Lizzy Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
What wild imaginations one forms where dear self is concerned! How sure to be mistaken!
JANE AUSTEN, PERSUASION
It is a truth universally acknowledged that going back on a proposal of marriage isn’t the best way to start the day. Jane broke the news over breakfast, then begged for a carriage to deliver her safely back to her family home in Bath. Her hostesses’ adieus were icy at best, in sad contrast to the pleasure with which their family had greeted her. It was a predicament, well, fit for a Jane Austen heroine, only this time the heroine was the author herself. She couldn’t afford not to marry. So why was she speeding away from Manydown Park as fast as her borrowed carriage could carry her, fleeing the only proposal she had ever received?
The author of Pride and Prejudice and Emma wasn’t exactly known for her romantic conquests, and the twenty-seven-year-old had already prepared herself for a spinster’s fate. It wasn’t that she was unattractive; indeed, her charms were fresh enough for any Regency drawing room. She had even managed to attract a romantic scandal years before. Still, things just hadn’t gelled, and it began to seem as if she’d be a dependent relative forever.
Back in her prime at age twenty-one, financial worries hadn’t seemed real to spirited Jane, who possessed an unusually broad education in addition to a lady’s expected accomplishments in drawing, dancing, and penmanship. Her penchant for conversation and her playful wit attracted the attention of Tom Lefroy, a young Irishman who went public with his admiration. Jane reveled in Tom’s conversation, tinged with an Irish accent. The couple conversed publicly, met in friends’ homes, and danced enough to incite juicy speculation. “I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved,” she wrote to her sister in 1796. “Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together.”
Though her references to Tom were lighthearted, Jane couldn’t hide her attraction. Tom was everywhere: for months, he occupied her ballroom, her living room, and her blithe letters. By the time he returned to Ireland to study law, Jane considered herself engaged in heart, if not in fact.
Preoccupied, but energized, she threw herself into her work, completing her first two novels (Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice) before realizing that Tom wasn’t coming back. She never found out why her Irish love fell out of contact, but she suspected it had something to do with her poverty. Discouraged from his relationship with Jane by family members, he suddenly announced his engagement to a wealthy woman. Her marriage prospects dashed, Jane got down to the business of being a spinster. She took to wearing dowdy caps and retired from society, committed only to herself and her family, relegated to eternal dependence on her successful brothers, and caught somewhere between marriage market and matronhood.
So six years later, Harris Bigg-Wither’s proposal seemed like her out. Jane was a welcome addition to the Bigg-Wither circle at Manydown Park. She accepted the invitation to visit gladly, all too eager to escape her family’s home in loathsome Bath and spend time with Alethea and Catherine, Harris’s sisters and her intimate friends, in Steventon. And her happy holiday hinted at a permanent vacation: just a week after her arrival, she impulsively accepted Harris’s proposal, celebrating her engagement along with her future in-laws. It was only later that night, alone in her bedchamber, that she began to have her doubts.
The decision should have been simple. Her fiancé was eligible, well connected; his hand would mean the difference between financial security and poor-relative status. Marrying Harris wouldn’t just make Jane a wife: it would make her a wealthy woman, free of uncomfortable family obligations and the specter of poverty that had haunted her entire adult life.
Still, something about Harris just didn’t sit well with Jane. He was nearly six years her junior, an awkward, hulking young man with a distasteful stutter and a notorious temper. And though she had known him since childhood, nothing about his physical stature or gauche behavior had managed to endear him to her. Harris had family and fortune to recommend him, but was Jane’s friendship with his sisters enough to justify a loveless marriage?
Jane knew this was probably her last chance at a life as the wife of a respectable man. But it was an opportunity she could not take in good conscience: the next morning she broke off her engagement in a mixture of disgrace, relief, and resolve.
No diaries or correspondence recording Jane’s thoughts on her choice survive, but it’s no coincidence that most of her novels deal with the difficulty and rarity of mutual love. Later in life, Jane wrote to her niece, advising her to marry for love and love alone. “Having written so much on one side of the question,” she wrote, “I shall turn round & entreat you not to commit yourself farther, & not to think of accepting him unless you really do like him. Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection.”
