that Jane is in no real danger, then goes back to Mr. Bingley and the others and launches into the kind of stream of semi-consciousness that even an Islamic jihad couldn’t interrupt:

“I am sure…if it was not for such good friends I do not know what would become of (Jane), for she is very ill indeed, and suffers a vast deal, though with the greatest patience in the world, which is always the way with her, for she has without exception the sweetest temper I ever met with. I often tell my other girls they are nothing to her. You have a sweet room here, Mr. Bingley, and a charming prospect over that gravel walk. I do not know a place in the country that is equal to Netherfield. You will not think of quitting it in a hurry, I hope, though you have but a short lease.”

When Darcy dares to offer a comment, Mrs. Bennet rises to dizzying heights of indignation, and spends the next several pages firing off direct insults at him, try though both Lizzy and Bingley might to deflect her onto other, less alarming topics. She’s like a terrier with a grip on a pants leg; she growls and snarls and refuses to let go. When Lizzy desperately asks whether Charlotte Lucas has called while she’s been at Netherfield, Mrs. Bennet says:

“Yes, she called yesterday, with her father. What an agreeable man Sir William is, Mr. Bingley—is not he? So much the man of fashion! So genteel and so easy! He has always something to say to everybody. That is my idea of good breeding; and those persons who fancy themselves very important and never open their mouths quite mistake the matter.”

Darcy bears all this by becoming increasingly rigid and aloof; it’s like Mrs. Bennet really is a gorgon, and is turning him slowly to stone.

Kitty and Lydia follow by virtually extorting a promise from Mr. Bingley that he’ll host a ball at Netherfield; and then, thankfully for Lizzy, the visit ends before any further damage can be done. Though a tongue like Mrs. Bennet’s is sure to retain a lethal capacity at a hundred yards at least, so she’s probably not entirely safe till their carriage is well down the drive.

Caroline, seeing how deeply affronted Darcy is by Mrs. Bennet’s behavior toward him, spends the next day pressing her advantage. Unfortunately, she’s about as subtle as a golden retriever. She fawns shamelessly over Darcy while he attempts to write a letter, to the point you wonder how he resists the urge to plunge his pen right through her neck. She can’t see that for a man like Darcy—who, as Charlotte Lucas astutely observed, has a right to be proud—flattery is nothing; it’s surrounded him all his life; it’s white noise. But Elizabeth Bennet’s indifference to him—Elizabeth Bennet’s muddy hem, Elizabeth Bennet’s unapologetic freedom, Elizabeth Bennet’s jolie laide allure—these are things highly exotic to him, and rapidly becoming irresistible. When Caroline, taking a turn at the piano, plays a lively Scotch air, Darcy can’t resist asking, “Do you not feel a great inclination, Miss Bennet, to seize such an opportunity of dancing a reel?” She doesn’t reply, so he repeats the question.

“Oh!” said she, “I heard you before; but I could not immediately determine what to say in reply. You wanted me, I know, to say ‘Yes’ that you might have the pleasure of despising my taste; but I always delight in overthrowing those kind of schemes, and cheating a person of their premeditated contempt. I have therefore made up my mind to tell you that I do not want to dance a reel at all—and now despise me if you dare.”

“Indeed I do not dare.”

Elizabeth, having rather expected to affront him, was amazed at his gallantry; but there was a mixture of sweetness and archness in her manner which made it difficult for her to affront anybody; and Darcy had never been so bewitched by any woman as he was by her. He really believed that were it not for the inferiority of her connections he should be in some danger.

Of course, the inferiority of her connections won’t save him, poor sod. If they could, he’d be in for a real windfall; for we’re about to be introduced to a Bennet cousin who’s about as inferior as they come, and who will prove to be one of the towering buffoons in all of English literature. Ladies and gentlemen, fetch your spit shields; here comes the Rev. Mr. Collins.

