What’s in it for me? Discover an iconic Regency-era romance.
If you’ve ever drooled over a meme of Colin Firth emerging – handsomely sodden – from a lake, laughed through Bridget Jones’s Diary, or enjoyed a rom-com featuring the time-worn enemies-to-lovers trope, then it’s safe to say you’ll be a fan of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The novel is a classic for a reason, combining a timeless love story with sharp social commentary that still feels fresh and funny today.
In this Blink to Pride and Prejudice, you’ll meet the memorable Bennet sisters, follow the turbulent courtship between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, and gain some critical historical context to deepen your understanding of the story while you’re at it. So strap on your bonnets, and let’s get started!
Prejudice, meet Pride
Moby Dick has “Call me Ishmael.” Anna Karenina has “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” And, like those other two classics, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice opens with a similarly iconic first sentence: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man, in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
What exactly is the appeal of this opening? Well, to start, it’s firmly tongue in cheek. In the Regency era – a period that characterized early nineteenth-century England – wealthy men had a pretty good time, whether they were single or married. For women, it was a different story. There was huge societal pressure to marry, and the laws of inheritance at the time meant that even if a woman came from a wealthy background, her financial stability was often only secured through marriage.
So while single men in possession of good fortunes weren’t desperately in search of wives, their prospective wives were certainly in want of well-off husbands. With this satirical opening, Austen wittily establishes the tone for her novel, in which she pokes fun at the era’s high-stakes approach to matchmaking yet stays keenly attuned to the serious consequences that marriage had for women of the time.
One person who is convinced that single, wealthy men must be in want of wives? The high-strung and overexcitable Mrs. Bennet. She lives at the family home of Longbourn with her husband, the sarcastic Mr. Bennet, and her five daughters ranging in age from 15 to 22 – every one of whom she wants to marry off. They are the beautiful and sweet-tempered Jane, witty and headstrong Elizabeth, bookish Mary, and silly younger sisters Kitty and Lydia. And while Mrs. Bennet is presented as shallow and meddling, there is some urgency to her desire to see her daughters married off, and it has to do with the legal concept of entailment.
Entailment was a common practice among landowning, upper-class British families whereby an estate would remain in the family lineage – the male lineage, that is. Since Mr. Bennet doesn’t have any sons, Longbourn has been entailed to his nearest male relative, Mr. Collins, who will inherit the property upon Bennet’s death. And if that happens, Bennet’s wife and daughters will need to depend on Collins’s goodwill for their livelihood – legally, it’s possible for them to be thrown out with no inheritance or home. No wonder there’s pressure for the Bennet daughters to marry well!
Luckily, a fresh marriageable prospect has just arrived on the horizon. News has spread through the countryside just outside the town of Meryton, where the Bennets live, that a wealthy bachelor named Mr. Bingley has just rented the nearby estate of Netherfield Park. Mrs. Bennet fixates on him as a potential suitor for one of the girls. She soon starts scheming. Which of her daughters should Bingley fall in love with? And how? The first question is answered with relative ease – Bingley pays a visit to the Bennets, and it’s immediately clear that he’s taken with the demure and graceful eldest sister, Jane. As for how the pair will begin their courtship, an opportunity soon arises: a ball is being held in a week’s time, and Mr. Bingley is planning to attend.
The night of the ball arrives, and Bingley is accompanied by an entourage from London. Among them are his two sisters, Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley, and his friend, one Fitzwilliam Darcy. Word quickly spreads that Darcy has a fortune of ten thousand pounds a year – twice that of Bingley’s!
Soon, Darcy is deemed the evening’s most eligible bachelor. Austen writes, “The ladies declared that he was much handsomer than Mr. Bingley and he was looked at with great admiration.” It soon becomes apparent, though, that unlike the amiable Bingley, Darcy considers this rural ball beneath him. He is arrogant, dismissive, and declines to dance with anyone other than Bingley’s sisters. At this point, the tide of opinion turns, says Austen, and “not all his large estate in Derbyshire could save him from having a most forbidding, disagreeable countenance.”
He is particularly dismissive of one person: Elizabeth Bennet. Lizzy happens to overhear a conversation between the two men in which Bingley urges Darcy to dance with one of the local girls, and suggests that Elizabeth would make a “very agreeable” partner. Darcy is withering: “She is tolerable,” he says, “but not handsome enough to tempt me.” Darcy has already cemented his reputation for being disagreeably proud. Now, Elizabeth’s prejudice against him is formed.
