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If there is one generally popular novel in the English language, it is Pride and Prejudice and this was true before a recent successful television version. It has always been taken seriously by the eminent in society and in literature: Jane Austen was celebrated from her first book, Sense and Sensibility. It is a very English novel, and foreigners have been known to question our admiration. Class and money! – and where are the great themes of Life and Death? So come the criticisms, still, and the reply often is that class and money defined the lives of the novel’s characters, not to mention the life of the woman who wrote it. So let us deal with these issues first, leaving aside for the moment the real themes of the book.

Jane Austen was a member of a network of middle-class families that merged upwards into the aristocracy, but her own family was poor. Her father, with six children – two girls and four boys – to feed and clothe and find careers for, had to take in pupils, so the home was for part of the year a school, noisy and full of rambunctious boys. Jane and her sister Cassandra felt themselves to be, and were often treated as, poor relations, dependent on presents, little trips and handouts from better-off and generous relatives. Not until – late – Jane earned some money writing, did she enjoy any kind of independence. Her situation was a common one then for poor unmarried women anywhere in Europe.

She has often been portrayed as a conventional spinster, partly because of Mary Mitford’s unfriendly description of her as ‘a poker’ – upright and judging. She was malicious – this time the critic is Virginia Woolf quoting not very attractive bon mots at others’ expense. She wrote her immortal novels in corners, always ready to set them aside to take part in tea and gossip. What do we have here? A woman of the kind I remember from when I was a girl, the unmarried maiden aunt, ready to be useful to others, without any life of her own, a pitiable figure. Austen was supposed, so we have often read, to be a sheltered woman, her experience limited to village life and a narrow middle-class circle.

Here is a quote from an article by a once influential critic, Demetrius Capetanakis, in the very influential periodical New Writing and Daylight for winter 1943–4 – that is, in the middle of the war. ‘Round every page of Jane Austen’s novels one feels the hedge of an eighteenth-century English home. It is the hedge of “sense”, of logic, or rather the logic of a person leading a secure life in the midst of a secure society. Jane Austen was protected by a hedge of unquestionable values …’ Nothing could be further from the truth. First of all, her situation among the genteel poor exposed her: there can be few worse positions in society, even if often useful for the creation of literature. She had a close woman friend in the fashionable world, a cousin, probably Warren Hastings’ illegitimate child, married to a French count who lost his head to the guillotine. The whole course of the French Revolution and its aftermath must have seemed as close to her as news from her own family. Her four brothers were often off fighting in the Navy against Napoleon, in danger, and afflicting their family with anxiety. Above all, Jane was enmeshed in the lives of female relatives and friends, who were always pregnant, nursing, giving birth to innumerable children who died then so easily and often. And, more potent as an influence than anything, Jane was sent as a tiny child to boarding school, and there was as miserable and neglected as Jane Eyre was at her school.

The triumph of Jane Austen’s art was that the little piece of ivory she claimed as her artistic territory was carved out of such an abundance of experience and material. She excluded and refined. That means for people now who know even a little about that time, her stages seem confined brightly lit places where all around loom and mass shadows, dangers, tragedy. Nowhere in an Austen novel does an aristocrat lose his head, a woman die from milk fever or puerperal fever, or give birth to a mentally sick child, like her cousin Eliza. Pain and grief are cured by love, kindness and presumably kisses, though I cannot imagine more than a chaste kiss in an Austen novel: more and the delicate fabric, the tone, would be destroyed.

Jane Austen loved well and lost, young. He was Irish and he loved her too, and now it seems this marriage would have been made in heaven, but he was poor, had a mother and sisters to support, and so he must marry for money. This abnegation was understood by both sides. But she did love him, and he her, and the pain of it is, so it is generally thought, in Persuasion.

Later, when her single state was at its most circumscribing and difficult, she was asked in marriage by a neighbouring estate owner, who was rich, with a big house. The temptation was such that she accepted him, and the prospect of running an estate, being wife to a man of considerable standing, having children, leaving behind for ever her status as poor relation. But next day she changed her mind and refused him. This seems to me as sharp a glimpse into her mind as any we have. It is suggested that the memory of her love for Tom Lefroy made it impossible for her to marry anyone else. But it is useful to remember here that Cassandra reported Jane’s moments of exultation at being free and unmarried. Free from what? Surely, childbearing. Again and again one reads how some cousin, or friend, has died in childbed with her eighth or ninth child, having been pregnant or breastfeeding for all those years. Matrimony at the level it was being observed by Jane and Cassandra cannot have appeared salubrious. Looking back now it is hard not to conclude that perhaps those despised spinsters had the best of it. Cassandra was always off attending sickbeds and deathbeds, and Jane did her share. Those two sisters’ confidential talk in their shared bedroom – what we wouldn’t give to have a recording of it. Perhaps there are hints in Elizabeth Bennet’s bedtime chats with sister Jane.

