Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

          A well-known first line to a novel, if ever I saw one. And now, for the first time ever published in a review, here is the oft overlooked second line.

          “However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.”

          And so begins one of the great pieces of classic English literature – or, as I prefer to call it, ‘A case-study of Georgian upper class courtship rituals.’ I could keep going with the following lines, but then we’d be here forever, and anyway, that’s plagiarism. So I’ll leave the excerpts at that.

          With all the books I read, I first like to consider where it appeared on the 2003 Big Read hierarchy of book-popularity, of which The Lord of the Rings placed at number one. Pride and Prejudice came in at number two, thus meaning it is undoubtedly a popular book – and in fact, when we stop to mull over the fact that this list came out shortly after the grand Peter Jackson films, which undoubtedly gave that book a significant boost in popularity as well, had the survey taken place a few years earlier then Pride and Prejudice might well have taken first place for itself. But then, how many film and TV adaptations have there been of this novel? How many modern re-imaginings have there been, and how many light-hearted parodies? It turns out that there have been numerous films based on this Jane Austen novel in particular, from the 1940s onwards, which means that it had upwards of sixty years more visual coverage than The Lord of the Rings ever had, and from before the Lord of the Rings had even been published. The prickly love affair between Miss Bennet and Mr Darcy has had considerable and long-lasting popularity, so it was inevitable that the old Artichoke here should come along and read the book for itself.

It’s about rich people. Landed people. The sort of people who’ll find themselves against the wall come the revolution. That Jane Austen lived at the time of the French Revolution is a tiny coincidence, in fact, and just a few chapters in I was beginning to feel a certain amount of sympathy for the angered working-class masses; there they were, struggling to survive under the boot of a decadent regime, while their social ‘superiors’ were mostly concerned about how vast the incomes were of their various prospective mates (of course, after a few moments of reflection I reminded myself that the French Revolution was primarily of benefit to the upper middle-classes – the very people that Austen is writing about here – who used the events of the Revolution to manoeuvre themselves into power. Ultimately it was still the working-classes who got the rough end of the stick, and found themselves slaughtered en masse fighting wars in far away lands for a megalomaniac emperor. They’re called ‘revolutions’ after all, not ‘inversions’). Anyway, having swallowed that nascent feeling of Marxism and re-righted my sense of perspective, I could begin to try to appreciate the lives of the Georgian elite.   

 The story is started by an event; a ball, at the beginning, where Mr and Mrs Bennet try to get their five daughters fobbed off on wealthy young men. The rest of the story involves the swanning about of the various Miss Bennets afterwards, dissecting each other’s love lives and marriage prospects in tedious detail, and trying to deal with the upsets caused along the way. It sounds like they lived a very boring existence – nothing to do but find a mate, and the rest of the time (and even in the course of finding a mate) they pass their existence by talking about any sort of inane stuff that comes to mind – the reading of novels being one resurfacing disposable subject. The most exciting thing to happen in the first quarter of the book is when one of the ladies gets a cold while visiting a friend’s house, and is left housebound away from home for a while – I think it was Jane Bennet, Elizabeth’s elder sister, though I can’t actually be bothered to reread it to make sure; it certainly was not Elizabeth, I can tell you that much.

Our characters here are generally referred to by their surnames, being a strictly formal world. The protagonist, when she can eventually be identified as such, is Miss Elizabeth Bennet, sometimes called Lizzy or Eliza just to make things marginally more interesting. We also have the two parents, Mr Bennet and Mrs Bennet, both sans first-name, her elder sister Jane, and three younger sisters, Mary, Kitty and Lydia. We also have an uncle and aunt (Mr and Mrs Gardiner), and the various male prospective husband characters, Mr Bingley, Mr Darcy, Mr Wickham and Mr Collins. Of the various other minor characters who occasionally pop up, the only one of any interest is the aristocrat Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who is likely to wipe out her family by inbreeding before the revolution can dispose of them. The almost exclusive use of surnames can be a little confusing, and it is why Mr Darcy is and always has been known as Mr Darcy (though, considering that his first name apparently is Fitzwilliam, in this case it is somewhat of a blessing). 

