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Pride and Prejudice

Published 1991 by Everyman’s Library

Austen is so compulsively readable that I’ve already accomplished my re-read of Pride and Prejudice too. And don’t worry, I’m not about to be the killjoy that strips the romance from it this time. This novel is romantic, a true meeting of minds with the happiest ending Jane Austen has on offer. A fairy tale through and through, it’s just that it’s a political fairy-tale as much as a romantic one, and benefits from a much closer reading, noting the larger class themes at work and the transgressive choices Austen makes. For example, it’s easy to see Collins as the definitive buffoon, Lady Catherine as a belligerent absurdity. It’s harder to see, through the layers of time, the larger (and utterly blistering) critique of the Church of England and the aristocracy. Or the lengths to which Darcy and Elizabeth transgress propriety. That context makes the relationship and character growth all the more meaningful, and all the more relevant in any age. Overturning our prejudices indeed, not just individually and romantically for a pair of fine eyes, but socially, culturally, at large.

(Note: I never thought I’d be comparing Austen to de Sade, but since I read Gothic Tales recently, they’re both similar in the way I wish their political context was better known.)

A few notes ⚭

Pride and Prejudice in context ⚭

Since this was a re-read after Jane Austen, The Secret Radical, I’m going to put my relevant highlights from that book here.

In a society where unmarried men and women were largely kept separate, and permitted to socialize only when properly chaperoned, how could a woman arrive at any sort of knowledge of a man’s character, and how could a man hope to understand the nature of the woman he married?

In Mansfield Park and Emma the heroines seek safety in quasi-incestuous marriages with men who are closely connected to their families and whom they have known for years. In Pride and Prejudice, though, Jane suggests an altogether more revolutionary approach to the problem.

Readers influenced by the screen adaptations of Pride and Prejudice may see Mr. Bennet as an affable, mildly eccentric, delightfully humorous father. His withdrawal from his wife and five daughters is usually depicted as a completely understandable retreat from an excess of hysterical, hormonal femininity. Jane makes it clear, though, that he is dangerously lax—ineffectual, incompetent. According to Lizzy, her father has “talents,” but they have not been “rightly used”—a damning indictment in a churchgoing culture still steeped in the language and stories of the Bible.

The idea that Jane’s novels offer a blissful, almost drugged-up, break from harsh reality doesn’t hold water, though. Remember that Britain was at war with France from 1793 to 1815, with only two short periods of peace. It’s this background that we have to place the books against. The “emigrant” mentioned in passing in Sense and Sensibility is a refugee from the French Revolution. Easy enough to miss the reference if you wanted to try to make the war and revolutionary unrest disappear; Jane doesn’t.

War is a constant presence in the novels, a buzz of background static that, at times, rises to earsplitting screeches and whines.

For a novel which is supposedly far removed from any concerns about war, it’s crammed with references to soldiers. Its pages are peppered with the words “regiment,” “militia,” “officers.” Sense and Sensibility has one colonel—Colonel Brandon, who seems to have retired from military life. Pride and Prejudice features two, both of whom—as far as we know—are still active. One major character and quite a number of minor ones are pursuing military careers, though, naturally, as officers. The ranks of the militia were supposed to be filled by lot, but you could pay to be taken out, so in practice the landowning and even middling classes were exempt.

And it’s one that, unlike Sense and Sensibility, is definitively set during wartime. At the end of the book, when Jane details the various fates of the different characters, she mentions, explicitly, “the restoration of peace.” The whole action of the novel, then, takes place during active hostilities. But to Jane’s first readers this would have been apparent from early on. The “regiment of militia” that in chapter 7 takes up its winter quarters in the heroine’s hometown of Meryton and, halfway through the book, moves to a larger camp at Brighton, on the south coast, would have been shifted around the country like this only during a time of war. The summer army camps strung along the south coast weren’t there just to train recruits in the bracing sea breezes; they were there to defend against invasion.