In Pride and Prejudice is a painful moment which it is easy to overlook, as it is presented as comedy. Elizabeth has been invited to marry one of the unpleasantest men in literature, Mr Collins. Had she agreed, she would have ensured her family’s safe future in a house which would belong to him on the death of her father. But she refused. Jesting about it with her friend and sister Jane she says there is no future for her unless another Mr Collins turns up, and proposes. The point is, there is a horrid truth there. The novel does not paint a picture where eligible and sensible (not the same thing) men abound. On the contrary, the young women are all on the lookout for a husband – no husband, no future – and the young men are spoiled for choice. Elizabeth earns the fury of her mother, who is all cunning and worldly wisdom, and the commendation of her father, a man of discrimination, who reminds his daughter, indicating his silly wife, what may happen if one marries indiscreetly. But the fact remains, one’s blood does suffer a chill, even if a brief one, even now, looking back at the fate of women, their choices. Elizabeth turned down appalling Mr Collins but could have remained insecure all her life. Incidentally it is interesting that teachers inviting students to read Pride and Prejudice report that many of today’s young women have so little sense of history, or of the history of women, or of their own good fortune, that they say things like ‘Why didn’t Elizabeth and Jane get jobs? Why were they always going on about getting husbands?’

Elizabeth said No to Mr Collins and flouted the conventions of the time. A young woman must look out for a young man with prospects and marry him. Love shouldn’t – and for centuries didn’t – come into it.

To say ‘I don’t love him’ was a recent right.

Which brings us to the core of this novel. A poor young woman, literary, of discrimination, proud of it, saying she will not marry except for love was a direct heiress of the Enlightenment and particularly of Jean Jacques Rousseau and most particularly of La Nouvelle Héloïse. This writer, this novel, had realigned women’s expectations and their self-definition. It was not only in the field of romantic love and marriage that Rousseau had changed manners and morals, for aristocratic women were already in Austen’s time breastfeeding their infants and aspired to educate their children rationally.

This novel, Pride and Prejudice, breaks new ground because of the new morality flourishing everywhere – for instance, in Fielding’s Tom Jones. When Elizabeth refuses Darcy’s first proposal, she tells him he is not gentlemanly. It could be argued that he was being honest when he frankly confessed the reasons why he had been reluctant to propose: surely the new morality must mean that he should be admired by Elizabeth, because he was being honest. Openness was a great good. To be open with your lover was to be in credit for the future.

Darcy was articulating the values of his class. Elizabeth was a misalliance, not because of her looks and education, both as good as his, but because of her vulgar relations – an uncle in trade, her unfortunate mother and sisters. Yet one has to notice that his aunt Lady Catherine de Bourgh has nothing to learn of vulgarity: she is a crude, stupid woman. And Darcy does not criticise the behaviour of his friend Bingley’s sister, who is setting her cap at him, not at all better than that of Elizabeth’s silly sisters. If this novel were published now, the reviewers would surely note these inconsistencies. Did they then? Were they in such awe of Darcy’s wealth and position they did not criticise him? Perhaps to be wealthy and noble was enough: he was a gentleman.

But Elizabeth told him he was not being gentlemanly.

Elizabeth refuses Darcy out of a new morality, superior to his, and while obeying the stultifying eyes-lowered maidenly correctness demanded by the situation, she clearly does not feel inferior to him, even while he is telling her she is.

Elizabeth is using a definition of a gentleman that we have lost: it was once powerful and even now we hear echoes of an old excellence. The ideal came from chivalry. Honour was the key, and while Falstaff mocked, nevertheless he was a knight and honour defined his position socially if not on the battlefield. Honour: one kept one’s word, was always honest, a man’s word is his bond – now that’s a laugh, these days. One succoured the weak and defended them against the wicked. Respect must be paid where it was earned. Respect was due to women that came from the Courts of Love and from the Troubadours. All these nuances were in Elizabeth’s passionate and scornful refusal of Darcy – a middle-class girl, speaking to an aristocrat.

There was a novel I remember from when I was a girl, John Halifax, Gentleman by Mrs Craik; it was about a lower-class person earning the right to the appellation because of his honourable behaviour and his aspirations. It was a popular novel: once, the title gentleman was something to be aimed for.

Here we have this uppity young woman Elizabeth, first refusing to marry a disagreeable man, though she could secure her family’s future by doing it, and then saying no to a very rich nobleman because of his arrogant behaviour. This was, indeed, a new thing in the novel. This was why Pride and Prejudice was so immediately popular: it defined, in the person of Elizabeth Bennet, how young women were thinking about themselves, as violent a change as happened later, in the twenties and then the sixties.