Pride and Prejudice, chapters 1-5

Jane Austen’s second published novel is one of the best known and best loved in the English language, so much so that it’s almost impossible to see it clearly any longer; it’s become a set of fixed images and responses in our collective mind. Perhaps only Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” has undergone so thorough a metamorphosis from literary work to cultural bulwark, bogged down by the accumulated accretions of generations who know it only second- or third-hand—or who know it only by reputation, a kind of ripple effect across the surface of western civilization; familiarity by osmosis. Whenever it’s mentioned we no longer even hear the dissonance in the title; it's just a series of syllables, a consumerist trigger—not Pride and Prejudice, but Pridenprejudice. It is, in these post-literate days, less a novel than a brand. And like all powerhouse brands, it’s proved capable of spawning sub-brands, the most powerful (and in my opinion the most insidious) being that which currently boasts legions of frenzied, maenad-like devotees who’d as soon rip Austen’s moldering carcass to shreds than grant her even a posthumous claim on her own creation. I speak, of course, of the great, the dreaded, invoke-it-at-your-peril, Darcy.

What’s been lost in all this, alas, is the original novel, which, when it’s read at all these days, is undertaken by people who already "know" it, who are convinced they’ve always known it, that they knew it in utero; they don’t just read it, they read it with intent. We all strive to find what we need in stories; we furnish what we can, in between the lines, to make the text more amenable to us—to reflect us better. But with the possible exception of the New Testament, no other seminal text has been so greedily trawled for evidence of the reader’s own transcendent superiority. Pride and Prejudice is the kind of book certain people make a point of visibly carrying with them in public, exhibiting it like a designer label. Or a weapon.

Astonishing, then, to read it afresh. Make a conscious effort to clear away the layers of received opinion, the yellowing varnish of endlessly parroted consensus, and you find a lean, feisty, spiky little novel, limber and fleet-footed and occasionally even vicious. A bantamweight boxer of a novel. Readers don’t fall for Pride and Prejudice; they’re knocked down. And while they’re on the mat they see twittering birds around their heads, like in cartoons. No wonder so many people are deranged about it. They’ve had their brainpans jostled. Their vision’s still screwy, they talk too loud, and under stress they’ve been known to wet themselves.

This most famous of Austen’s works begins with one of the most famous first lines in literary history: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” What nobody ever seems to get, here, is that she’s being ironic—she’s starting as she means to go on. The “truth” that is “universally acknowledged” is actually neither; it’s the kind of ludicrous attempt to co-opt the conventional wisdom we hear all the time in the modern world (“Everybody knows trees cause air pollution”). Austen even exposes the irony in the next paragraph, when she allows that even the single man in question might not be aware of the “truth” about him.

From there she gets right down to business. We’re thrown into the hearth and home of the Bennet family, a gentleman and his wife and their five grown daughters. Anyone expecting a Dickensian scene of domestic felicity is in for a rude shock. The Bennet home is if anything a kind of capital-B Bedlam, with Mrs. Bennet as the chief lunatic and her husband the sadistic warden who keeps poking her with a stick through the grate.

Both the senior Bennets are, in fact, major comic creations of Austen’s. Mrs. Bennet is all impulse, pure emotion; the delay between her having a feeling, and speaking it, cannot be measured by any instrument known to man. It’s like her synapses are actually in her tongue. She rages, she rants, she pouts, she preens, she exults—sometimes all in the space of a single sentence. Her husband, whose regard for her is clearly long gone, likes to amuse himself by orchestrating this cacophony of feeling—directing it first this way, then that, like a pinball player knocking about a little silver ball. His chief method of doing this is by affecting not to understand a word of what she says to him, even the plainest and most obvious statement of fact. This happens repeatedly in the first chapter, with such frequency you’d think any idiot would sit up and say, “Hey, wait a minute—are you busting my chops, here?” But Mrs. Bennet is not just any idiot. She’s world championship material; a Wonder Woman of imbecility.

And Mr. Bennet is an utterly ruthless tormenter. It’s fairly clear that he’s revenging himself on his wife for getting old and silly; but Austen skillfully implies an element of self-loathing as well. He can’t forgive his wife for losing her youth and beauty; but he can’t forgive himself for not having seen that’s all she ever had going for her.

The chief prod to Mrs. Bennet’s hysteria is that she has five unmarried daughters and a limited income. This is why she’s in such a state of high excitement when the novel opens; she’s just heard news of a gentleman—the aforementioned “single man in possession of a good fortune”—moving into the neighborhood. “What a fine thing for our girls!” she trills to her husband, who of course pretends not to understand her.

“How so? how can it affect them?”

“My dear Mr. Bennet,” replied his wife, “how can you be so tiresome! You must know that I am thinking of his marrying one of them!”

“Is that his design in settling here?”

