Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice is a novel about the difficulty of seeing clearly in a world that gives you every incentive to see what you want to see. Austen builds her entire plot around two people who are exceptionally intelligent and spectacularly wrong about each other, and she does it not to mock their intelligence but to demonstrate that intelligence without self-awareness is just a more sophisticated way of being wrong.

Pride and Prejudice is a novel about the difficulty of seeing clearly in a world that gives you every incentive to see what you want to see. Austen builds her entire plot around two people who are exceptionally intelligent and spectacularly wrong about each other, and she does it not to mock their intelligence but to demonstrate that intelligence without self-awareness is just a more sophisticated way of being wrong.

Elizabeth Bennet is Austen’s greatest achievement and her most carefully constructed trap. She is so charming, so witty, so much more appealing than everyone around her that the reader trusts her completely, which means the reader makes exactly the same mistakes she does. When Elizabeth dismisses Darcy, the reader dismisses him. When Elizabeth believes Wickham, the reader believes him. The letter in Chapter 36 is as much a corrective for the reader as it is for Elizabeth, and Austen times it with the precision of someone who has been managing the reader’s sympathies for thirty five chapters and knows exactly when to pull the rug.

Darcy is the novel’s most misread character, which is appropriate given that the novel is about misreading. He is genuinely proud and genuinely good, and these things are not in conflict — they are both expressions of the same deeply held sense of what is right. His interference in Bingley and Jane’s relationship is wrong, but it comes from real concern rather than malice. His first proposal is disastrous, but it is also honest — he is not pretending to think Elizabeth his social equal, and Austen respects honesty even when it is delivered badly. His transformation is not from bad to good. It is from a man who did not know how to show what he was to one who has learned, at considerable personal cost, to try.

What makes Pride and Prejudice endure is not the romance, though the romance is very good. It is the novel’s refusal to let anyone entirely off the hook. Elizabeth must confront her prejudice. Darcy must confront his pride. Mr Bennet must confront his abdication. Even the happy ending is shadowed by what almost happened — Lydia is married to a man the novel makes no secret of despising, and will presumably be unhappy. Jane and Bingley will be happy in the way that good, uncomplicated people are happy. Elizabeth and Darcy will be happy in the harder, more interesting way that people who have genuinely changed each other are happy. Austen knows the difference and so does the reader.