Jane’s choice to end her embarrassing engagement was the first foray into the battle for self-definition she would fight for the rest of her life. An outsider by choice, Jane developed a keen sense of observation and sarcasm. She was drawn to parody and self-deprecation, absorbed by the absurd. And what better place to hone her talent than on the drawing-room scandals and small-town romances that surrounded her?
Though she wrote the book that would become Pride and Prejudice eight years before she cemented her single status forever, you wouldn’t know it to read it. Jane must have foreseen her own heroine’s journey toward self-reliance when she took to her pen in 1796, for her most famous book contains not one but two rejected suitors—and a heroine whose sense of self is rivaled only by her creator’s.
Modern women aren’t called upon to attach themselves to the first eligible man who shows his face, but that won’t keep them from seeing themselves in the book’s heroine. Elizabeth Bennet is vital, naughty, saucy, smart. And like her creator, she’s not about to sacrifice herself on the altar of a loveless life. Even in the company of other memorable Austen heroines like worldly Emma Woodhouse or wicked Mary Crawford, Lizzy more than holds her own. Her specialty? Poking holes in the ridiculous. Her cross to bear? A marriage-obsessed family with no money to support its five daughters.
Lizzy’s world is as uptight and constrained as a Regency-era dance, but this heroine isn’t exactly resigned to her fate. She’s happy to cooperate with the social niceties, but when it comes to major life decisions, she knows herself far too well to be taken in by mere words, formalities, or expectations. And nowhere is Lizzy’s raucous, flawed, and decided sense of self more clear or more enticing than in the moments in which she does exactly the opposite of what she is expected to do. When called upon to sit languid in some living room, Lizzy heads out for a bit of exercise in the muddy fields that surround Meryton. When presented with Wickham, a man of few credentials and many charms, she lets her true feelings show. Provoked by her wild sisters, she remains indifferent and ineffably calm. And when proposed to by the wrong man, she refuses to play along.
By all unimaginative calculations, bumbling Mr. Collins is the perfect match for Lizzy. After all, he holds the keys to the Bennet property, has a doting patroness, and is more than willing to share his estate in exchange for a fetching wife. But by a heroine’s standards, Mr. Collins is just not going to happen. He’s unattractive, pedantic, stifling… everything a self-respecting heroine must avoid. To her mother’s chagrin, Lizzy runs the other way, roundly rejecting Collins and refusing to place money before love. When her friend Charlotte Lucas accepts Collins instead, Lizzy gives vent to her true feelings:
“To oblige you, I would try to believe almost anything, but no one else could be benefited by such a belief as this; for were I persuaded that Charlotte had any regard for him, I should only think worse of her understanding than I now do of her heart. My dear Jane, Mr. Collins is a conceited, pompous, narrow-minded, silly man; you know he is, as well as I do; and you must feel, as well as I do, that the woman who marries him cannot have a proper way of thinking.”
Lizzie’s sense of self doesn’t just point her in the right direction, it prevents her from going down a dangerous path. We’re left feeling sorry for Charlotte, but we can’t exactly nod our heads in approval as Lizzie’s friend thumbs her nose at a heroine’s promise. By marrying a man so far beneath her, Charlotte has relegated herself forever to the annals of supporting characters. For any real heroine, Collins is the equivalent of literary kryptonite.
Okay, so it’s easy, even expected, for Lizzy to turn down Mr. Collins. But what about when the man making an offer is proud, conceited Fitzwilliam Darcy? Though Darcy has been introduced as diffident and self-absorbed, we can’t help but root for him a little. After all, preoccupied Lizzy has allowed her preconceived notions to mask his growing interest. Too absorbed in her dislike of him to acknowledge their complex flirtation, Lizzy doesn’t see Darcy for who he is. We don’t have that problem: though Jane doesn’t favor us with a full description, it’s hard to picture him as anything but brutally hot, staggeringly wealthy, and intelligent enough to really appreciate Lizzy despite his serious misgivings about her family.
It is these doubts, honestly but uncouthly stated, that trigger one of literature’s most withering marital rejections. Lizzy’s floored when Darcy suddenly asks for her hand, but we’ve been better prepared. Still, we cringe right along with her as Darcy lays down a proposal so backhanded it comes right around to slap him in the face. Her vanity insulted and any chance of romantic communion ground into dust under Darcy’s riding boots, Lizzy thinks fast. And self prevails:
“You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner.”
