Pride and Prejudice (2 page)

1803
‘Susan’ sold for £10 to the publisher Crosby, who did not publish it.

1804
Austen wrote unfinished novel, ‘The Watsons’.

Napoleon crowned Emperor.

1805
Austen’s father died. Battle of Trafalgar.

1806
Austen moved with her mother and sister to Southampton.

1809
Austen moved with her mother and sister to a house in the village of Chawton in Hampshire, owned by her brother Edward, which was her home for the rest of her life.

1811
Sense and Sensibility
published.

Illness of King George III caused the Prince of Wales to be appointed Prince Regent.

1813
Pride and Prejudice
published.

1814
Mansfield Park
published.

1815
(December)
Emma
published (dated 1816) and dedicated at his request to the Prince Regent.

Wellington and Blücher defeat French at the Battle of Waterloo, bringing to an end the Napoleonic Wars.

1816
Austen’s health started to deteriorate; she finished
Persuasion
. ‘Susan’ bought back from Crosby. Walter Scott reviewed
Emma
flatteringly in the
Quarterly Review
.

1817
(January–March) Austen at work on ‘Sanditon’. She died on 18 July in Winchester, where she had gone for medical attention, and was buried in Winchester Cathedral. (December) Her brother Henry oversaw the publication of
Northanger Abbey
and
Persuasion
(dated 1818), with a biographical notice of the writer.

New readers are advised that this Introduction
makes the detail of the plot explicit
.

In each of her six novels Austen provides her heroine with a good marriage, but that of Elizabeth Bennet in
Pride and Prejudice
is the most dazzling of all. Of all Austen’s love stories, it is
Pride and Prejudice
which most comfortably fits the patterns of popular romantic fiction, which is perhaps one reason why Austen herself famously described the novel as ‘rather too light & bright & sparkling’.
¹
Pride and Prejudice
is centrally concerned with personal happiness and the grounds on which it might be achieved, and Elizabeth’s marriage to Darcy – tall, handsome, and rich – is the stuff of wish-fulfilment.

When Darcy is first seen by Meryton society, at the assembly in the third chapter, he ‘soon drew the attention of the room by his fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien’. Physically, at least, he epitomizes the romantic hero, the ideal object of desire in popular romance fantasy. What’s more, he is reported as having ‘ten thousand a year’, which makes him the object of rather more mercenary desires among those for whom, in the novel’s famous opening words, ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife’ (I, i). But the fortune-hunters – and Elizabeth – are put off when Darcy is ‘discovered to be proud, to be above his company, and above being pleased’ (I, iii). The inhabitants of Meryton might lose interest, but for the experienced romance reader the story really gets under way with this early confrontation between Darcy’s snobbish indifference and Elizabeth’s angry pride. Darcy’s arrogance only serves to enhance his desirability and confirm his status as hero: as every reader of romantic fiction knows, the heroine will learn to
reinterpret the hero’s bad manners, his ‘shocking rudeness’ (I, iii), as a seductive sign of his repressed passion for her. She has the power to transform apparent hostility into lasting commitment and a happy-ever-after marriage.

In
Pride and Prejudice
, this process of transformation and seduction is very complex and very subtle. It involves Elizabeth and Darcy in far-reaching reassessments of themselves, and of their social pride and prejudices. Their prospects for happiness are rigorously tested by constant comparison with the situations and expectations of other characters. In this Introduction I shall be focusing primarily on Austen’s immediate social, political and fictional context, and exploring the meanings that Austen’s use of romance might have had for a contemporary audience. But to point out basic structural similarities between Austen’s novel and a Mills and Boon or Harlequin romance is not to reduce Austen’s achievement. Rather, it helps account for the continuing popularity of Austen’s fiction and of
Pride and Prejudice
in particular. The romantic fantasy which so effectively shapes Austen’s early-nineteenth-century novel is still a powerful cultural myth for readers in the late twentieth century. We still respond with pleasure to the rags-to-riches love story, to the happy ending which combines sexual and emotional attraction with ten thousand a year and the prospect of becoming mistress of Pemberley, a resolution which makes romantic love both the guarantee and the excuse for economic and social success. Romance makes connections across history: it helps us identify and understand the continuities – and the differences – between the novel’s significance at the time it was written and published and the appeal it still has for modern readers.

