Each time I return to Jane Austen’s 1813 masterpiece, and I must have read it a dozen times, I notice and smile at things I haven’t noticed before. Take the pithy, one sentence account of the Bennet marriage: “Her father captivated by youth and beauty, and that appearance of good humour, which youth and beauty generally give, had married a woman whose weak understanding and illiberal mind had very early in their marriage put an end to all real affection for her”. Then, at the end of the novel, comes real poignancy when Mr Bennet says to his daughter of the proposed marriage he is doubtful about: “My child, let me not have the grief of seeing you unable to respect your partner in life”. Austen’s italics are very telling here.
Just in case you’ve been holidaying on Mars for the last 200 years, Pride and Prejudice is the story of an ill-matched Hertfordshire couple who have five daughters whom Mrs Bennet (a pitiful, tiresome, comic character) is determined to marry off as soon possible. The novel runs along on on-off possibilities between Jane and Bingley, Elizabeth and Darcy and Lydia and Wickham. Mr Collins, the cousin who stands to inherit the Bennet estate – another genius comic creation – marries Charlotte Lucas from the next estate because Elizabeth, understandably, won’t have him.
Of course there’s a happy ending which traditionally means marriage – three in this case. We close the book confident that Jane and Elizabeth will both be very contented married women. Lydia’s position is far more interesting because hers is a forced marriage triggered by a wedding-free elopement and, one presumes, a lot of hormones and lust. Wickham, gamester in constant debt and probably a womaniser, is most unsuitable marriage material and Lydia is barely sixteen. It will not go well.
Austen prose always sparkles but it glitters more brightly in Pride and Prejudice than it does anywhere else, partly because the novel is full of unforgettable characters. The outrageous, entitled vulgarity of Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Mr Darcy’s aunt and Mr Collins’s patroness, for example, is perfectly done. So are some of the minor characters such as Sir William Lucas and Georgiana Darcy. No wonder this has always been the most popular of the six Jane Austen novels. And I’ve lost count of the number of different ways it has been dramatised.
I’ve come back to Pride and Prejudice now because it’s relevant to a new project I’m working on (you will probably hear more about this later in 2025) but, unsurprisingly, as soon as I read the first page, it became enjoyment rather than research and I was entranced – yet again. I’m sometimes asked to name a favourite book which would, for me, be absolutely impossible but this one would certainly have to be in my top ten.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
