Anghraine’s Blog

I was reading an essay on patronage in Jane Austen — a very nice essay, by and large — and of course, Darcy comes up.  As one of the “ideal landlords” (with Mr Knightley, although they are different sorts of ideals because their roles are different), that is inevitable.

But like so many others, the author does not seem to regard him as a single individual, but rather seems stuck in the Saul/Paul dichotomy.  Reformed Darcy and unreformed Darcy.  Is it just me, or are there not clues scattered throughout the entire first half of the novel, that he is generally different (from how Elizabeth sees him)?  And then — oh, the perfidy! — this author says that only the “reformed” Darcy is a good patron, quoting Mrs Reynolds: “ ‘he will be’ (not ‘is’) ‘affable to the poor.’ ”

Funnily (or not), I had this strange idea that the whole point of Mrs Reynolds’ raptures is to show Elizabeth what sort of person he has always been.  She doesn’t say ‘he will be affable to the poor,’ she says ‘his son will be just like him — just as affable to the poor.’  Hardly unambiguous.  And according to the Lambtonites, ‘he was a liberal man, and did much good among the poor (not ‘will do’).  That does seem to settle the matter.  At least the author acknowledged this chapter, because most seem to overlook it entirely (for instance, those who have the idea that he is a cold, distant, and dispassionate guardian to Georgiana: And this is always the way with him.  Whatever can give his sister any pleasure, is sure to be done in a moment.  There is nothing he would not do for her.).  Honestly, no wonder these people don’t get why Henry Crawford’s “reformation” is unsuccessful!

Since I’m feeling especially snarky, a couple things one finds in criticism and fanon, that I truly loathe:

(1) Darcy didn’t really love Elizabeth when he first proposed to her.

– The logic, presumably, is that he could never have proposed so demeaningly if he had “really” loved her.  These are, I suppose, the same people who think he only proposed because he wanted her in his bed.  That must be why he was so desperate to protect her from Wickham that he confided an intensely private family secret to her.

And even the Hunsford scene — offensive as it is — ends on a graceful note: Forgive me for having taken up so much of your time, and accept my best wishes for your health and happiness. Foreshadowing for The Letter, I suppose.  Are we really supposed to believe that the feelings which drove him to (reluctantly) throw aside everything he’d been taught and expected to do were composed only, or mostly, of lust?  And this, I suppose, is why he appealed to her justice rather than her ‘feelings,’ and near the end excuses her of any culpability in believing Wickham.

– In any case, he directly, and very famously, refutes this in his second proposal:  If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once.  My affections and wishes are unchanged. Doubtless a proper, conventional romantic hero would explain all about how he had never truly loved her before she rejected him, that he had not truly understood her and therefore could not love her, that his love for her had grown so much deeper and richer that what he felt in April paled by comparison,  etc etc.

But Pride and Prejudice isn’t a romance, it’s a love-story.  Darcy and Elizabeth are lovers, but they are not romantic ones.  So he doesn’t say that.  He says his affections are unchanged.  (Here’s another charming moment: He . . . wished it [the Lydia Wickham affair] a happier conclusion than there was at present reason to hope. How comforting.  Darcy is a rather strange creature by way of a lover.)

(2) Elizabeth changed Darcy; or, he changed for her.

– The first is the most infuriating to me, partly because the idea of any person changing another person is completely unreal.  I love Pride and Prejudice because it combines the fairy-tale with psychological realism; it’s at once enchanting and convincing.

I have never found Darcy’s so-called transformation all that surprising, firstly because there is plenty of evidence that he is (a) not acting quite like himself (Bingley, Miss Bingley, Colonel Fitzwilliam, even Wickham all either say outright or imply as much), and (b) that Elizabeth is missing or misconstruing much of his behaviour anyway, and (c), that “[h]is setting seems to be a condition of Darcy’s being” — when he returns to Longbourn toward the end of the novel, Elizabeth finds his behaviour much more like how he was when she first knew him, than how he was at Pemberley.

*gasp* *shock*

Even in the act of giving a compliment, his manner is cold and forbidding.  How much has he changed, and how much is simply a matter of setting?  The reader must decide, but I think both must be taken into account.

