A Three-Part #ReadWithMe Series
After the recent EconTalk episode with Janine Barchas, we promised we’d discuss this book… So here goes!
(Although this post focuses on Volume One of Pride and Prejudice it will contain spoilers for the rest of the novel. Given the near-infinite number of adaptations of Austen’s novel, I’m assuming you’re all likely to be familiar with the book’s major plot points, even if you haven’t read the novel before.)
Like many of us, I was first introduced to Jane Austen when I was a teenager, reading Pride and Prejudice for a school assignment. On first read, and with the characters and major events of Pride and Prejudice less ingrained in the culture than in our current, Austen-enriched days, I was completely hornswoggled. The rude Mr. Darcy turns out to be the hero? The charming Mr. Wickham is a scoundrel and worse? The witty Elizabeth, whose good sense (and sense of humor) I had already taken as #goals was…wrong? About pretty much everything? How could this be??!!
Leaving teenage effusions aside, the surprise we feel at the plot twists when first reading Pride and Prejudice is surely one of Austen’s great accomplishments. The novelist Neil Gaiman has observed that the most important words for a storyteller are “and then what happened?” because this is how you persuade people to turn the page. Austen is a master of the art of luring readers on through her plots from a sheer need to know “and then what happened?” And her mastery is all the more impressive because she warns us about all the plot twists well in advance.
And she does it in the first two sentences.
Pride and Prejudice begins, famously, with the observation that “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” The sentence is sharp, funny, and well-phrased, and as perfect an example of why Austen is such a good writer, as well as such a beloved one. But we forget that Austen follows that sentence with this one, “However little known the feelings or views of such a young man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.”
We are warned, right there, that Austen sees the world as a place where people operate from incomplete and incorrect information with absolute confidence in the complete correctness of their interpretations. In other words, Austen sees humans as mistake-makers.
We see small examples of this immediately. Mrs. Bennett persuades herself and her daughters that Mr. Bennett will never call on their new neighbor, Mr. Bingley. But in nearly the same moment she convinces herself of this, Austen informs her readers that “Mr. Bennet was among the earliest of those who waited on Mr. Bingley. He has always intended to visit him…”
A few pages later, the group of visitors who are reported to be staying with Mr. Bingley is described in this way:
A report soon followed that Mr. Bingley was to bring twelve ladies and seven gentlemen with him to the assembly. The girls grieved over such a number of ladies; but were comforted the day before the ball by hearing, that instead of twelve, he had brought only six with him from Londong, his five sisters and a cousin. And when the party entered the assembly room, it consisted of only five altogether; Mr. Bingley, his two sisters, the husband of the eldest, and another young man.
We should, as well, reassess our own distaste for Mrs. Bennett’s aggressive, obsessive match-making when we learn that the Bennet home is entailed, and that when Mr. Bennet dies, his wife and five daughters will have no home and very little money.
These relatively small examples of mistakes in assessment set us up for the much larger ones that begin to unfold throughout the first volume of the novel. Among those greater errors, we see that Jane Bennett is decidedly mistaken in her initial sense that Bingley’s sisters will be charming friends. We see Mr. Collins learn, fairly brutally, that his assessment of himself as a desirable husband for Elizabeth Bennett is woefully mistaken. We see Mr. Darcy begin to realize that his early dismissal of Elizabeth as “not handsome enough to tempt me” was so wrong that, by the end of the volume, he finds that she is on his mind every moment,
Again and again, Austen’s characters make confident assessments of individuals and situations that are simply, sometimes devastatingly, incorrect.
First time readers who do not pick up on all these hints are not foolish. Austen sets out to fool us, and she’s very good at it. There are much bigger mistakes, misjudgments, and reversals of fortunes coming in the following two volumes. But one of the rewards of returning to Austen for a second read after high school–or for a repeated read at any point–is the pleasure of finding more and more of these moments where she bluntly tells her audience that all is not as it seems, and then allows us to go tearing off on our own, trusting Mr. Wickham and wrinkling our noses at Mr. Darcy.
- What are some other moments where Austen warns us about unreliable assessments of situations and characters?
- Which characters seem to you to have the best sense of judgement? The worst?
- Mr. Darcy is inarguably very rude to Elizabeth. Does Austen give us any hints that this may be a mistaken assessment of his character?
READER COMMENTS
Michelle Vachris
Apr 24 2020 at 1:09pm
Thank you for this lovely read along, Sarah!
Mr. Collins has a terribly sense of judgement and is hilariously self-delusional. I love the scene when he dares to introduce himself to Mr. Darcy. Collins thinks he can deviate from ceremony because his patroness is Darcy’s aunt, and because Collins is a member of the clergy. Mr. Darcy “was eyeing him with restrained wonder” while Collins babbles on.
Upon further consideration, I was probably very Collins-esque when I once met baseball star Darryl Strawberry on an airplane. Like Darcy, Mr. Strawberry couldn’t get a word in edgewise! Jane Austen sure knows human nature.