Certainly her mother and three of her sisters could not understand Elizabeth. Her mother, Mrs Bennet, a figure of fun throughout, is at the same time dangerous, because her silliness exposes her daughters to risk and obloquy. She belongs to a different world from Elizabeth, and Jane, and her own husband. This family is split. Elizabeth, Jane, Mr Bennet – a gentleman – judge people and situations from a fine and sensitive discrimination. Lydia, the youngest daughter, who elopes with an attractive young officer, talks only of having fun. So does her sister Kitty. They have their counterparts today: their descendants are in multitudes. A good time – that’s the thing. Lydia and Kitty could not understand Elizabeth’s and Jane’s idea of a good time. But wait – here we have to remember that the severe Mary Mitford described Jane Austen as a ‘silly husband-hunting butterfly’. So it took time to stiffen her into ‘a perpendicular precise taciturn piece of single blessedness’ and she wrote about the silliness of Lydia and Kitty from her own experience and memories. She had not always been the quiet observer. There is another sister, Mary, who aspires to be more than a husband-hunting butterfly, but she is a silly would-be bluestocking, quoting aphorisms like a Chinese cracker. Quite a gallery of women here: Elizabeth who knows how to love well and wisely; beautiful Jane, with none of Elizabeth’s cleverness, but with a more patient and forgiving heart; Lydia who will grow up to be as tiresome as her mother; Kitty who longs for fun; Mary, a bookish fool. There is Darcy’s sister, scarcely delineated, except perhaps to prove that the sisters of aristocrats may also run away with handsome officers, and Bingley’s stupid sister, and Lady Catherine, the crass tyrant. Charlotte, Elizabeth’s friend, marries Mr Collins because he is a good catch, and she hasn’t the backbone to be a single woman.

And the men? Mr Bennet, from whom Elizabeth has got her sagacity and good sense, is a weak man, one of those whose ironical judgements on their own behaviour must compensate for their deficiencies. Bingley is rich, handsome and weak. The villain Wickham is unscrupulous and conceited. Elizabeth’s uncle is a serious, intelligent man. The officers in the regiment in their scarlet coats are like a chorus to the action.

So, when you look at it, Elizabeth is the only female with anything like the moral size and weight to take on Darcy, and he is the only man equal to her.

And now here comes my personal caveat, but I am not the only one to think Darcy would not marry Elizabeth. Aristocrats do not marry poor middle-class girls much encumbered with disagreeable relatives. Yes, you believe it for the space and time of the tale, and that is all that is needed. Lords marry chorus girls and models, as we have seen so often in this country, enlivening the annals of the doings of high society. ‘New Blood’ they have been heard to cry, justifying misalliances. Some of these marriages have had a fairy-tale quality. Very beautiful girls, from nowhere, marrying lords in their castles? It all appeals to our nursery memories.

We may wonder – and I’ve read critics who do just that – whether Pride and Prejudice may fairly be classed among the novels now described as ‘Chick-lit’, girls hunting for husbands, a sophisticated and witty version. Barbara Cartland, the grande dame of the genre, when asked why her stories always had the same plot replied, ‘There is only one plot. You need a girl who knows she is underestimated, in love with a difficult, problematical or wicked hero who recognises her worth. She will cure him, she is sure, but the story must end with the wedding, before she discovers that no, she will not change him.’ That fits.

We may acknowledge that the marriage market in Austen’s England, while far from what girls in Europe would recognise, is similar to what goes on now, for instance, in India, in many Islamic countries, and in parts of Africa.

We may entertain ourselves with imagining a meeting between Jane Austen and Jean Jacques Rousseau. Would he recognise that in this apparently prim maidenly lady were united the two strands of the Enlightenment, Romance and Reason? Would she see the debt her heroines owed to him even if they had never read a word of him or even heard of him?

One thing has changed utterly. Jane Austen’s landscape is more alien than the mountains and deserts that television invites us to travel in. We move about, country to country, continent to continent, and think nothing of it. Then, to visit a family a few miles off was a big thing. I can understand this, because when I was a girl in Africa, the early rattling cars, the poor roads, some of them not more than wheelmarks through grass, meant that to go to supper with a neighbour was the same as us going to Paris or even New York. We used to be invited to ‘spend the day’ since the effort of travelling meant you had to make the most of it. You could go on a visit to another part of the country for days or weeks. ‘You must come for a whole week, otherwise it won’t be worth it.’ Elizabeth Bennet stays six weeks when she visits her friend Charlotte after her marriage to Mr Collins.

If you didn’t keep your own carriage and horses then well-off neighbours could be applied to. Or the horses might be in better employment than used for jaunting about. Mr Bennet is reluctant to take his horses away from farm work.