– There is indisputably some change in him, just as there is in Elizabeth.  My opinion on the matter can be encapsulated in this quote: “Darcy and Elizabeth influence each other for good, but the change comes from within.”

Darcy, like Emma, begins as an incomplete snob; someone whose opinions are informed by status; yet Darcy feels no compunctions about ‘constantly giv[ing] offence’ among the circles he generally moves in, and both are willing to cavalierly throw their snobbery aside when they feel like it.  Darcy likes Bingley so he befriends him; there is no trace of Emma’s snobbery to the Coles in her manner towards the Westons.  Their allegiance to a value-laden class order was never very deep.  Neither seems to have ever questioned it.

Elizabeth’s diatribe, formed as it is on largely mistaken premises, challenges Darcy’s ideas about himself and his society; but it is he who puts aside his anger at her accusations, he who reconsiders his ideas, he who changes himself.

– I think it ridiculous to suppose that Darcy altered his paradigms out of a desire to please a woman he had no expectations of meeting again.

It’s important that he is changed before he sees Elizabeth at Pemberley.  Upon seeing her, he did not instantly decide to woo her; rather, to show her he ‘was not so mean (narrow-minded, ungenerous) as to resent the past.’  It was a full half-hour before he thought of pursuing her.

My personal opinion is that he changed something of his ways (although I think it was more a change of mind-set, as I said, paradigms — manners are only the outward manifestation of it) because what she said was (partly) true, not because she said it.  A fine distinction but important here.

(2) What should we read into the fact that Lydia is both the youngest and tallest of the Bennet girls?

A1: Let’s see. She’s overgrown and immature? The sisters who seem closest to her in nature are both slight and delicate, that is to say, fundamentally different? Yet another parallel to tall, womanly Georgiana Darcy? I can keep going if you want.

A2: She has coarse vitality.
— Yes, she does. I’m not sure that follows from being tall at fifteen/sixteen; Georgiana lacks both.

Lydia is ‘a stout, well-grown girl of fifteen’, possessed of ‘high animal spirits’, we learn. This would seem to be a euphemism for sexual appetite.
— What?! I’m not saying Lydia hasn’t got a sexual appetite, but those ‘high animal spirits’ speak far more, IMO, of an unthinking desire for instantaneous gratification of any kind; a bonnet, a dance, a romance. Sex too, of course.

Lydia, who is prepared to make her own destiny, in defiance of the decencies of middle-class life, would be the heroine of a twenty-first-century novel.
— Am I completely missing something here? Lydia couldn’t care less about her destiny. She isn’t defiant of middle-class decencies, she’s oblivious to them. There is a difference. Lydia is shallow and foolish, driven solely by the impulses of the moment, and she doesn’t so much make her destiny as crash-land into it (though she won’t realise that for awhile).

(3) Why is Lizzy Mr Bennet’s favourite and Mary his least favourite daughter?

A1: Elizabeth is his only daughter with anything like wit or cleverness. Jane has sense, and the rest not even that. I don’t think that Mary is ever condemned as his least favourite, though — he shoves the younger three together, but he seems to dislike Kitty and Lydia rather more.

A2: Lizzy is ‘quick’, has inherited his caustic humour, and amuses him.
— I could go with that, though I’m not sure that Elizabeth’s sense of humour is all that caustic when Darcy isn’t in the room (his is). And, post-Hunsford, it softens still further. Darcy and Elizabeth are both much more amusing in the first half, if less admirable.

Mary has presumed to set up as a bluestocking . . . The implication is that she has dulled herself (and lost much of her femininity) by book study.
— Um, no. First of all, she does not pretend to be a bluestocking and would undoubtedly be horrified at the very thought. She likes Fordyce, not Wollstonecraft — archconservative moral instruction. In fact, Mary is the exact opposite of a bluestocking, and if she’s setting herself up as anyone, it’s the Bennet family’s own Hannah More. IMHO again, she’s a parody on the very conservative idea of the accomplished woman, and probably the Evangelicals. Mary’s book study is ultrafeminine and uninspired, as well as pretentious, and that is what Mr Bennet so disdains.