I grew up near Chatham in Kent, which was for centuries a major naval base. It’s ringed with hilltop fortifications built or extensively remodeled during the Napoleonic Wars. Throughout Jane’s adulthood, people were terrified of being invaded by the French. There was a degree of scaremongering involved. It was far from unusual for newspapers to carry alarmist reports in which invasion was made to seem imminent. But scaremongering wasn’t the only reason people were afraid. Fourteen hundred French troops landed at Fishguard in Wales in 1797. They quickly surrendered, but they landed. (nb: I’m aware of this much more vividly thanks to KJ Charles and her Doomsday Books set in Kent, especially The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen.)

The militias aren’t in the novel to provide young men for the five unmarried Bennet girls to dance with; they bring with them an atmosphere that is highly politically charged; they trail clouds of danger—images of a rebellious populace, of government repression, and, more distant but insistent nevertheless, of the fear of what might happen if the men in the militia, the troops, mutiny. The militias embody one of the central questions of the age: Whom should you be afraid of? In evading one danger, do you run straight into the arms of another?

The French didn’t invade the well-fortified south coast of England; they tried instead to land troops at Bantry Bay, on the sparsely populated southwest coast of Ireland. They were prevented by a combination of bad weather and the British navy. Among the ships that sailed out from the Irish port of Cork to mop up the last remains of the French fleet was the Unicorn, captained by the man who’d married Jane’s first cousin Jane Cooper and having, among its officers, Jane’s younger brother, Charles.

But whenever—and in whatever guise—Pride and Prejudice was begun, by the time Jane came to publish it, she had herself lived in what was, for all intents and purposes, a garrison town. The glamour, for her, had worn off.

The camp at Brighton will be dirty and—if it rains—muddy. It will stink. There will be stalls selling alcohol, public drunkenness. There will be women (and girls, and perhaps a few boys) plying their wares as prostitutes. And these kinds of problems aren’t confined to the large training camps. The militia, which supposedly exists to preserve order and to protect the local inhabitants, is in fact a disruptive force throughout Pride and Prejudice.

Jane lifts the lid on it in one deeply, dizzyingly unsettling sentence, which goes from social niceties to bloody violence and back again: “Several of the officers had dined lately with their uncle, a private had been flogged, and it had actually been hinted that Colonel Forster was going to be married.”

Invasions; the naval mutinies at Portsmouth and in the Thames Estuary in 1797; the food riots that periodically erupted throughout the war years—they’re there. They’re in the background, but they are there.

But from what remains, it seems that we can’t be going too far wrong in identifying the setting as the mid- to late 1790s. This chimes with the mention of “peace” at the end of the novel, with the prominence given to the militia, and with the reference to the large summer army camps at Brighton. The way in which the snobbish newcomers to the district Miss Bingley and her sister talk about Elizabeth’s muddy petticoat early in the novel (“six inches deep in mud, I am absolutely certain; and the gown which had been let down to hide it not doing its office”) also indicates 1790s fashion rather than anything later.

Miss Bingley and her sister aren’t just criticizing Elizabeth for walking alone through the muddy fields; they’re bitching about how unfashionably she’s dressed, a point the modern reader misses. But by 1813, this style was pretty much confined to the wardrobes of workingwomen; there’s no way Elizabeth, who visits London fairly regularly and is not kept short of money, would have been wearing it.

“Prejudice,” then, in the 1790s, isn’t simply bias or judging without all the facts; it’s tradition, “inbred sentiments,” unquestioned cultural assumptions. It’s the entire edifice of society. The monarchy, the government, the judicial system, organized religion, the class system: all are to be upheld simply because they’ve been around for a long time. “Awe,” “duty,” “reverence,” “respect”—these are the “old prejudices.” They are to be clung to, a raft swirling in the maelstrom of revolution.

But that’s what radicalism was, and still is, about—questioning unexplored assumptions, getting, quite literally, down to the root, the “radix.” It’s about reassessing the way society works on a fundamental level, about challenging, in the process, every single one of Burke’s “prejudices.”