She saw him start at this, but he said nothing, and she continued:
“You could not have made the offer of your hand in any possible way that would have tempted me to accept it.”
Again his astonishment was obvious; and he looked at her with an expression of mingled incredulity and mortification. She went on:
“From the very beginning—from the first moment, I may almost say—of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.”
Lizzy’s split-second decision is true to her heroine’s self, a self that won’t be trodden upon by any arrogant man. Darcy’s not just due for a refusal—his insulting proposal means he’s the last man in the world she’d ever accept. Overcome by embarrassment and outrage, Lizzy flings both caution and future aside with a few choice words. For a heroine, anything would do but to marry a man she can neither love nor respect.
But heroines are human, too, and we’re along for the comedown that overtakes Lizzy once she has time to think over her refusal (Darcy’s impassioned letter, which explains his behavior and casts doubt on Wickham’s true nature, doesn’t hurt, either). A waffling Lizzy is even better than decisive, spirited Lizzy precisely because her questions and doubts are so real. Was her ballsy refusal actually a terrible mistake? Will Darcy ever forgive her impulsive, hurtful words? Can a man with a gorgeous estate like Pemberley be all bad? Any woman who’s ever stayed up at night reliving an important conversation or planning out a difficult one can identify with Lizzy’s plight.
She grew absolutely ashamed of herself. Of neither Darcy nor Wickham could she think without feeling she had been blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd.
“How despicably I have acted!” she cried; “I, who have prided myself on my discernment!… Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment I never knew myself.”
It would be all too easy for Lizzy to mope and resign herself to her pride’s spectacular fall, but Lizzy is a heroine of action. Ever on the hunt for self-understanding, she is forced to evaluate her own role in the debacle, and what she sees is not flattering. Given the chance to behave heroically, Lizzy shines: in the face of her own shortcomings, she doesn’t flinch for a second. Instead, she confronts herself with a heroine’s daring. It’s time to change and challenge the beliefs she once held so dear.
With new self-knowledge comes new resolve, and Lizzy softens toward Darcy when they unexpectedly meet in Derbyshire. It isn’t long before she must acknowledge that their relationship goes far beyond cold mutual acquaintance—knowledge that helps her stand up to a bullying aunt and dare to declare her own truth. Tellingly, love doesn’t hit Lizzy until she’s open enough to receive as well as give it. And what she does get will inspire a tiny spark of jealousy in anyone but the most angelic reader.
The heart of Pride and Prejudice is more than a love story—it’s a heroine’s fearless confrontation of herself, complete with family humiliations and fatal flaws. Jane isn’t easy on Lizzy: she draws her literary daughter with just as many shortcomings as strengths. Her worst traits are brought to the fore by her inane parents and absurd sisters, people who encourage her to be petty and dismissive, and to laugh away her troubles. No, Lizzy’s not perfect, and her prejudices are as much a part of herself as the bravado that leads her to walk three miles in the mud to visit her ill sister or contradict pompous Lady Catherine de Bourgh in defense of herself and her love. Lizzy and Darcy must both embrace each other’s entire selves if they are to get their happy ending. First, though, both must look within.
Jane Austen knew all too well that self is elusive and ever-changing. After all, she specialized in sudden realizations and blemished but self-determined heroines. Throughout Pride and Prejudice, she urges us to take an honest look at ourselves and, more importantly, to face what we see with a heroine’s bravado. Does that fearlessness mean we can’t succumb to (or laugh at) our woes? No way: the laughter and the doubts are part of the heroine’s journey toward a more complete self.
Like her most famous heroine, Jane Austen never really came to terms with a society that expected her to repress her true opinions and strengths in favor of frivolous “accomplishments.” Contrary to popular perceptions (and her fans’ desires), she tended toward Darcy-like discontent, spending much of her adult life carving out a unique space for her dissatisfied self. We lucked out when Jane decided to take a pass on a mundane life full of fancy work and frills, daring instead to act on behalf of her real passions. And we’re lucky that she passed some of that fire—and courage—to her literary daughter.