A contemporary Pride and Prejudice would, perhaps, see Mary (named, perhaps, after Mary Wollstonecraft) as the most interesting of the Bennet girls.
— I thought that was Lydia? Actually, I think Elizabeth would always-always-always be the most interesting of the Bennet sisters. A brilliant mind rusticating and already beginning to stagnate in her backwater ‘hometown’, pretty without being fashionably beautiful, a perfect older sister, completely and utterly inadequate parents, everyone intellectually or morally inferior, except for one haughty, straitlaced young man who dismisses her on sight. Except for the protagonists’ morals, this framework would fit quite nicely into the modern world. Oh, and Mary could be named after Mary Wollstonecraft, but is it more likely than Mary Austen, JA’s sister-in-law? or Mary, Countess Fitzwilliam? or Mary, Queen of Scots, who JA loved as a girl? Or simply an ordinary English name like those given to all the Bennet girls but Lydia? (I can’t help but think of Lydia Languish, but also JA’s great-grandaunt, the Duchess of Chandos, was Lydia Catherine.)

(4) What is Mrs Bennet’s characteristic indisposition, and what do we deduce from it?

A1: Nerves! And she’s a self-dramatising, hypocritical hypochondriac.

A2: ‘Nerves’. Neurosis would be the modern equivalent.
— Not if she didn’t have an actual disorder, it wouldn’t. And I really don’t think she does. If I had to choose a character in P&P to label ‘neurotic,’ I’d go with poor Georgiana Darcy. (I’ll add that I’ve always both admired and been disturbed by JA’s portrayal of her. P&P3’s portrayal made Wickham’s perfidy far less of a betrayal and depravity than it really was. In the original, we see the whole effect with the direct antithesis of Lydia — a girl who is talented, pretty, sensible, devoted to an affectionate brother, and just a wreck.)

She uses her nervousness as a means of tyrannizing over her family.
— Yep.

One must also wonder how much Mr Bennet’s sub-acid scorn has driven her neurotic.
— I always thought it was the other way around, actually; her ‘nerves’ drove him into sarcasm and mockery.

Is she a (verbally) battered wife?
— No. At least, not really; she’s certainly no better than he is. The difference is that he could be better (I’m thinking of Sir Thomas Bertram, another one who married a pretty girl and discovered her to be a shallow idiot later on; he treats her with the respect she’s due as his wife and guides her thinking as much as is possible. Lady Bertram is silly but respectable).

A2: [Miss Bingley] perceives that Darcy is attracted, and not just by Elizabeth’s ‘fine eyes’.
— They could be talking about his attraction to her personality, but I rather doubt it. I wonder, if I checked the publication date, would it be post-1995? Ah — yes. 2005. Figures. (Which is not to say that Darcy is only attracted by Elizabeth’s pretty eyes and sparkling personality, just that since brooding!Darcy took hold, nobody shuts up about it.)

Women have better prescience on such subjects than men.
— Particularly when the woman in question sees what’s going on because the man in question told her about it. Pointedly.

Why, one may wonder, does Darcy, if he is so grand, not have a title to his name?
— This is one that springs up occasionally, though I wouldn’t have expected to see it in anything pretending to be remotely authoritative (it’s usually more fannish). Darcy doesn’t have a title because he is that grand. His name means high birth, extensive property, political/economic power, and connections to his fellow aristocrats. What use would he have for a title? It wouldn’t give him anything he doesn’t already have. If he were the sort to desire one, he could simply purchase it — but I think that the only letters appended to his name are ‘JP’ and perhaps ‘MP.’

(10) Why has Mr Collins offered his ‘olive branch’ to Mr Bennet?

A1: Because his father is dead and he can? I daresay the rumours of his cousins’ beauty have something to do with it, too.

A2: Because Lady Catherine has ‘condescended to advise him to marry as soon as he could.’
— Okay . . .

Why? To protect her own daughter from the addresses of a young clergyman (she not having, like Emma Woodhouse, a Harriet Smith close to hand).
— Uh . . . that didn’t so much come out of left field as come out of a different ballpark entirely. In Lady Catherine’s mind, engagements for Darcy or Anne are impossible, as they’re engaged to each other. And were there the slightest indication that Mr Collins was subverting Anne, Lady Catherine’s displeasure would know no bounds. No, she’s just being an interfering busybody, as usual.