If Jane wasn’t familiar with Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution, she would have been in a minority among the educated, literate English men and women of her time. We know she read at least some of the other influential political writers of the period; we saw that she probably borrowed the setup for Sense and Sensibility directly from Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and there are indications in Northanger Abbey that she was also familiar with some of the writing of the anarchist philosopher William Godwin. If Pride and Prejudice had been published with that same title in the 1790s, it could scarcely have avoided being seen as consciously political, as deliberately attaching itself into radical discourse.

For a start, the names of the hero (Darcy) and of his aunt (de Bourgh) sound and look French. The first is occasionally printed as “D’Arcy” in later nineteenth-century editions of the novel. “De Bourgh” isn’t even vaguely anglicized. Why make characters with French names aristocrats and the owners of large landholdings if you don’t want to bring up what had happened in France—the abandoning of titles, the confiscation of estates, the guillotining?

Jane’s novels are unusual for their period in that they seldom feature members of the “nobility,” the titled aristocracy. Her near contemporaries—Maria Edgeworth, Fanny Burney—love a lord or a lady. Jane doesn’t, an aspect of her work that was remarked on by more than one early critic. “Her characters,” suggests an essay of 1830, “are for the most part commonplace people…of secondary station, and hardly ever exhibited through that halo of rank and wealth which makes many an ill-drawn sketch pass…with a credulous public.”

It’s rare that Jane ventures higher than a baronet. This is the rank held by Sir John Middleton in Sense and Sensibility, by Sir Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park, and by Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion. Baronets are the lowest hereditary title; they’re technically still “commoners” rather than “nobles.” There is a noblewoman, a viscountess, in Persuasion, a cousin of the heroine, Anne, whom we encounter in Bath, but she is in no way a prominent character, not least because we hardly ever hear her speak.

Pride and Prejudice is the exception—something that, again, was picked up early on.

In one of many aristocratic peculiarities, the daughters of a duke, marquess, or earl are, for example, Lady Mary Crawley, Lady Edith Crawley, and Lady Sybil Crawley. Marriage alters only their surnames, unless they marry a man who has a superior noble title of his own. Younger sons of an earl, though, are “The Honourable,” a title that they can share with their wives but that only ever really appears on letters. I’ve come across sneers that Jane made a mistake with Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s title; she didn’t. Colonel Fitzwilliam’s apparent lack of a title is also entirely correct.

Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s late husband might only have been a baronet, perhaps no more than a knight. But—as is indicated by the use of her Christian name—Lady Catherine herself is the daughter of a high-ranking nobleman—as it turns out, an earl.

In Pride and Prejudice, Jane employs a convention quite common in earlier eighteenth-century fiction but one she hadn’t used in her own writing since her youthful “novel” The Beautifull Cassandra, that of coyly referring to her fictional earl as “Lord ——.” This usually serves the dual purpose of steering well clear of any possible action for libel while at the same time encouraging your readers to wonder if you might not actually be referring to a real live earl.

Perhaps emboldened by the fact that Lord Fitzwilliam appeared completely unaware or unconcerned that she’d made use of his name, Jane appears to have borrowed more from him; Lord Fitzwilliam lived at the vast Yorkshire mansion called Wentworth Woodhouse.

So does this novel—with a title that seems to direct our attention toward Burke, and featuring characters with names that do likewise—look up with awe to kings, with affection to parliaments, with duty to magistrates, with reverence to priests, and with respect to nobility? Not so much.

Now, in Jane’s novels gossip isn’t always seen negatively. In Emma, as we’ll discover, the relentless gossiping of the loquacious spinster Miss Bates frequently exposes the truth, and the truth, for Jane, is necessary. Similar revelations arise from gossip in Persuasion. Here, though, it does look as if we are meant to think a little less of Colonel Fitzwilliam. The affair is nothing at all to do with him, and besides he barely knows Elizabeth.

Charlotte Lucas, who suffers the fate worse than death—that of marriage to Mr. Collins.

It’s worth just dwelling on this for a moment. Wickham and Elizabeth bond over their shared dislike of Darcy. Wickham’s dislike of Lady Catherine is, really, just an extension of his feelings about Darcy (he suggests that her “reputation of being remarkably sensible and clever” is the creation, in part, of “the pride of her nephew”). But Elizabeth’s impression of Lady Catherine is, as far as we can tell, completely unconnected to Darcy; she’s only just discovered that the two are related. What Jane is offering her readers here is a potent and, for some, terrifying cocktail—a dash of personal and class resentment, a measure of clear-eyed judgment.