Sarah Skwire
Apr 30 2020 at 1:31pm
Michelle–
Exactly! She has such a gimlet eye–sees straight through all of us, clearly enough to replicate our foolishness and trick us into more of it. And I hope Mr. Strawberry was a little more charming that Mr. Darcy on that occasion.
Cynthia Rowley
Apr 25 2020 at 4:37am
Read P&P many times, yes, and love to listen and take part in discussion. But, I hereby promise, not to turn in my essay questions.
Sarah Skwire
Apr 30 2020 at 1:31pm
If you turn them in, I promise not to grade them! (They’re really just prompts for further thinking, not to be taken too seriously as directive.)
MarkW
Apr 25 2020 at 7:52am
Not only does Austen throw off her readers by having the most sensible characters make big mistakes, she also has the foolish characters speak truths and give away the major plot points (which first-time readers immediately discount because the truths are spoken by fools). So Mrs Bennet is the first to believe that Bingley and Darcy are going to marry her daughters. And here’s what Mr Collins says when Lizzy rejects him:
<i>“I am not now to learn,” replied Mr. Collins, with a formal wave of the hand, “that it is usual with young ladies to reject the addresses of the man whom they secretly mean to accept, when he first applies for their favour; and that sometimes the refusal is repeated a second, or even a third time. I am therefore by no means discouraged by what you have just said, and shall hope to lead you to the altar ere long.”</i>
And she replies:
<i>I do assure you that I am not one of those young ladies (if such young ladies there are) who are so daring as to risk their happiness on the chance of being asked a second time. </i>
Cute.
Sarah Skwire
Apr 30 2020 at 1:33pm
This is a great observation, Mark! And it’s interesting, too, because when Mr. Collins describes it, we feel how insulted Lizzy is (and should be) by his description. And when she DOES it, we sympathize with her entirely. (I am not sure she’s hoping for a further proposal from Mr. Darcy at that point, though.)
Michelle Vachris
May 1 2020 at 5:52pm
Wow, Mark, I never made that connection before. Thanks!
Nick Ronalds
Apr 25 2020 at 7:11pm
Brilliant post. I’ve read P&P twice, but this has dramatically expanded my appreciation for Austen. I look forward to future posts about her other works.
Sarah Skwire
Apr 30 2020 at 1:34pm
Thanks, Nick!
A little on Austen and economics coming up tomorrow!
Juan Manuel Pérez Porrúa Pérez
Apr 27 2020 at 3:01am
I recently set out to re-read Austen’s novels, beginning with Pride and Prejudice. One quote that struck me was what I believe is Mrs. Bennet’s most honest moment, while complaining to her husband about Mr. Collins and his new wife’s inheriting Longbourn:
Not to mention, that if were not for the entail, it would be very difficult for Mr. and Mrs. Collins to have the Longbourn at all.
Sarah Skwire
Apr 30 2020 at 1:37pm
Exactly! Entails are a staple of fiction of the period, as they force women and daughters from their homes. I talk a little about this in the next piece, but Lizzy and her mother and sisters would really be in a terrible position if Mr. Bennett died. They would lose their home, and the daughters each have only 40 GBP annually–which is next to nothing. They would rapidly fall into genteel, and then less than genteel poverty. With that in mind, Mr. Collins’s offer is actually a very kind one that would secure the family their home and some money to live on. No matter how much of an obsequious idiot he is, he is at least a kind one.
Lynne Kiesling
Apr 27 2020 at 10:20am
One character who intrigues me in this regard is Mr. Bennet. He’s simultaneously intelligent, a reader, kind to people whom he respects, and also capricious, short-sighted (in ways that we’ll learn later in the work), and self-indulgent. There are points in the story where I admire him, and then there are real [headdesk] moments.
We could ask whether Austen wants the reader to admire her characters. She doesn’t really create caricatures (except for maybe Mr. Collins and especially Lady Catherine). Her characters are nuanced and realistic, so when we do admire her characters we do so on balance, despite their flaws. And on the flip side, we think poorly of characters like Mr. Collins despite his occasional articulations of truth. This is a topic for a different conversation, but this construction of her characters is one of the big ways that Austen for me is in the vein of Adam Smith.
Sarah Skwire
Apr 30 2020 at 1:43pm
Mr Bennett is one of those characters about whom I’ve really changed my opinion over the years. He seems to have married unwisely, and then thrown up his hands and given up once he didn’t have a son. His retreat into his study and his scathing observation about his wife and daughters are funny, but I like him less and less as the years go on. He could and should have been a better parent than he is. Look how much better Lizzy is when she’s with the Gardiners!
And I agree. I don’t think Austen writes us people we are meant to admire. We may be meant to admire how Lizzy and Darcy change one another for the better, but that’s a different thing that admiring them as they are initially constituted.
OTOH, “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?”
Gowri Sairam
May 2 2020 at 3:27am
I chanced upon reading this “read along” and it has drawn me to the nuances of the novel. I have read P&P probably 2 or 3 times and it was just for D’s character and how he struggles with expressing himself but for the letter, where he puts out his perspective. Keeping in mind that he was from a rich family background makes it more interesting.
Comments are closed.