It resembles a kind of castration of the harem attendant.
— Er. If you say so.

(11) What profession was Wickham first destined for, and what do we know of his backstory?

A1: The church was intended to be his profession. As for his backstory . . . *deep breath*

Mr Wickham was an attorney who, apparently, followed a fairly conventional path in becoming steward of a great estate. The estate in question, Pemberley, prospered under his stewardship, and his benefactor, Mr Darcy, felt very much obliged to him. The two men were friendly, and so, when Mr Wickham’s wife bore a son, Mr Wickham called him George and asked Mr Darcy to stand godfather, which he did.

The Wickhams were always poor, not from any stinginess on Mr Darcy’s part, but because Mrs Wickham was extravagant. Therefore, being a very generous, benevolent sort, Mr Darcy took responsibility for his godson, openly favouring him, bringing him up at his own expense, giving him a gentleman’s education, and generally treating him like another son. (We never hear what Lady Anne thought of this.)

The two boys, Fitzwilliam and George, were apparently close friends and companions until Fitzwilliam saw enough of George’s ‘unguarded moments’ to cut off the friendship. Mr Darcy doesn’t seem to have ever realised this.

So, off they went to university — young Wickham to Cambridge. We don’t know where Darcy went, though I tend to think Oxford (mostly because JA only sends unsavoury sorts to Cambridge). Wickham seems to have lived an entirely dissipated life, which Darcy disapprovingly observed while continuing his own presumably blameless pursuits (not like the wild young men nowadays). Then Mr Darcy died.

They went to Pemberley, where Wickham resigned all claim to the living that was supposed to be his in exchange for three thousand pounds, plus a one thousand pound legacy, and racked up debts all over the country before heading off. Darcy paid all his debts. Old Mr Wickham died not much later.

Three years later, after more vice and dissipation, the incumbent of the living died and Wickham returned to claim it. Darcy refused to give it to him, Wickham hurled invective at him for a bit, then went away again.

In 1799, Wickham and his cohort Mrs Younge arranged to get a position as governess to Miss Darcy, and when the ladies went to Ramsgate for the summer, Mrs Younge informed Wickham, and he followed them, then pretended to fall madly in love with fifteen-year-old Georgiana, his patron’s daughter, and according to some theories, his half-sister, playing on her fondness for him as a child. With Mrs Younge aiding and abetting him, she finally consented to a secret elopement, but was clearly not altogether thrilled about the idea, since she told her brother all about it as soon as he showed up.

Darcy wrote something to Wickham, and whatever he said caused Wickham to leave immediately (I expect something along the lines of ‘I’ll strangle you with my bare hands and throw your body into the Thames if I ever see you again’ phrased in suitably Darcyish terms). Wickham was presumably at financial odds before a friendly acquaintance, Mr Denny, encouraged him to join the militia, and he did so, and by pure coincidence, showed up in the same place that Darcy was staying in. Thus endeth the backstory.

(I probably shouldn’t ever answer backstory questions. But I always do.)

He was, by his own account, denied the promised living of Kympton with its ‘excellent parsonage house.’
— That’s true, too. He was denied it, when he asked for it. Gosh, Wickham could be a good liar if he would give up the smarm and clichés. Oh, and I really hope that the clergyman Kitty eventually marries is the one who’s at Kympton in Wickham’s place. Because that would make Bennet family gatherings hilarious.

His father, he claims, was an attorney turned steward. Miss Bingley portrays him as the son of an upper servant, not a gentleman.
— She’s right; that’s what a steward is. Even before then, though, he was never a gentleman, socially. An attorney is effectively ‘in trade,’ like Elizabeth’s uncle Phillips.

Who bought Wickham’s commission? We assume it must have been Darcy, to get him out of the way.
— Commissions in the militia didn’t need to be bought. Anyway, that doesn’t seem to fit the facts. Wickham is white with terror on the street in Meryton; he left Ramsgate immediately, and doesn’t dare occupy the same ballroom as Darcy at Netherfield. I suspect that he nearly wet himself when Darcy showed up in London. Bribery was not required to get him out of the way.