A young, unmarried woman with connections in trade and a lieutenant of militia, the son of a steward, an estate manager, sit and shred the character of a much older woman, a lady, a member of the nobility, who has the power to pick a clergyman to serve her local parish and who we’re meant to imagine might be related to prime ministers.

This, right here, is a revolutionary moment.

A conservative novel would show its readers how wrong Elizabeth is, or at the very least introduce a truly positive aristocratic character by way of counterweight. Darcy could have been made into this counterweight, but, as we’ll see, he isn’t, or not in any straightforward way. Instead, Elizabeth’s suspicions (and ours) turn out not to have gone far enough. In spite of her title and her lineage, Lady Catherine isn’t just conceited; she’s shockingly ill-bred, far worse than the vulgar Mrs. Jennings in Sense and Sensibility, who, if she sometimes blunders tactlessly, has a kind heart.

Jane’s not exactly showing her readers a perfectly functioning system here, is she, any more than she is with the militia? Not only are the cottagers “poor” and “discontented”; Lady Catherine doesn’t do anything for them, apart from scolding them. She’s not a Lady Bountiful. There is, for her, no sense of noblesse oblige, no feeling that noble rank entails any sort of responsibility. From the corner of our eyes we can see the shadow of the guillotine.

There’s no unthinking respect for the nobility in Pride and Prejudice, any more than there’s reverence for Mr. Collins.

In fact Jane makes it clear that titles and blood count for very little. In this novel, being “gentlemanlike” has almost nothing to do with your social position. Colonel Fitzwilliam is; Darcy, for much of the novel, isn’t. Mr. Bingley is, and his money “had been acquired by trade.”

Mr. Bennet barely bothers to write to his wife and daughters during his attempts to discover Lydia in London; Mr. Gardiner, by contrast, makes a point of keeping them informed. He does all the things that Lydia’s own father ought to be doing. His wife, too, is as close to an exemplary character as Jane allows us to come in Pride and Prejudice.

It’s a significant departure, this, to make the characters who live by trade not only so much the most agreeable of the older generation but also the novel’s moral arbiters. Jane makes no effort to soften the realities of their social position.

The social hierarchy during this period fetishized the ownership of land, as we’ve seen, but it was just about willing to overlook the fact that money had come from trade provided that there was enough of it and that the source was decently concealed. In Pride and Prejudice, by contrast, we’re encouraged to think far more positively of Mr. Gardiner than we are of Sir William Lucas, whose knighthood “had given him a disgust to his business” and led him to abandon it, although he is by no means rich (he can afford to give Charlotte “little fortune” when she marries, and he appears to have at least five children).

In the other novels, Jane’s readers would have known, city characters—characters involved in trade—are included for broad comedy or to create embarrassment for heroines. In one novel we know Jane liked—Emmeline, by Charlotte Smith—the character who started his career as “a clerk to an attorney in the city” is “cunning,” interested in only “place or profit.” The heroine has suitors who are engaged in business and are, clearly, meant to be repellent. The only men she seriously considers are noblemen. In Burney’s Evelina, our beautiful young protagonist fairly writhes under the humiliation of having relations in trade.

In Pride and Prejudice, though, Darcy’s mindless snobbery isn’t allowed to stand. It can’t be justified. For the first half of the novel he is certain both of his own place in the social hierarchy and of everyone else’s, viewing status less as opinion than as fact. For him, it’s immutable, self-evident. It’s an idea which is so obviously right that it has never occurred to him to question it. It’s a prejudice, in Burkean terms—something that has to be correct because everyone’s thought it for ages.

