Happy Two-Hundredth Birthday, “Pride and Prejudice”
Posted by William Deresiewicz
The most beloved novel in the [English] language was written by a rural parson’s daughter with no formal education, in ten months, between the ages of twenty and twenty-one, and published two hundred years ago today. That’s not entirely true: she revised it later, but probably not very much. Elizabeth Bennet’s story was largely composed by someone Elizabeth Bennet’s age.
Two hundred years. But there seemed little chance, two hundred years
ago, that many people would remember either the novel or its author by
now. The draft that she produced at twenty-one was rejected by a London
publisher sight unseen. Other disappointments followed, and after a
series of personal upheavals, she gave up writing altogether. But circumstances stabilized and hope returned, and by the time of her death, just four years after “Pride and Prejudice” came out (four years during which she finished “Mansfield Park,” and wrote “Emma” and “Persuasion” from scratch), her brother was willing to venture the claim that her novels were fit to be placed “on the same shelf as the works of a D’Arblay and an Edgeworth.”
How she got from there to here is a long story.
The public soon forgot her, but her memory was kept alive, like Bach’s, among the cognoscenti. George Eliot reread all six of her novels aloud with her lover George Henry Lewes before setting sail on “Middlemarch.” Mark Twain and Charlotte Brontë hated her; Rudyard Kipling adored her; Henry James learned more from her than he was ever willing to admit. Virginia Woolf installed her at the head of the canon of English women novelists (“the most perfect artist among women, the writer whose books are immortal”). F. R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling certified her academic prestige.
Then came the movies, and feminist criticism, and more movies, and Colin Firth, and the fan fiction, and now the ever-growing, ever-changing multi-platform media phenomenon and global icon.
Austen is inscrutable. As with Shakespeare, the magnitude of the achievement is incommensurate with the life that produced it. But in Shakespeare’s case, there is a lot we do not know. In Austen’s, there just isn’t very much to know. She grew up in a large and literate family; shared a bedroom with her sister her entire life; never went abroad, caused a scandal, sought to enter high society, corresponded with illustrious peers, got rich, went broke, or took a lover; and she died a spinster (and without question, a virgin) at the age of forty-one.
The prodigy’s genius tends to be all overflowing passion — think of Keats or Shelley, Austen’s near contemporaries. The autodidact’s tends to be all rough edges and loose ends — think of Melville or D. H. Lawrence. When we turn to Austen — and above all, to “Pride and Prejudice” — the qualities that come to mind are confidence, mastery, serenity, and tact. Especially tact.
She spares us knowledge of herself, leaves us free to read the story through the window of her perfectly transparent prose. She doesn’t tax us with her personality. She keeps her feelings out of it — not her judgments, her feelings, and she never confuses the two.
“Pride and Prejudice” discredits one of our most deeply held beliefs: the idea that emotions have an absolute validity. Feelings are not right or wrong, we say; they just are. Or rather, feelings are always right, because they are — and we always have a right to them.
It is a notion that was promulgated by the same feminism that helped to elevate Austen to her current eminence. So much of the feminist struggle involved asserting the legitimacy of women’s feelings.
Emotions — the reality of female discontent within the patriarchal system — were the bedrock, in a sense, of the feminist argument.
But in the story of Elizabeth and how she learned to change her mind, Austen tells us something different. Oh, Elizabeth is very full of her feelings towards Mr. Darcy when she thinks she has the moral high ground: her rage at what he’s done to her sister Jane, her indignation on behalf of Mr. Wickham, her scorn for his aristocratic arrogance. But they all turn out to be based on false perceptions — some of them the products of those very feelings.
“She grew absolutely ashamed of herself,” goes the little paragraph on which the novel turns. “Of neither Darcy nor Wickham could she think, without feeling that she had been blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd.” Emotions are wrong, Austen wanted us to know, when the conceptions that they’re based on are wrong. It doesn’t matter if they feel right at the time. Of course they feel right: they’re feelings!
And we won’t grow up, or be happy, until we’re willing to acknowledge that.
So why do we love the novel so much? Because while Austen sacrifices Elizabeth’s feelings, she lavishly indulges ours. Austen’s heroes usually aren’t the wealthiest men around, or the handsomest. In many of her novels, there is something troubling about the way that things work out. But not in “Pride and Prejudice.”
Here she gives us everything we want: the wittiest lines, the silliest fools, the most lovable heroine, the handsomest estate. And a hero who is not only tall and good-looking, but the richest and most wellborn man in sight.
He’s also kind of an asshole, which makes it even better. Do women love assholes, the way that everybody says? Well, if the novel’s epic popularity is any proof, they seem to love to win them over, anyway. “Tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me”—Darcy’s famous insult, the first time he and Lizzy [Lizzie] meet.
That’s the real story, underneath the one about Wickham and Bingley and Jane, the misperceptions and coincidences. Darcy wounds Elizabeth’s sexual pride, and her victory comes — and with it, ours — when he’s made to recant and repent. Wish fulfillment doesn’t get much wishier than that. Austen tells us that our feelings aren’t necessarily right, but boy does she ever make the lesson feel good.
Darcy and Elizabeth, Elizabeth and Darcy: by now they’re nearly mythological. Just as the Greeks did with Achilles or Medea, figures who spoke to them of something permanent about the human condition, characters to orient their moral compass by, so we do not cease to tell their story — which means, to retell it.
The movies, the zombies, the fan fiction; the sequels and variations and modernizations; Bridget Jones, “Pride and Predator,” P. D. James; the characters as African-Americans, the Bennet family as Anglo-Jews, [as Asian Indians in conflict with Indian Brits and a white American Darcy in "Bride and Prejudice"] Mr. Darcy as an angel come to save America from Satan: everybody wants to inhabit the story for themselves, to cut Elizabeth and Darcy out of the picture book and see how they’d fit somewhere else, everywhere else.
They are archetypes of the way we want to be: clever but good, fallible and forgiven, glamorous, amorous, and very, very happy.
Two hundred years — the bicentennial. Send in the tall ships. Set off the fireworks. Darcy and Elizabeth forever.
William Deresiewicz is an essayist, book critic, and the author of “A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter.”
Photograph by Stock Montage/Getty.
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