(12) What fault of good manners does Mr Collins display, in introducing himself (with welcome bulletins about Lady Catherine’s health) to Darcy, and how does he justify the breach?

A1: LOL, welcome bulletins. Love it. Anyway, Darcy is more important than Mr Collins, therefore Collins can’t introduce himself to him. This is why the Merytonians are so outraged when Darcy refuses to be introduced to any young ladies at the initial assembly. He’s effectively made himself unavailable; they can’t flirt with him, can’t talk to him, can’t anything. (Talk about a win-win!) Mr Collins says that social rules don’t apply to him because he’s clergyman. (Except when they do, of course.)

A2: As Elizabeth warns him, Darcy is his ‘superior in consequence’, and he should wait to be introduced or approached. Collins replies, reasonably enough, that clergy are above the protocols that bind the laity.
— Reasonable my foot. Joining the Anglican clergy is not like becoming a monk; it’s not a vocation, but a career move (well, some individuals might consider it a vocation — but not society at large). Clergymen are treated essentially as landless gentlemen, the exact degree of consequence affected, as ever, by their places in the hierarchy, birth, connections, and so on. They are not, however, afforded exceptions to ordinary social laws.

He seems, for all his fatuity, to be making a good point.
— No, he isn’t. This is treated as a very basic, simple, and unalterable social law which has nothing whatsoever to do with snobbery. As a very simplistic, modern example — imagine that you find yourself attending the same function as a millionaire who is also the nephew of a senator. Do you, Rev Smith, walk up and introduce yourself because you work for the senator’s sister’s corporation? Uh, no.

(13) Why does Elizabeth take such a tender interest in Jane’s marriage affairs, and so little in those of her younger sisters?

A1: Because she cares about Jane, and is fairly indifferent to the others. (I have never seen Elizabeth as particularly attached to any of the Bennets except her father and Jane, and she grows even less so over the course of the novel, until the end, when her principal interest is in shielding Darcy from them. She doesn’t simply fail to regret leaving home, unlike every other Jane Austen heroine; she seems eager, even desperate, to take Darcy and get out, away from Longbourn. Now I feel like Lady Knatchbull — I mean no slight on Elizabeth’s good character or her compassion, and in fact I find her lack of cloying sentimentality refreshing, as with the delightful incongruity of twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth as the fierce protector of her overpowering Lady Bountiful of a fiancé.)

A2: It is presumably her hope to live with Jane, should they both be unlucky and enter mature spinsterhood together.
— And I thought I was being harsh! Um, no. Should they become spinsters, there’d be no choice in the matter, they’d live with their mother on their uncle’s charity. A better argument would be that Elizabeth is invested in Jane’s romance because it ‘saves’ them without sacrificing anybody’s principles. Charles Bingley is literally the answer to their prayers, a knight in bright shiny armour; once he marries Jane, their worries are over. A man took on his wife’s family as his own (hence Darcy’s horrified scruples), and single!Elizabeth would probably live with the Bingleys. In any case, I very much doubt whether that’s anything more than a small fraction of why Elizabeth is so thrilled about Bingley and so invested in the relationship. No, I think that has more to do with Jane’s vulnerability and Elizabeth’s innate protectiveness (not only of Jane — per above, she’s protective also of Darcy, and perhaps to a lesser degree Charlotte; she certainly takes Charlotte’s acceptance of Collins as an almost personal affront).

A2: He evidently ascribes an unprovincial sophistication to her which can only have come from travel and mixing in metropolitan society. He is wrong.
— Or rather the reverse — something that can only come from not being in the sterile Meryton community all her life. Which would not, in fact, be necessarily wrong. It’s clear that Elizabeth is the Gardiners’ particular favourite and has spent a great deal of time with them, in Gracechurch Street. The irony isn’t that Darcy is wrong that Elizabeth Bennets don’t spring from unremitting vulgarity and littleness, but that the people who exposed her to the wider world are the ‘low’ connections he so disdains — well, and that they all get on famously once they meet without prejudice.