Unfortunately what gives the characters their main drawback is that they all sound exactly the same while they talk. They all speak in the same flaunting high-end English, which the narrator also writes in, essentially giving them all the same voice; this often causes a little confusion in who is actually speaking at the time. Austen writes in a very 18^th century sort of way – if something needs to be said, then it’s worth using about five times as much language in order to say it. On occasion, though, we can see the faint glimmering of a character through all the language; Mr Collins for instance is a massive windbag, whose English is, if anything, even more pretentiously formal than that of the other characters. Mr Bennet, the father, has a certain dry wit to him that makes him just about worth paying attention to, while his wife as a contrast is a bit of a worrying, interfering woman whose only goal in life is to see her various daughters married off and resettled within visiting distance of home. Lydia’s character, as the self-obsessed teenager, emerges later on in the story, while Mary Bennet is completely absent throughout – seriously, I could remember that there were five Miss Bennets, and while the other four were in evidence throughout, Mary was a complete non-entity until the epilogue reminded me that she still existed. Maybe I was just asleep during the bits she featured, which is entirely possible. 

Elizabeth herself is tolerable enough, but Mr Darcy, one of the most important characters in the book, is just dull and lifeless. I understand that he’s meant to come across as aloof and prideful in the first part of the book, but he never really leaps off the page as you would expect a romantic icon to do so. Maybe this is a blessing actually; while he’s never really engaging, at least he is never irritating or slimy, or unrealistic. As far as male romantic leads go, not driving me mad with hatred is always a plus; it’s just that I can’t really see much else to him besides the one good turn he does, and the size of his wallet of course.

Because that’s what’s at the heart of this novel. Money. It is ‘A Case-Study of the Courtship Rituals of the Georgian Upper Classes’ after all. Mrs Bennet, the mother, is always eager to point out precisely how large a man’s income is, and to not follow the correct social conventions when choosing a mate is considered a despicable failure. The best episode in the story occurs at around chapter 46 when Lydia, at just sixteen years old, making her the youngest of the Miss Bennets, elopes with a male prospective husband. This sends shockwaves through the Bennet family home, for this is “Not The Done Thing”, one which will have quite tangible negative effects on the entire family, and the ladies are left quite indolent and hopeless for the next few chapters while Mr Bennet and the uncle Mr Gardiner go off in an attempt to track down Lydia and her scumbag lover. This is where the novel really shows its true colours; Lydia has disappeared due to the impulsive love of a teenager. Whereas a soft-minded modern audience might be completely taken in by that idea if it were dressed up any other way, considering that it’s the essential plot of a certain series of young-adult vampire books*, Jane Austen’s sympathy is entirely with the family Lydia abandons. We see the other four sisters whose lives have been shaken by Lydia’s impulsiveness, and the pain and anguish of the parents whose carefully managed existence has been thrown into turmoil as a result. 
‘But then,’ as the modern audience might reply, ‘what’s the collective loss of a tiny bit of social status when the bright and beautiful young Lydia, in the prime of her life, is following her heart and her dreams?’ I’ll tell you what, you whimsical modern audience, it’s the fact that she’s just so bloody thoughtless about it all – thinking only of herself at that moment, without any thought to anyone around her. It’s selfishness, quite simply. She cannot see beyond her tiny little world or her so called ‘love’, and has not an ounce of remorse about the whole affair, an affair which at one point her mother fears might end in a ‘pistols at dawn’ scenario between her daddy and her husband-to-be. You just want to grab and shake her by the shoulders and scream “Lydia, you stupid, careless little girl!” But she still wouldn’t take notice. Oh well; Jane Austen did her job well, to make such a point.