While Elizabeth wants nothing to do with Darcy, Jane is smitten by Bingley and accepts an invitation to stay at Netherfield Park. While there, she falls ill – and is obliged to stay longer to recover. Elizabeth visits to nurse her sister back to health and, during her stay, notices how Caroline Bingley flirts with Darcy. Although he doesn’t reciprocate, Lizzy’s dislike of Darcy intensifies; at the same time, he finds himself growing intrigued by her fine eyes and spirited wit. Bingley’s affections for Jane are blossoming, too, but his sisters disapprove of the potential match given the Bennet family’s comparatively lower social status.
Meanwhile, the local militia regiment arrives in town. Bookish Mary is unmoved by the arrival of the soldiers, but Kitty and Lydia are delighted – and are especially taken with handsome officer George Wickham. When Elizabeth encounters Wickham, he volunteers the tale of how the cruel Darcy had denied him a parish living promised by Darcy's late father. Elizabeth, predisposed against Darcy, is hardly surprised to hear this, and her dislike of Darcy grows into something akin to disgust.
ANALYSIS
The “marriage plot” is a literary term for a category of novels that revolve around the machinations of marriage – and in the time that Jane Austen was writing, as we’ve discussed, marriage was serious business. Whether Jane and Bingley or Lizzy and Darcy end up together at the end of the novel has implications way beyond “happily ever after” for the Bennet women.
Like many of her contemporary novelists, Austen centered her romantic tales around a female protagonist navigating respectable options for financial security and social validity. Marriage served as practically the only available path beyond staying at the parental home for genteel women. Interestingly, in her life Austen subverted the conventions of the marriage plots she so skillfully penned – she never married and, highly unusually for a woman of that time, supported herself through her work.
From romance to rejection
Jane and Elizabeth Bennet return to Longbourn just in time to receive an unwelcome guest – Mr. Bennet’s cousin, Mr. Collins, a man who is as odious as he is dull. Austen describes him as “not a sensible man” and adds that his “deficiency of nature had been but little assisted by education or society.” But while Elizabeth detests Collins, her manipulative mother pays little attention to his personality flaws. She is focused, instead, on the fact that Mr. Bennet’s estate will be entailed to Mr. Collins upon Mr. Bennet’s death.
When Collins broadly hints that he’s interested in marrying one of the Bennet daughters, Mrs. Bennet sees a pathway to securing her family’s financial future. Surely, Jane will soon be matched with Bingley – so Mrs. Bennet throws Lizzy in Mr. Collins’s path. When Collins does propose, though, Lizzy firmly rebuffs him; she says that, in every respect, her feelings forbid her from accepting him. Mrs. Bennet is furious, and Mr. Collins is embarrassed – though not so embarrassed that he doesn’t shortly afterward secure the hand of Lizzy’s far more pragmatic friend and neighbor, Charlotte Lucas, in marriage.
To make matters worse for Mrs. Bennet, Jane’s romantic prospects, too, suddenly seem far less secure. Mr. Bingley, his sisters, and Darcy abruptly depart Netherfield for London, giving Jane no explanation for their hurried exit. Jane is heartbroken – she thought Bingley loved her, and now believes she was mistaken. But Lizzy is suspicious. She feels certain Bingley is still deeply in love with Jane, but that Darcy and Bingley’s sisters don’t approve of the match – and are doing all they can to prevent it. Jane’s Aunt and Uncle Gardiner invite her to visit them in London, where she hopes she might reconnect with Bingley. But her hopes are in vain.
In Meryton, the pleasant militia officers are becoming a town fixture, and Lizzy finds herself increasingly attracted to the good-natured Wickham. Their bond is strengthened by the fact that they share a common enemy in Darcy. Lizzy is sorry to leave Meryton – and Wickham – when she has to pay a visit to Mr. Collins and his new wife, Charlotte Lucas, at Rosings Park estate. As Charlotte is Lizzy’s close friend, Lizzy is hoping to provide her company and comfort in her new home. Yet upon her arrival, Lizzy clashes on multiple occasions with Mr. Collins's patroness, the overbearing and snobbish Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Lizzy is further exasperated when Mr. Darcy, Lady Catherine’s nephew, arrives at Rosings along with his cousin Colonel Fitzwilliam.
Lizzy and Darcy have passionate conversations on all manner of topics. But while Lizzy believes their heated conversations spring from a mutual dislike, Darcy’s feelings for Lizzy have turned unequivocally romantic.
One afternoon, Darcy bursts in on her and bluntly proposes. “You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you,” he says. Lizzy is shocked and rejects him harshly, telling him, “I have never desired your good opinion and you have certainly bestowed it most unwillingly.” She explains that, thanks to his ill-treatment of both Wickham and Jane, she can never feel affection toward him. Mortified by her criticisms, Darcy writes her a long letter, denying Wickham's allegations and defending his protection of his friend, saying he was sure that Jane didn’t reciprocate Bingley’s feelings.