A2: If Wickham was at Cambridge, then Darcy was too,
— And why is that? It gives a nudge of probability, perhaps, but no more.

which is why he sees Wickham’s dissolute lifestyle at first hand,
— I tend to think it was earlier than that. Darcy says that it has been ‘many, many years’ since he saw what Wickham was, and he isn’t much given to exaggeration (by which I mean that he does not represent anything as ‘more’ than he actually believes it to be). He also says that he observed Wickham’s ‘want of principle’ not out of any effort or extraordinary perception on his part, but because he could not help it. My impression from all of this is that they were adolescents living in a situation of such close physical proximity that they couldn’t help noticing each other’s habits — ie, public school. And I can easily imagine what sort of ‘vicious conduct’ Wickham might get up to there, and why it would have so outraged Darcy.

On the other hand, Mr Collins was presumably at Oxford, as he has never come across Darcy before.
— Forgive my ignorance, but somehow I was under the impression that Cambridge was large enough for the two of them.

(23) How does Elizabeth learn that Darcy was at the wedding of Lydia and Wickham?

A1: Lydia tells her that Darcy could have given her away if Mr Gardiner had been detained. The mind boggles.

A2: Lydia ‘accidentally’ (surely not) lets the ‘secret’ slip.
— Why couldn’t it have been an accident? This is Lydia we’re talking about, rambling on about her wedding, and mentioning something she had promised to keep secret. Is there anything unusual or uncharacteristic about that?

Why should Darcy have been there, one may ask — unless it was with the intention that the information should get back to Longbourn?
— You’ve got be kidding me. He had committed himself to a task and saw it through to the very end. Is there anything unusual or uncharacteristic about that?

Or perhaps, it was to ensure that Wickham turned up? Was he the best man? Or a signing witness to the ceremony?
— I’m not sure why his mere presence would be enough to ensure Wickham’s. I’ve always assumed he was a witness.

A2: Legally minded critics have sorted out his family history as follows: Mr Bennet and Mr Collins senior were first cousins
— Probably not. William Collins is described as a distant cousin. I, at least, wouldn’t consider a first cousin-once-removed all that distant.

the sons of two sisters
— You may know the law, but clearly your familiarity with the book is limited. The entail limits the inheritance to male-line descendants. Mr Collins and Mr Bennet are descendants of brothers.

Although scholarly, Mr Bennet does not seem to be a university man.
— Why on earth not?

Mr Gardiner is a merchant, presumably, in the import and export business.
— Just incidentally, the Mr Gardiner’s business must be very prosperous given their journey to the North. Also, there is no question in anybody’s mind but that they can pay off Wickham; it’s the Bennets who have no idea how to repay that. I’d guess that they’re at about £3,000 per year and they’ll only get richer over time. (If Darcy lives to a venerable old age, he’ll see the time when the Gardiners are probably his most valuable connection. Feel the irony.)

(4) When, at the Meryton ball that brings the principals together, Darcy makes his disagreeable remark that ‘She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me; and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men’, he is overheard by Elizabeth (and, as we apprehend, her mother). Does he mean to be overheard? Is he, perhaps, a little deaf?

A1: Firstly, Mrs Bennet does not hear him; only Bingley and Elizabeth do. Elizabeth proceeds to tell all and sundry what she overheard, presumably out of a fit of pique. He is neither malicious nor deaf, but simply (on this occasion) careless; it’s a crowded, noisy hall, he’s having a private conversation about someone who is sitting some small distance away, and he looks away from her before speaking. It appears that he doesn’t realise she can hear him. I also doubt that he attaches any importance to the event (I once played with this idea in a story where he didn’t even remember it happening).

A2: Pitching one’s voice in order to be overheard was, evidently, something of a social skill in the period.
— I’d say that it’s the other way around; people are overheard, sometimes to their own chagrin, all through the novels.

Mrs Bennet does it very effectively to embarrass Darcy, later in the narrative.
— A failure to lower your voice is not a social skill. Mrs Bennet is not trying to embarrass Darcy, but as always, speaking her mind without the slightest consideration for anyone else. Darcy isn’t embarrassed, either — just appalled.