Darcy’s first proposal to Elizabeth continues down the same—prejudiced—path. Jane withholds most of the proposal itself. “You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you,” Jane has him declare, before promptly shifting into summary and stopping him from telling the reader much at all. Now, it’s rather a feature of her novels that successful proposals aren’t written down in full, to the frustration of generations of scriptwriters. The exception is Persuasion, Jane’s last (more or less) complete novel, and that’s rather a unique proposal anyway, because the hero and heroine were engaged to each other before, and she indirectly declares her love first.

Social introductions are referred to thirty times in Pride and Prejudice. To compare this with the other novels of slightly greater length, there are nineteen incidences in Mansfield Park, twenty-three in Emma, and fifteen in Sense and Sensibility. In several scenes, the exact form and correctness of introductions are explicitly addressed, as when Mr. Collins introduces himself, very improperly, to Mr. Darcy.

Introductions were an important moment.

Which makes it all the more remarkable—and all the more obviously deliberate—that Elizabeth and Darcy aren’t ever, as far as we can see, introduced to each other. In fact, they actively resist the efforts of other characters to make them formally acquainted.

Darcy’s refusal to interact with his perceived social inferiors leads to some strangulated, triangulated conversations, as when Mrs. Bennet, taking offense at a comment that Darcy addresses in front of her, but to Miss Bingley, is forced to refer to him as “that gentleman.” Her apparent rudeness at the end of the novel, when she speaks to Darcy only in the shortest of sentences, is in fact an attempt at socially correct behavior under circumstances that Darcy has made extremely problematic.

Usually introductions required a third person, someone who was acquainted with both parties—a guarantor, if you like, of each side’s good faith and good character. Places like Bath, where it could be difficult to find someone to do this, had a master of ceremonies to carry out the role instead. It was all quite formalized. It also required a decision as to the relative social status of the parties, because generally the party who was lower in status was introduced to the party who was higher or who had more to lose, so young people to older people, single people to married people, untitled to titled, men to women. Once you had been introduced, you could dance, converse, and so on. It was possible, though, for either party to reject the introduction, to show his or her unwillingness to be acquainted. (It’s the courtesy traditionally given to women, that of treating them, temporarily, as the higher-status party in an introduction.)

It isn’t simply that Elizabeth doesn’t want to dance with Darcy; she doesn’t want to be formally acquainted with him, or at least not like this. She doesn’t once address Darcy here; she speaks through Sir William. As far as she’s concerned, the message she’s sending is clear: she isn’t prepared to acknowledge Darcy as her social superior.

It’s a moment that radical thinkers would have recognized, a stripping back to essentials, the propounding of a problem. What happens with something as apparently everyday and straightforward as an introduction if the two parties can’t agree on their relative social status?

So she sets up a situation where, first of all, Darcy refuses to be introduced to Elizabeth and then Elizabeth refuses to be introduced to Darcy. And she has the two of them embark on a relationship that takes place, almost entirely, outside social norms, one in which all kinds of set ideas and traditional concepts—prejudices—are uprooted.

[At this point in the novel, Bingley and Jane’s] interactions are nothing like enough to make them understand each other’s character; it’s a shaky foundation for married life, for all its decorum.

In comparison, Darcy and Elizabeth have, during an identical time frame, danced once, dined together several times, argued a lot, walked alone together, sat alone in rooms together, debated, corresponded, and insulted each other’s family (him) and manners (her). Darcy has proposed and been rejected. He’s detailed the sexual peccadilloes of his younger sister.

We’re so familiar with what happens between them that we fail to register quite how wholly improper much of their behavior is. Theirs is an astonishingly frank, astonishingly intense relationship, and almost no one, except for the two of them, knows that it’s happening at all, certainly not the true extent of it. The news of their engagement comes as a complete shock to Elizabeth’s family; it’s met with flat incredulity.

Elizabeth, we know, is impatient of convention and established modes of behavior, not for the sake of being contrary, but when she considers that they’re being clung to for no good reason.

Elizabeth is, fundamentally, a radical. She knows her own mind; she reserves the right to decide questions for herself. There are plenty of kinds of authority that she doesn’t recognize, or tolerates only as far as it suits her. On occasion we see her all but disciplining her own mother."