My mother would say, ‘Can we send the wagon in to get the …’ whatever it was, spare parts for the harrow, sacks of meal. ‘No, we are ploughing the big field this afternoon.’

The five Bennet sisters walk into the little town to shop and sightsee, and to hope for a glimpse of the officers. In bad weather they do not walk on the muddy roads, they stay cooped up.

When Jane falls ill at Darcy’s house, Elizabeth refuses to wait for the carriage and horses to become available, and she walks the three miles by herself, across country, getting her skirts muddy in the process. The females at Darcy’s, jealous of her brilliant colour and her health, whisper and condemn, saying it is unladylike behaviour, walking by herself, without a chaperone. These are the genteel classes, not the robust, much freer farm women of Hardy’s novels. This action of the spirited heroine must have surprised and impressed the readers then. Ladies simply did not go about alone. If a young woman visited somewhere far off, even a few miles, she had to wait to come home until a male relative or a trusted servant came to fetch her. The watchful care of young women, as much as the bad roads and the slowness of horse travel, slowed everybody’s movements. Yet here was Elizabeth Bennet venturing independent and alone. Not all Austen heroines are robust: Fanny in Mansfield Park becomes faint after a few minutes’ stroll, and you have to wonder about corsets. We know now that the fainting and vapours and the paraphernalia of women’s ill health was due to tight-lacing. But the French Revolution (and Rousseau) had enabled women in England as well as in France to throw away corsets. For the time being, for they were soon to return, even worse. So if Fanny didn’t faint and languish because of corsets, what was it? Was she anaemic?

There is a dark under-stratum in Austen’s novels where the ill health, mostly of women, is hinted at. Not only childbirth killed women: people died then as they do not now. Jane’s feverish cold that kept her at Darcy’s might easily have become something worse, with no antibiotics to come to the rescue. In Emma the father, a skilled valetudinarian, is permitted his hypochondria as he wouldn’t be now. Jane does laugh, a little, at the father, but the truth was they brought out the horse and carriage for a half mile’s visit in the damp evening air.

Not easy for us now to imagine those lives where illness lurked so near, and most of it as mysterious to them as some new horror like Ebola is to us. Those brothers of Jane’s, always off to foreign parts – malaria has to come to mind, and they had no idea what caused it, talked of miasmas and bad air. Perhaps if there is one thing that distinguishes our world from that one, it is how we live in a clear light of knowledge, information, while they were as much threatened by the unknown as savages.

When Jane’s cousin Eliza’s mother got a lump in her breast there was nothing to be done but take painkillers – not very effective – and pray. She could have had an operation – without anaesthetic.

What threats and dangers and illnesses did lie in wait for those women – and that is why Elizabeth Bennet’s impulsive walk across country, jumping over stiles and over puddles, alone, must have been to the young female readers of Pride and Prejudice as good as a trumpet call.

I imagine fearful mammas and alarmed papas putting down the novel to lecture their daughters on the dangers of Elizabeth’s behaviour.

For others, the lively but virtuous Elizabeth must have been a reassurance. The French Revolution had unleashed in England not only terrors of revolt and the guillotine, but of the unfettered females who yelled for more blood as the heads fell, who rampaged about streets in screaming mobs, giving the world a glimpse of just what manic rebellions were being kept in check by chaperones and corsets.

Elizabeth Bennet was both more alarming and reassuring than we can possibly imagine. Her bold and unladylike dash across country presaged young women climbing the Eiger, shooting rapids, sailing boats by themselves across the Atlantic. Her sense of humour and fastidiousness told novel readers that a young woman could claim freedoms unthought of by her mother and grandmothers, but remain in command of herself, and in balance.

This tale is set firmly in its place and time, detail by certain detail, fact by verifiable fact. The magic of Jane Austen’s skill means that it is only at the end of the story you realise its kinship with ‘girl gets her man’, and begin to suspect that it is older even than that. The Cinderella tale is in every culture in the world. At least four hundred versions are known to exist, but however much it changes according to time and culture, there is a core. A heroine superior in insight and goodness is bullied by a sometimes cruel mother who prefers stupid and frivolous sisters. It is the poor girl who in the end charms the Prince’s – or spirit’s, or noble being’s – heart, and she lives happy ever after while her ignoble relatives repine.

Here we have a superior girl, in Elizabeth Bennet, but she does have a good sister, so she is not alone. She has not two but three awful sisters who are the favourites of their mother. Her fairy godmother is her aunt, a kind and sensible woman. Elizabeth Bennet achieves her noble lover through force of her own character and against the will of the awful Lady Catherine de Bourgh, surely the wicked witch.

Pride and Prejudice is recognisably from the same level of human experience, a tale that merges back into the unconscious depths of humanity everywhere. Surely its ancient origins are why it enthrals generation after generation of readers?