Lizzy, like Jane, knows full well that turning down Darcy and the ridiculous Collins means she may never marry. She does it anyway. Even if Lizzy didn’t get her happy ending, we get the feeling that she would have been happy all the same, content in a position much like the one her creator occupied. “Till I have your disposition, your goodness, I never can have your happiness,” she tells her sister Jane. “No, no, let me shift for myself; and, perhaps, if I have very good luck, I may meet with another Mr. Collins in time.” Though everyone around her is intent on freaking out around love and marriage, Lizzy doesn’t have to play along. Self-assured and self-respecting, she doesn’t need a man to complete her, even if she gets one in the end. And we can’t help but suspect that she’ll find plenty of laughter in life, married or not.
Jane Austen’s decision not to marry meant giving up the possibility of the romantic happy ending she invariably gave her heroines, but it didn’t mean giving up her enjoyment of life. A novelist at a time when true ladies never sought public regard, Jane dared to envision a life defined by professional accomplishments rather than personal connections. As a writer and a woman, she forged a life that reflected the deepest callings of a heroine’s self—laughing at polite society, poking fun, never conforming completely to the model of a mannered woman. It was something that placed her at odds with expectation even as it fed her innermost self. But losing the approbation of others for her own self’s sake was a risk Jane was more than willing to take.
Two hundred years after Jane Austen dared to be herself, a modern heroine’s got to shore up her resources. Circumstance and romance change constantly, but there’s something to be said for leaning into what you know. If “self” isn’t part of that arsenal, what’s the point of the struggle? Self is what we fight for, where we come from. Flawed or not (and what heroine is not flawed?), we’re the only constant in our lives. Often, our selves are the only place we have to come back to. The landscape is weird and ever-changing, but it’s one well worth getting to know.
Luckily, no heroine is called upon to know herself at all times. In fact, Lizzy proves that blind adherence to prejudices and principles is its own kind of folly. Think of the boredom of a Pride and Prejudice in which neither quality was challenged, changed, or overcome. Lizzy’s imperfection is also her appeal, and ours. Thankfully, we’re allowed to get some mud on our petticoats, change our minds, even turn down a Darcy once in a while, as long as we come back to ourselves in the end. Change is inherent in “self,” but one thing should never change: our commitment to whichever self we possess right now. Staking a claim to self may be scary, but it’s always necessary.
It’s easy to dismiss a two-hundred-year-old book as a literary chestnut, a historical oddity that couldn’t possibly apply to modern life. But hemlines shift far more quickly than human nature, and Jane’s story of romantic confusion and changing opinions is just as vital and funny as it must have been for its first readers. Jane Austen’s witty heroines have pervaded every level of culture, from Clueless to chick lit, and her influence isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. There’s certainly no dust on my copy of Pride and Prejudice, for the book remains relevant no matter where I find myself. My life is more concerned with career politics than marital ones, but that doesn’t keep me from finding Lizzy’s spirit wherever authority is flouted, minds changed, and expectations challenged.
Looking for a modern-day Lizzy? Seek out the people with enough perspective to laugh their way through the crappy and the ridiculous. I channel my inner Lizzy whenever I bump up against absurd expectations or laughable characters (surely I have a Lizzy-like disregard of self-important lawyers to thank for getting me through my paralegal years). Like Miss Bennet, I am called upon to examine my own actions, change what I don’t like, and adhere to my gut instincts. Like Miss Austen, I am called upon to create my own place in life, one that is true to the person I am and not the person anyone else expects me to be. It isn’t easy to answer this call, but I know I’m in good company whenever I do. And every time I revisit Pride and Prejudice, I am reminded that when dealt a hand of Collinses and Wickhams, indecision and regret, there really isn’t any acceptable substitute for my own boisterous, uncertain self.
READ THIS BOOK:
• When your mom complains that you’ll never give her grandchildren
• When your inner people-pleaser threatens to drown out your gut instinct
• As an antidote to deathly seriousness
LIZZY’S LITERARY SISTERS:
• Emma Woodhouse in Emma, by Jane Austen
• Bridget Jones in Bridget Jones’s Diary, by Helen Fielding
• Hermione Granger in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series