This is exactly the kind of response that causes Mrs. Bennet to sputter bits of foam; but she manages all the same to make her point, which is that Mr. Bennet had better introduce himself to this newcomer, Mr. Bingley, immediately, so that he can then become acquainted with the rest of the family. But Mr. Bennet sees no point in that; if his marrying one of the girls is all that matters, why not just send over all five for him to choose from, like a pack of hunting dogs?

It’s here that Mr. Bennet first expresses some degree of partiality for one of his brood, when he adds that he may have to put in a good word for “my little Lizzy.” All his daughters, he declares, are silly and ignorant, but “Lizzy has something more of quickness than her sisters.” Elizabeth Bennet’s “quickness” is at the very heart of the novel, and of the character’s extraordinary appeal to generations of readers, and I sometimes wonder whether a certain type of female devotee—lethally smart, socially inept, unappreciated by her family and disdained by her peers—might not latch on so needily to Lizzy Bennet as a personal avatar if the first words regarding her super-specialness didn’t come from her father. My own observation of the “Lizzies” and their ilk is that, whoa baby, major Daddy issues.

As for the other Bennet sisters: Lydia, the youngest, is the most like her mother—all wild, unchecked feeling—and is for that reason her mother’s favorite, which she both knows and uses to her advantage. Mary is bookish but very far from wise; she’s always trying to come forth with some wise maxim or aphorism, but it invariably ends up sounding like bad advertising copy. Kitty coughs, and…well, basically Kitty coughs. And then there’s Jane, who’s possessed of no flaw of any kind: she has beauty, grace, charm, humility, and sweetness of temper. By page 19 you’re more than ready to push her in front of a train.

In the end Mr. Bennet does visit Mr. Bingley; Austen doesn’t say why, but it’s pretty clear he’d be only too happy to have one less mouth to feed. If he really can foist one of his daughters onto this new arrival, all the better. But of course he doesn’t tell anyone that he’s paid the call; instead he waits for his wife to snarl about how tired she is of hearing Mr. Bingley’s name since they’re never to know him; then he produces the news of his acquaintance as though it were something he’d agreed to all along, leaving Mrs. Bennet to do one of those whiplash reversals that over time have basically shredded her grey matter to confetti. If someone treated his dog the way Mr. Bennet treats his wife, PETA would have the guy shot.

And yet, we laugh. Of course we do. It’s funny. It’s also funny when Mrs. Bennet says, “If I can but see one of my daughters happily settled at (Mr. Bingley’s) Netherfield…and all the others equally well married, I shall have nothing to wish for.” We hoot because this is exactly the kind of mindless babble you get from women like her. She doesn’t even hear herself. She might as well have added, “and if I can but fly like a bird and live forever” into the mix.

Next thing you know there’s a ball, and in Austen that always spells trouble. She likes lining up all her characters so that they sweep around the room in perfect harmony, while in the ether above them all bloody hell’s breaking loose. In this case the hell is principally provoked by one of Mr. Bingley’s guests, a regal young man who enters the hall like Admiral Perry stepping foot on the island of Japan. This is Mr. Darcy.

The gentlemen pronounced him to be a fine figure of a man, the ladies declared he was much handsomer than Mr. Bingley, and he was looked at with great admiration for about half the evening, till his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity; for he was discovered to be proud, to be above his company, and above being pleased; and not all his large estate in Derbyshire could then save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance, and being unworthy to be compared with his friend.

Even worse, by Austen’s yardstick, is that he refuses to dance—unless it’s with one of Bingley’s two sisters, whose noses are as determinedly tilted skyward as his; they’re like three sea lions balancing invisible hoops. And when Bingley—who of course is having just a swell time, never better, love these peeps and hey how about that Jane Bennet number, woof—corners his friend and pleads with him to dance, Darcy flatly refuses:

“At such an assembly as this, it would be insupportable. Your sisters are engaged, and there is not another woman in the room whom it would not be a punishment to me to stand up with.”

Bingley bravely urges him on, pointing out that Elizabeth Bennet is both very pretty and at present without a partner. Darcy looks over to where Lizzy is seated, and either not knowing or not caring that she can easily overhear him, declares:

“She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me; and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men.”

So here’s my message of good will to all those aggrieved single women, smoldering with affronted self-esteem, who go angrily about their lives carrying tote bags that read AN ELIZABETH IN A DARCY-LESS WORLD: Ladies, I can help you! I know for a fact that there are very, very many men who would be only too happy to step reluctantly into your life, offend all your friends en masse, and then insult you in particular. You just say the word, I’ll have a whole rugby team of Darcys at your doorstep.