Elizabeth on the other hand does carefully think and consider things. She follows the necessary convention, but is by no means a mere subservient tool of her parents; this being the subject of one of the most interesting plot threads in the earlier part of the book. Mr Bennet having no sons to inherit his property, announces that due to the stupidity of the law, on the event of his death his closest male relative will inherit the house – that relative being his nephew, Mr Collins the windbag vicar. This is when something vaguely interesting happens; Mr Collins makes a rather ridiculous proposal to Elizabeth, in the most windbaggy way possible, in a sort of verbal essay. Naturally Elizabeth refuses him, definitively proving that there is at least the characters have more personality than meets the eye, though Mr Collins - being the windbag that he is - can’t seem to understand being refused. He thinks he presented his case well, and the fact that he does not appeal to Elizabeth on any level – intellectual or emotional – he remains completely oblivious of. While Mrs Bennet urges her daughter to reconsider his proposal, Elizabeth sticks to her guns – a good thing too, as Mr Collins is her cousin.

That’s something that might strike the modern reader as a bit weird; at the period it’s set, there seems not to be as strict a set of incest laws. Mr Collins claims to want to marry one of his uncle’s daughters so as to take the sting out of inheriting all his property after he dies, while the Lady Catherine de Bourgh, an aunt of Mr Darcy, intends him to be married to her own daughter under claims that ‘they were intended for one another from birth’, or some such piece of claptrap. Aristocratic inbreeding is not considered shameful by Lady Catherine, though her nephew’s marriage to an arbitrary social ‘inferior’ is. Like I say, if the revolution doesn’t get these people, then they’ll wipe themselves out like the Habsburgs did. 

One of the main barriers to a modern audience might be the alien nature of upper class Georgian life and courtship. To this end there have been numerous attempts to bring the story back ‘up to date’, by setting it in the modern world. While it might be admirable for writers to try to find modern parallels, the very essence of Pride and Prejudice is in its setting; the complex interconnected personal relationships of people who have to live under this quite stifling regime, when viewed in hindsight. Whichever way we look at it, modern western society is very different to those days – and something that must be stressed, though this is quite clearly a piece of romantic fiction, sex has no place in this book. In a world where you generally only get one chance to find love, you really do need to chose carefully – that is, in choosing a long-term partner, not just someone to have sex with. Hence the upset caused by Lydia. Hence Elizabeth’s rejection of Mr Collins’ proposal. Hence her rejection of Mr Darcy, even. As much as it may disgust you, neither money, status nor character can afford to be ignored in these considerations – and in today’s world, I don’t see how any of these factors can find a parallel. All romance nowadays is to do exclusively with copulation.

So then, to wind up. Did I enjoy this book?

Hmmmmmmmm...

I admit as I got deeper into the story, and realised that there was in fact a story to get in to, that it slowly began to grow on me. Very slowly, mind. There is a lot of tedious meandering about, I largely found it dull and uninteresting, but sometimes I was woken up by the events going on. Would I recommend you read it? Statistically you’ve already read it, and I’m aware that the Cult of Jane Austen is still extant in this day and age, so you’ll either end up reading it, or you won’t. What it is, though, according to my own interpretation, is a romantic story about reason and rationality, and that is a rare – nay extinct – thing nowadays, what with the romantic genre’s domination by primal passions and feelings. It’s a look back in time to the attitudes and lives of a vanished people, and if you can deal with the slight language barrier presented by upper-class Georgian prose, then go right ahead. I can attest that it grows on you, albeit slowly. I pretty much hated it for the first half of the story, it having bored me to tears, but, like the walls of Constantinople when faced by the rampaging armies who sought to overcome them, it wore down my convictions to maintain the offensive, until at last I agreed to a compromise peace.

         

* Post scriptum. I tried to hard not to mention those God-awful vampire teen romance bookshit during this review, but I was undone in the end. In many ways Pride and Prejudice and those other books are two opposite ends of the spectrum; one is about rational and considered love, while the other is about throwing oneself at the first man-shaped thing you notice and calling it ‘True Love’. I know now which one I’d rather see at the top of a bestseller list.

 Bride and Bibliojuice

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Collins. (1952 [First Published 1813])