It is clear that someone has been gossiping maliciously about Elizabeth. She has not been slighted by other men.
— Uh, no. Darcy doesn’t even know who Elizabeth is. Nobody has opted to dance with her, therefore (by Darcy’s logic) she’s being slighted by the local gentlemen. Yes, sometimes it’s really that simple.

Later in the narrative we learn that Darcy is also under the misapprehension that Elizabeth, alone of the Bennet girls, has travelled.
— Oh, this again . . . except we have no idea what he thinks about the other Bennet girls, just Elizabeth herself. And she has travelled, at least some; she’s stayed with the Gardiners in London.

(6) Why does Darcy, at the Netherfield ball, resolve to break up the romance between Bingley and Jane?

A1: (1) Jane doesn’t seem to reciprocate Bingley’s feelings. (2) The family’s public behaviour is appalling beyond words, with the exceptions only of Jane and Elizabeth. (3) The family is moderately genteel with low connections. As far as Darcy is concerned, this is a recipe for tragedy. (And if he had been right about Jane’s indifference, Bingley’s situation would have been unenviable at least.)

A2: His motives are never clear, other than that it is his ‘pride’ which is at fault
— Obviously his letter was too short. For heavens’ sakes!—he explains it quite thoroughly, and never imputes his motives to pride, not even much later (when he calls it impertinent and absurd but nothing more).

(8) Why does not Mr Bennet encourage his heir, Mr Collins, in his addresses to his eligible daughters? If not Lizzy (whom he does not want to lose) then Mary?

A1: Because he couldn’t care less.

A2: An added reason is that we are specifically told that Mary likes Mr Collins . . . Mr Bennet seems to be incorrigibly selfish. After he dies his womenfolk will be left near destitute, and evicted from their home.
— I don’t have a lot of respect for Mr Bennet, but it should be pointed out that they have an uncle with a good income.

As Mrs Bennet says to her daughters, ‘I do not know who is to maintain you when your father is dead’. Who, one wonders, is to maintain her?
— Her married daughters, of course. That’s the point. That’s why she’s so desperate to marry them off.

(9) Who does Darcy bring to Rosings with him, and what plot details may we weave around it?

A1: I’m not sure that Darcy brings anyone to Rosings, as it appears to be a duty-visit that they pay, together, every year. In any case, Darcy’s companion is his mother’s nephew, Colonel Fitzwilliam. Who is not an it.

Plot details? Er . . . Darcy is accustomed to being laughed at, thank-you-very-much, and he doesn’t mind it. Elizabeth can be attracted to plain men as well as handsome ones. Darcy has friendships with people who aren’t doormats, and confides his skulduggery in his cousin — who is suitably impressed. (I shouldn’t, but I just laugh at that.  Even though they only appear briefly together, their brotherly camaraderie is rather fun.) That Darcy’s family tends to share his values, so the anticipated ‘family obstacles’ aren’t figments of his imagination. That Elizabeth is attractive to men who aren’t depraved or idiotic. Well, he’s also the antithesis to Wickham, but that’s not a plot point. Oh, and of course that Darcy’s uncle Lord —- is an earl surnamed Fitzwilliam.

A2: He brings his cousin, Colonel Fitzwilliam, ‘about thirty, not handsome, but in person and address most truly the gentleman.’
— This is mildly interesting because some argue that this is the narrator’s ringing endorsement of the colonel’s character. While I do believe the colonel to have a good character, I also feel certain that this is Elizabeth’s perspective. (Which, alas, allows Certain People to fudge past the ‘not handsome’ thing.)

Apparently misanthropic, Darcy seems strangely averse to solitude.
— Misanthropic? Where did that come from? Jane Austen shows a clear pattern with Darcy: ‘between him and Darcy there was a very steady friendship’ — ‘for to love, ardent love, it must be attributed’ — ‘our near relationship and constant intimacy’ — ‘there is nothing he would not do for her.’ This is a man who habitually forms intimate, intense attachments to a very few people and ignores the rest. And he seems to have a gift for inspiring devotion; ultimately, everyone he cares about loves him. (You can’t really ask for more than that!) His well-documented abhorrence for socialising with large groups of strangers is an entirely different matter (which is, however, not-not-not shyness).

