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
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
