Pride and Prejudice

The Bennet household is thrown into excitement when Charles Bingley arrives at Netherfield Park with his sisters and his considerably wealthier and considerably more intimidating friend Fitzwilliam Darcy. Mrs Bennet decides the universe has delivered. Mr Bennet finds the whole situation entertaining. At the Meryton ball Bingley falls openly and immediately for Jane, who falls quietly and deeply for him in return. Darcy looks at the neighbourhood with barely concealed disdain, refuses to dance with anyone new, and delivers his verdict on Elizabeth — tolerable but not handsome enough to tempt him — within her hearing. Elizabeth goes home and makes it into a joke. The neighbourhood goes home and decides Darcy is the most disagreeable man in England. The social machinery of Hertfordshire grinds on. The Bennets visit Netherfield. Jane is invited back and gets caught in the rain and falls ill and has to stay several days, which Mrs Bennet considers an excellent development. Elizabeth walks three miles through muddy fields to nurse her, arriving with dirty petticoats and bright eyes, and Bingley’s sisters are appalled. Darcy is not appalled. He is paying attention to Elizabeth in a way he has not quite admitted to himself yet. Several evenings of conversation and sparring at Netherfield establish that whatever is happening between Elizabeth and Darcy is not indifference on either side, though neither of them would describe it as anything else. George Wickham arrives with the militia and the novel’s central deception begins. He is charming, handsome, and attentive, and he singles Elizabeth out at their very first meeting. He tells her his story about Darcy — that Darcy cheated him out of a living promised by Darcy’s late father, leaving him penniless despite years of loyal connection to the family — over a single conversation, with the ease of someone who has told it many times before. Elizabeth believes every word because Wickham tells her exactly what she already wants to hear, and because her pride in her own judgment makes her particularly vulnerable to anyone who flatters that pride while deceiving her. She files Darcy firmly under villain and moves on. Mr Collins arrives at Longbourn, cousin to Mr Bennet and heir to the estate, a man of no real quality who has been given just enough status to feel enormously important. He has come to choose a wife from among the Bennet daughters, having been advised by his patroness Lady Catherine de Bourgh that marriage would suit him. He selects Jane, is told she is likely to be engaged soon, switches to Elizabeth without missing a beat, and proposes with such magnificent self-satisfaction that Elizabeth’s refusal genuinely surprises him. He recovers quickly. Within days he has proposed to Charlotte Lucas, who accepts with the calm efficiency of a woman who has been waiting for exactly this opportunity. Elizabeth is horrified. Charlotte explains herself with complete clarity. The novel declines to condemn her. The Netherfield ball is the volume’s centrepiece and its disaster. Every class anxiety and family embarrassment is compressed into one evening. Mrs Bennet is loudly triumphant about Jane and Bingley. Mary performs too long at the piano. Mr Collins attaches himself to Darcy without introduction and is barely civil in return. Lydia and Kitty flirt with every militia officer in the room. Darcy asks Elizabeth to dance in what appears to be a moment of impulse he immediately regrets, and their conversation on the floor is the most honest and most combative exchange they have had. By the end of the evening Darcy has seen everything he feared about the Bennet family confirmed in one room and has made his decision. Within days Bingley’s party leaves Netherfield without warning. Jane receives a letter from Caroline Bingley that makes clear they will not be returning. Jane is quietly devastated. Elizabeth is furious.