The Colonel himself clearly considers proposing
— Er . . . what? What he considers is that his behaviour might have inadvertently led to expectations, and being a gentleman, he tries to rectify the situation as sensitively as possible. While he may have considering a proposal, we hear nothing of it.

It has ‘less of splendour’ but more ‘real elegance’ than Rosings. Elizabeth is already thinking like an owner.
— Um, no. She’s thinking, ‘gosh, and this could have been mine!’

[they are] helped by Mrs Younge, who was dismissed [handsomely paid off] for conspiring to help Georgiana elope with Wickham.
— Darcy paid her for conspiring against his sister? You’ve got to be kidding me.

She is presumably, at this stage, a mistress
— No, she isn’t. A mistress is an official position; not every woman who sleeps with a man is his mistress.

if [Wickham] had caught wind, as he probably did, of Darcy’s feelings for Elizabeth
— I have NEVER been able to understand this.

(14) Why, at Pemberley, does Elizabeth confide Lydia’s elopement to Darcy?

A1: Because she’s overwrought and she trusts him. Which is, in a weird way, very sweet.

A2: She gives the unconvincing reason that ‘it cannot be concealed from anyone.’
— I bet she didn’t find it unconvincing.

The truth is that she is looking for a strong man
— *dies laughing*

someone to fill the hole so prominently left by Mr Bennet, who comes out very badly from this section of the narrative.
— Elizabeth knew what her father was, even if it hadn’t come home to her before. Darcy may be more admirable because he possesses virtues Mr Bennet does not, and Elizabeth loves him for those virtues (among other things… she also seems to very much enjoy his personality quirks), but I don’t think she’s looking for a father-figure. Exactly.

(18) In their post-proposal intimate conversations, Bingley tells Jane (who tells Elizabeth) ‘that he was totally ignorant of my being in town last spring’. Is this plausible?

A1:  Yes.

A2: No.
— I should have expected that.

The two ladies were, of course, in correspondence when Jane was in Gracechurch Street — and even exchanged visits. Darcy admits that he knew Jane was in London, and kept Bingley in the dark. It is a murky little side-plot.
— Caroline tells him (he never saw Jane himself), and he doesn’t opt to pass the news on to Bingley. Oh, the villainy.

As in some other episodes, Bingley emerges as either very much duped by trusted friends, or a virtual simpleton. Or both.
— Well, he can manage social repartee, and at least he’s not deficient. Intellectually, you can’t say much more for him. I’d add that part of his problem isn’t being persuadable so much as incredibly impulsive.

(24) Why is the proud, cultivated and snobbish Darcy the inseparable friend of Bingley, a man of limited intelligence and no firmness of mind?

A1: First, Darcy is a very partial snob; in fact, his style of snobbery is all but undistinguishable from Emma’s. There is some genuinely excessive class-consciousness, but a lot of it is simply that he’s snobbish when he feels like it, and especially when he’s justifying disliking someone. Secondly, Bingley does have some firmness of mind. Just not a lot. And the narrator tells us why. Bingley’s a supremely nice man, good-humoured, lively, easy-going, and well-meaning. And Darcy likes nice. (Incidentally, is there any reason to suppose that Bingley and Darcy are inseparable friends, except that they stuck together during Bingley’s 21st/22nd year?)

A2: One assumes that Darcy likes servility.
— Wha-? No, one certainly doesn’t! And Bingley isn’t servile, anyway. He’s impulsive and suggestible. There is a difference. In fact, it’s pretty obvious that Darcy doesn’t like servility AT ALL. Cf Exhibit A, Caroline Bingley.

(25) Why does Bingley (and his future wife) so readily forgive Darcy for keeping from him, the previous winter, the fact that Jane was in London — causing huge pain to the lady?

A1: Because he was acting out of loyalty to Bingley and never intended to cause Jane pain (good intentions go a long way in the Bingleys’ world) and possibly because Darcy didn’t really do anything to actively prevent Bingley finding out. He just didn’t mention something he knew. Bingley had already given Jane up, so to speak (which he is responsible for, though he never seems to realise it).

A2: Because he is Fitzwilliam Darcy, and not answerable to anyone.
— That works too.