When, toward the end of the novel, Lady Catherine appears on Elizabeth’s doorstep and demands that the younger woman undertake never to marry Darcy, her demands are couched in language that Burke would have recognized and approved, the kind of language he used himself in Reflections on the Revolution. It’s all obligation, obedience, claims, “honour, decorum, prudence,” “duty,” and “gratitude.” And it comes up against a completely different kind of language. “You have no right,” announces Elizabeth. “What is that to me?” she asks. She is, she says, “only resolved to act in that manner, which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness.” Society be damned; Darcy and Elizabeth’s relationship has nothing to do with anyone else.

Elizabeth’s undutifulness as a daughter, her laughter, her lack of reverence for Mr. Collins, her lack of respect for Lady Catherine de Bourgh, they’re all of a piece. Elizabeth is, in short, constructed to be a conservative’s nightmare.

With her impatience of convention, Elizabeth transgresses almost as much as Marianne Dashwood does, perhaps even more, but Jane never devises any punishment for her. There’s no illness, no betrayal, no watching the man she loves marry someone else while she makes do with second best, as poor Marianne has to endure. All Elizabeth is made to do is change her mind about Darcy when she’s presented with new evidence, which is completely in line with radical thinking.

He has pride in his birth, he has prejudices in favor of rank, he appeals, at times, to recognized authority and to “natural”—generally accepted, time-honored—ideas, but Jane makes it apparent from early on that he is “clever,” too clever, ultimately, to reject the justice of Elizabeth’s criticisms and arguments.

In fact there are indications that he’s receptive to new ideas even before he begins to be seriously attracted to Elizabeth.

Darcy is excited by Elizabeth’s unconventionality; it speaks deeply to some hidden, largely repressed part of his own character. He can’t stop himself from arguing with her, about women’s accomplishments, about poetry, about Scottish dancing, about music, about other people, about themselves. In Kent, he deliberately and repeatedly seeks her out, prolonging his visit to his aunt and cousin at Rosings so that he can spend more time with Elizabeth.

A more conservative character, in a more conservative novel, wouldn’t accept that his behavior needed to be explained. Nor would he be open to being reformed. The conduct of a character like Darcy wouldn’t be open to criticism in a conservative novel.

Eighteenth-century writers were deeply uneasy about making their upper-class characters marry out. There are few exigencies to which they aren’t reduced, in their desperation to achieve social parity between hero and heroine. Children are switched at nurse; villainous uncles hide the rightful heirs; foundlings turn out to be related to the local landowner after all; fortunes appear; marriage certificates are discovered; guardians marry their wards; cousins marry each other.

Jane doesn’t do this in Pride and Prejudice.

The marriage between Darcy and Elizabeth is not, as her father fears it might be, “unequal.” Each comes to admire and respect the other. Their relationship begins with a refusal to accept social inequality, and it ends with it, too.

Lady Catherine, by contrast, is admitted only on sufferance and because Elizabeth wishes it. Of the new, extended family that Elizabeth and Darcy create, the family members that Darcy is happiest with, apart from his sister, the ones he is “on the most intimate terms” with, the ones he is “sensible of the warmest gratitude towards,” are, in the end, the Gardiners, the low connections in trade. Pemberley isn’t “polluted,” as Lady Catherine fears. Instead, it keeps the best of the old and welcomes the best of the new.

Any reader fully sensitized to the loaded language of revolution and counterrevolution would have read Pride and Prejudice for what it is—a revolutionary fairy tale, a fantasy of how, with reform, with radical rethinking, society can be safely remodeled.

If society were reformed, and the revolution to take place bloodlessly, then there would be no need to worry that popular disaffection would flourish, and no way the government could justify retaining an armed force to subdue its own people. Once peace returns, as it does—duly, symbolically—at the end of the novel, Elizabeth and Darcy can continue their radical marriage, freed from senseless or inconsistent rules and conventions. Together they will read, and debate, and remain open to new ideas, ready to cast off prejudices that no longer fit. It’s a fairy-tale ending; it’s a sweet-natured one. No one—not even Wickham, not Lady Catherine—is punished.

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