The particular appeal of
Pride and Prejudice
is also due, of course, to its articulate and independent-minded heroine – ‘as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print’, as Austen herself described her.
²
An early reviewer noted approvingly that ‘Elizabeth’s sense and conduct are of a superior order to those of the common heroines of novels.’
³
The qualities which distinguished Elizabeth from the ‘common heroines’ familiar to contemporary audiences continue to endear her to modern readers. Though she plays her part in a version of the familiar romantic plot,
Elizabeth Bennet embodies a very different kind of femininity from that of the typically passive, vulnerable and child-like romantic heroine; her wit and outspokenness make her the most immediately attractive of all Austen’s female protagonists. Less naïve than Catherine Morland, livelier than Elinor Dashwood or Fanny Price, not such a snob as Emma Woodhouse and younger and more confident than Anne Elliot, Elizabeth Bennet seems to connect most directly with the active, visible, independent identity of modern feminity.

Importantly, it is the fatal attraction of Elizabeth’s critical intelligence – ‘the liveliness of [her] mind’, and not just her ‘fine eyes’ (III, xviii; I, vi) – which proves even Darcy to be ‘in want of a wife’. From that first meeting, Elizabeth’s and Darcy’s fraught fascination with each other generates a tantalizing sexual energy, an energy which, like Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Rochester later in the century, finds expression in a series of highly articulate confrontations. Elizabeth and Darcy engage in verbal struggles to assert their own definitions of people, principles – and each other. Elizabeth’s satirical sense of humour and sharp intelligence are stimulated and matched by Darcy’s judgemental reserve, his apparent refusal to compromise; his social and moral confidence are challenged by her uncompromising criticism. But by the time Elizabeth admits her love to herself, confrontation has been transformed into an ideal complementarity:

She began now to comprehend that he was exactly the man, who, in disposition and talents, would most suit her. His understanding and temper, though unlike her own, would have answered all her wishes. It was an union that must have been to the advantage of both; by her ease and liveliness, his mind might have been softened, his manners improved, and from his judgment, information, and knowledge of the world, she must have received benefit of greater importance. (III, viii)

As good readers of romantic fiction, we know long before Elizabeth does that union with Darcy would answer ‘all her wishes’; as modern readers committed to Elizabeth’s independence of
mind, we may feel slightly disturbed by the inequality (‘benefit of greater importance’) at the heart of that imagined union. But the narrative momentum of romance demands a happy ending and, supported by the subtlety of Austen’s characterization, makes it very difficult to resist Elizabeth’s longing description of ‘connubial felicity’ (III, viii). Her description stands as the novel’s central definition of its ideal state of ‘rational happiness’ (III, vii): that is, marriage envisaged as a balance of moral and personal qualities, as a fulfilling process of mutual improvement. Austen’s skilful use of romance to shape her detailed analyses of social manners is powerfully persuasive: their capacity for ‘rational happiness’ makes it seem both inevitable and desirable that her exceptional heroine should find fulfilment through a spectacular marriage to her most eligible hero.