But then, I’m willing to bet these women meet such men all the time. And I’m guessing that they, like Lizzy, don’t recognize a potential Great Romantic Hero in any of them; or maybe they do, and that’s the point. They don’t want a potential romantic hero; they want one who’s already fully fitted out and ready to drive off the showroom floor. God forbid they should have to do any of the body work themselves. Or that, like Lizzy, they’d have to recognize some of their own failings into the bargain. What, are you fuggin’ kidding me…?

Good luck with that, chiquitas. ‘S’all I’m sayin’. Cheers, stay in touch.

Anyway, Lizzy is sufficiently self-confident to laugh off the incident, in fact to report it merrily to her friends and family, which only increases the general loathing of Darcy. Lizzy doesn’t mind being the figure of fun; it doesn’t leave a scratch on her. She’s invincibly well-adjusted. She knows it, too; when Jane, the next day, is all bewilderment at Mr. Bingley having paid her the compliment of asking her to dance a second time, Lizzy rolls her eyes and says, “Compliments always take you by surprise, and me never.”

We’re then introduced to another family in the neighborhood, the Lucases. Austen’s brief introductory sketch of their paterfamilias is a small comic gem all on its own, and a wonderfully coherent psychological profile as well; by the time you finish it, you’d be able to pick him out of a crowd. It’s worth quoting in full, because it shows how Austen’s comic genius can manifest itself even in the swiftest, most fleeting strokes:

Sir William Lucas had been formerly in trade in Meryton, where he had made a tolerable fortune and risen to the honour of knighthood by an address to the King, during his mayoralty. The distinction had perhaps been felt too strongly. It had given him a disgust to his business and to his residence in a small market town; and quitting them both, he had removed with his family to a house about a mile from Meryton, denominated from that period Lucas Lodge, where he could think with pleasure of his own importance, and unshackled by business, occupy himself solely in being civil to all the world. For though elated by his rank, it did not render him supercilious; on the contrary, he was all attention to everybody. By nature inoffensive, friendly and obliging, his presentation at St. James’s had made him courteous.

Sir William has a daughter, Charlotte, who’s Lizzy’s best friend. She is, we are told, “a sensible, intelligent young woman, about twenty-seven.” We already know she’s no looker, because a few pages earlier, during a scene in which Mrs. Bennet recounts for her husband the goings-on at the ball so exhaustively that the poor man is nearly driven to taking refuge under his desk, she says the following, of Mr. Bingley’s dance partners:

“First of all, he asked Miss Lucas. I was so vexed to see him stand up with her; but, however, he did not admire her at all; nobody can, you know.”

Charlotte thus has all the necessary criteria for seeing the world as it is: she’s smart, she’s old, and she’s unloved. And true to her nature, she speaks truth to Lizzy throughout the novel, though Lizzy—her supposed best friend—hears her without listening. She says something now, as the novel’s principle womenfolk gather to talk over the ball—making this one of the chapters male readers may have some trouble with (except, say, the kind of male who giddily consents to be in the studio audience for The View). As the ladies rise to new heights of indignation over Mr. Darcy’s insufferable pride, Charlotte interrupts them:

“His pride,” said Miss Lucas, “does not offend me so much as pride often does, because there is an excuse for it. One cannot wonder that so very fine a young man, with family, fortune, everything in his favour, should think highly of himself. If I may so express it, he has a right to be proud.”

Such wise words alarm Mary, who’s supposed to be the sage in the room. Accordingly she leaps into an extemporaneous discourse on pride that proves to be another comic high point. It’s a small masterpiece of flat-footed, tone-deaf banality:

“Pride…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.”

At this point, she’s in serious danger of Lydia beaning her with a candlestick. Fortunately for her safety, a young Lucas lad chooses this moment to burst in and declare that if he were as rich as Mr. Darcy he’d drink a bottle of wine every day, prompting Mrs. Bennet to say that if she were to see him she’d take the bottle away from him, unleashing a repeated chorus of “No you shouldn’t”/”Yes I should” which, Austen tells us, “ended only with the visit.”

For the record?...If I were to meet Mrs. Bennet, a bottle of wine a day is about the first thing I’d recommend to her.