Lizzy is unmoved by Darcy’s explanations. She returns home to Longbourn – and to catastrophe. Her headstrong sister Lydia has secretly run away with Wickham. The scandal seems certain to destroy the Bennet’s social standing and financial prospects; no one will want to marry a Bennet girl if this news gets out.
ANALYSIS
Why is Wickham and Lydia’s reckless affair so catastrophic? In the genteel nineteenth-century society depicted in Pride and Prejudice, a woman’s reputation is paramount for securing social standing and moral respectability. Up until this point in the novel, Austen has gently poked fun at respectability politics – for example, in contrasting the vulgar antics of Mrs. Bennet with the rigid decorum of the status-conscious Bingley sisters. Here, however, Austen shows just how much depends on reputation and respectability, as Lydia’s elopement with Wickham threatens to ruin her entire family.
Austen illuminates the precarious position of women in the Regency era, in which a lady’s fate and fortune can rest on her perceived respectability. Simply through their association with their wayward sister Lydia, the other Bennet girls might lose their social standing – and without that, they’re left with nothing.
A second look at love
In the shocking aftermath of Lydia’s elopement with Wickham, the Bennets are in crisis mode, panicking over their potential disgrace.
Still reeling from the drama, Lizzy makes a tour of Derbyshire with her Aunt and Uncle Gardiner. Derbyshire happens to be Darcy’s home county. During a tour of Darcy’s Pemberley estate, she is stunned to encounter none other than Darcy himself. Lizzy is mortified – and sure that after their last encounter, where she so roundly rejected him, Darcy will want nothing to do with her. To her surprise, Darcy greets the Gardiners cordially and invites them all to dine at Pemberley, signaling his continued admiration of Lizzy.
Back at Longbourn, a letter arrives with welcome news. Lydia and Wickham have been located and swiftly married. While Mrs. Bennet is relieved, Lizzy and her father are suspicious; neither believe Wickham truly intended to marry Lydia, and they are certain someone else must have had a hand in containing the scandal.
Bingley, along with Darcy and his sisters, returns to Netherfield. He is delighted to see Jane again, and full of apologies – he was wrong to ever doubt her affections, or let his opinions be swayed by others. Darcy, too, is far more gentlemanly than he was on his last visit. Soon, both Jane and Elizabeth are regular visitors at Netherfield. While it seems certain that Bingley will soon propose to Jane, Lizzy finds herself increasingly attached to Darcy. She reflects ironically that he is “exactly the man, who, in disposition and talents, would most suit her” – if only she hadn’t already turned his proposal down! Bingley does propose to Jane. And, of course, she says yes.
The next morning, Lady Catherine de Bourgh makes an unannounced visit to Longbourn. She’s fuming over some gossip that Darcy and Elizabeth might be engaged. She wants Lizzy to promise never to enter into such an engagement. Knowing full well she is not engaged to Darcy, Lizzy still refuses to comply.
Darcy then makes a visit to Elizabeth to apologize for interfering between Jane and Mr. Bingley. He shares how he quietly played a pivotal part in securing the marriage between Lydia and Wickham, in order to salvage the Bennets’ reputation, by personally settling Wickham’s gambling debts. Elizabeth is touched by his generosity. When Darcy admits that his “affections and wishes” for Lizzy “are unchanged,” his proposal is met with a far more enthusiastic response than the previous time. The novel ends with Elizabeth and Darcy, as well as Jane and Bingley, happily wed.
ANALYSIS
For all its satire, Pride and Prejudice remains a sincere romance – and the love story between Lizzy and Darcy, in all its fraught complexity, remains one of the most adored in literature. Beyond this central pairing, Austen takes love, and the possibility of finding love within the social constraints of the Regency period, as her theme.
Charlotte Lucas’s pragmatic marriage to Mr. Collins, for example, and the subsequent lack of romantic fulfillment, indicates Austen’s awareness that fiscal and social motives often dictate marital outcomes more than emotional bonds. Yet Darcy and Elizabeth’s eventual triumph over misunderstandings, difference in status, and their own initial dislike of each other suggests that Austen believes real affection can flourish, as long as pride and – yes – prejudice can be overcome.
Final summary
You’ve followed the love story of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy, from initial dislike to misunderstandings and social obstacles to its ultimate happy ending. Along the way, you’ve learned just how pivotal a role marriage played for women in Regency-era England.