I want to pursue this idea of
Pride and Prejudice
as a ‘powerfully persuasive’ text, and to develop my suggestion that it is Austen’s deployment of the conventional, pleasurable romantic plot, and a rather less conventional heroine, which makes it so. At one level, we are simply being persuaded that two particular individuals are right for each other, that – against all the social odds – Fitzwilliam Darcy is ‘
exactly
the man’, the only man, who could have satisfied Elizabeth Bennet’s emotional needs. The breathtaking arrogance of Darcy’s first proposal is, after all, gratifying evidence that individual desire transcends economic and social differences: ‘“My feelings will not be repressed”’ (II, xi). But personal happiness is inseparable from the world in which it must find expression: precisely because they transgress normal expectations of who can marry whom, Darcy’s private ‘feelings’ have an unavoidably public significance. Darcy’s romantic attachment involves a very clear rejection of the dynastic ambitions of his aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, for example, with her plan that he should ‘unite the two estates’ by marrying his cousin (I, xvi). On the other hand, Elizabeth’s and Darcy’s unorthodox relationship is very explicitly distinguished from the shocking impropriety of Lydia’s irresponsible attachment to Wickham. Indeed, the moment at which Elizabeth finally recognizes Darcy as the
answer to ‘all her wishes’ is also the moment at which fulfilment seems impossible, precisely because ‘An union of a different tendency, and precluding the possibility of the other, was soon to be formed in their family’ (III, viii). By this characteristic process of juxtaposition and contrast, Austen establishes Elizabeth’s and Darcy’s marriage as necessarily significant within the wider community. Our narrative and emotional commitment to their successful union becomes, imperceptibly, also a commitment to the values that union embodies.

Again, at one level, those values are concerned primarily with the ostensibly private world of morals and manners: in the comparison between Elizabeth and Lydia, with the point at which the right to autonomy becomes irresponsible self-indulgence; in the opposition to Lady Catherine, with the rival claims of personal choice and family aggrandisement as legitimate motives for marriage. But, precisely through that focus on individuals and communities, Austen’s novels intervene in wider political debate. Written in a period of political crisis and social mobility, they are strategic critical analyses of the moral values and modes of behaviour through which a section of the ruling class was redefining itself. Very few readers and critics would now endorse the myopic view represented by George Steiner’s comment: ‘At the height of political and industrial revolution, in a decade of formidable philosophic activity, Miss Austen composes novels almost extra-territorial to history.’
⁴
It all depends, of course, on what you mean by ‘history’ and on where history is assumed to happen. Austen writes about ‘3 or 4 Families in a Country Village’ – ‘the very thing to work on’, as she told her niece Anna
⁵
– and about the fates and choices of their marriageable daughters. She writes, therefore, about femininity and about class: about forms of identity and about marriage as a political institution which reproduces – symbolically as well as literally – the social order. An important feminist insight from the late sixties reminds us that ‘the personal is political’; and the reverse is also true. ‘Political and industrial revolution’ are enacted or resisted at the level of private consciousness as well as public event; historical change takes place through subtle shifts in social interaction, not just through
wars and technology; much ‘formidable philosophic activity’ is concerned, like
Pride and Prejudice
, with the pursuit of happiness.

Access to the full political dimension of Austen’s novels depends on an understanding of the ways in which apparently inconsequential or private details of behaviour or language evoke wider debates. So far, I have stressed the pleasures of recognition on which Austen’s persuasive power depends: in terms of its romance plot, and the moral choices which that plot addresses,
Pride and Prejudice
feels familiar. But though the moral issues themselves may be easily recognizable, the public forms – the manners, the social assumptions, even the language – through which they manifest themselves for our judgement are often strange to a modern readership. Strangeness is itself another source of enjoyment, of course. Austen’s novels give us the difference of history, one of the important pleasures of which – beyond that of a purely aesthetic enjoyment – is the opportunity to make comparisons with our current moment. Austen works out her romance plots in terms of the everyday, material details of realist fiction, and her novels offer access to a particular, irretrievable lifestyle. But their economical attention to the lived texture of a social environment is never simply documentary or merely decorative. It would be a mistake to adopt a commodified view of that world as comfortingly stable, ordered and comprehensible. Austen’s fictional technique depends crucially on the reader as an active interpreter, not just a passive consumer, of detail. Her texts work on the shared assumption that nuances of language, or dress, or behaviour can carry very particular implications: as comparatively straightforward signs of social status, for example; as clues to a character’s moral attitude; or – more problematically for modern readers – as conscious references to the terms and issues which were being contested in contemporary cultural debates. Like its protagonists,
Pride and Prejudice
is vitally engaged in argument.