Jane goes to London to stay with her aunt and uncle the Gardiners, hoping proximity might lead to a reunion with Bingley. Caroline Bingley visits once, briefly and coldly, and makes clear that no reunion is being facilitated. Jane writes to Elizabeth with dignified disappointment. Elizabeth writes back with barely controlled fury directed at Darcy, whom she holds responsible, and at Bingley, whom she is beginning to find spineless. The Bingley chapter of their lives appears to be closed. Jane goes to London to stay with her aunt and uncle the Gardiners, hoping proximity might lead to a reunion with Bingley. Caroline Bingley visits once, briefly and coldly, and makes clear that no reunion is being facilitated. Jane writes to Elizabeth with dignified disappointment. Elizabeth writes back with barely controlled fury directed at Darcy, whom she holds responsible, and at Bingley, whom she is beginning to find spineless. The Bingley chapter of their lives appears to be closed. Darcy arrives at Rosings to visit his aunt with his cousin Colonel Fitzwilliam, and everything becomes complicated again. Darcy visits the parsonage repeatedly and for no obvious reason, standing at windows and saying little while Elizabeth reads or sews and wonders why he keeps coming. Colonel Fitzwilliam is charming and conversational and tells Elizabeth, in the course of a pleasant walk, that Darcy recently saved a friend from an imprudent marriage. Elizabeth understands immediately that the friend is Bingley and the imprudent marriage is Jane, and she goes home with a headache and a renewed conviction that Darcy is the worst man she has ever met. Darcy then appears at the parsonage while she is alone and proposes. It is extraordinary and disastrous in equal measure. He tells her he loves her against his will, against his reason, and against his character. He makes clear that her family’s inferiority has been a serious obstacle. He is genuinely surprised when she says no. Elizabeth’s refusal is one of the great speeches in English literature — she tells him he is the last man she could ever be prevailed upon to marry, enumerates his offences against Jane and Wickham with considerable precision, and tells him that he could have obtained her good opinion had he behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner. Darcy leaves. Elizabeth shakes. The next morning Darcy gives her a letter. He does not apologise for his manner of proposing. He addresses her accusations. On Jane and Bingley he explains his reasoning — he genuinely believed Jane indifferent and the match unequal — which does not justify what he did but makes it comprehensible. On Wickham he tells the truth. Wickham attempted to elope with Darcy’s fifteen year old sister Georgiana to get at her fortune of thirty thousand pounds. The story Wickham told Elizabeth was a careful and practiced lie. Elizabeth reads the letter. She rereads it. She walks for two hours. She begins the slow and deeply uncomfortable process of realising she has been wrong about almost everyone, and that her famous judgment has been the least reliable thing about her. It is one of the most honest accounts of a person confronting their own prejudice in all of English literature, and Austen gives Elizabeth no comfort in it. She simply has to sit with being wrong and figure out what to do next. She returns to Longbourn. Jane comes home from London. The regiment is leaving Meryton for Brighton and Lydia has been invited to accompany the regiment’s wife as a companion for the summer. Elizabeth urges her father to refuse. Mr Bennet does not refuse. It is the novel’s most quietly damning portrait of his failure as a father, dressed up in his usual amusement, and Elizabeth sees it clearly even while being unable to stop it. Lydia goes to Brighton. Volume 2 ends with Elizabeth travelling north with the Gardiners toward Derbyshire, heading, though she does not know it yet, directly toward Pemberley.

Elizabeth arrives at Pemberley, Darcy’s estate in Derbyshire, having established that the family is away and a visit is therefore safe. The house is everything Darcy is when he is not performing superiority for a neighbourhood he disdains — beautiful, tasteful, and without unnecessary ostentation. The housekeeper describes him as the best landlord and the best master that ever lived, a man his tenants and servants speak of with genuine warmth rather than obligation. Elizabeth walks through the rooms and the grounds and something shifts in her that she does not yet have a name for. Then Darcy arrives unexpectedly, catches her in his grounds, and is so entirely different from the man who proposed at Hunsford that she barely recognises him. He is warm, he is considerate, he asks to introduce her to his sister. She agrees before she has fully thought about what agreeing means. The introduction to Georgiana Darcy goes well. Bingley appears, still friendly, and Elizabeth watches him and wonders. Everything is tentative and careful and quietly hopeful when the letter arrives from Jane. Lydia has eloped with Wickham. They have left Brighton together with no word of where they are going and no indication that marriage is intended. The Bennet family is on the verge of social ruin — an unmarried daughter living with a man is enough to destroy the reputations of every sister remaining. Elizabeth tells Darcy immediately, watching the hope that had been building between them collapse in real time, convinced that no man with his sense of family honour would connect himself to such a scandal. He leaves. She is certain she has lost him and certain it is her own family that has lost him for her. She returns to Longbourn to find her father already gone to London to search for Lydia and Wickham, and her mother in spectacular hysterics. Mr Gardiner follows and takes over the search. Days pass with no news. Then the news arrives — Wickham has agreed to marry Lydia. The terms are so reasonable, a small annuity and his debts paid, that Mr Bennet is immediately suspicious. The money is more than Mr Gardiner could afford and more than Mr Bennet can account for. The source is eventually revealed, not through any announcement but through Mrs Gardiner’s letter to Elizabeth — it was Darcy. He found Wickham, negotiated the marriage, paid the debts, and secured Lydia’s future, and did it all without telling anyone and without expecting recognition. Elizabeth understands the full weight of what this means. Darcy did not do it for the Bennets. He did it for her. And he did it knowing she might never know, knowing it might change nothing between them. It is the most significant action in the novel and the quietest, and Austen makes sure the reader feels both of those things simultaneously. Lydia and Wickham are married and visit Longbourn briefly on their way to Wickham’s new posting. Lydia, oblivious to everything, lets slip that Darcy was present at the wedding. Elizabeth writes to Mrs Gardiner. The whole truth comes out. She knows everything now, and what she knows has reordered everything she thought she understood about both men. Bingley returns to Netherfield with Darcy. He proposes to Jane. Jane accepts. Mrs Bennet achieves the first of her goals and immediately begins working on the second. Lady Catherine de Bourgh arrives at Longbourn in a magnificent fury, having heard rumours of an attachment between Elizabeth and Darcy, and demands Elizabeth promise never to enter into an engagement with him. Elizabeth refuses with complete composure, which sends Lady Catherine back to Darcy in outrage, which inadvertently tells Darcy that Elizabeth did not deny the possibility of loving him, which gives him the courage to try again. He comes back. He walks with Elizabeth and tells her that his feelings and wishes are unchanged but that one word from her will silence him forever. Novel ends with two good marriages and one bad onel.