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?
