Jane Austen by Catherine Reef

Author:Catherine Reef
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

gave him to understand that her sentiments had undergone so material a change, since the period to which he alluded, as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure, his present assurances. The happiness which this reply produced, was such as he had probably never felt before; and he expressed himself on this occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do.

Some readers have felt cheated by this description. They looked forward to a great love scene, and Austen gave them a summary. They have accused the author of losing interest in her story once the characters solve their problems, and rushing its conclusion. A few critics have even said that a spinster like Jane Austen would have had no inkling what people in love might say at a time like this, so she could not possibly have written it.

Maybe Austen knew what she was doing, though. By describing the meeting between Elizabeth and Darcy in this way, she stressed the universal nature of their experience. She wrote about two young people in England in the late 1700s, but they are the same as lovers in any place and time. This is why readers everywhere can hear in their minds the words Elizabeth uses to receive Darcy’s assurance of his love. They know exactly how sensibly and warmly a man in love behaves.

Elizabeth accepts Darcy this time, of course. She puts up with the comments of her astonished family, who thought he was the last man she would ever choose. “We all know him to be a proud, unpleasant sort of man,” Mr. Bennet tells Elizabeth, speaking of Darcy; “but this would be nothing if you really liked him.”

Pride and Prejudice, “By the Author of Sense and Sensibility, “was an instant hit. One reviewer called it “very far superior to almost all the publications of the kind which have lately come before us.” Another critic praised Austen’s characters, insisting that every member of the Bennet family “excites the interest.” Still, Elizabeth stood out, because her “sense and conduct are of a superior order to those of the common heroines of novels.”

“The work is rather too light & bright & sparkling,” Jane Austen wrote, pretending to find fault with her novel. “It wants to be stretched out here & there with a long Chapter,” she continued, “about something unconnected with the story; an Essay on Writing, a critique on Walter Scott, or the history of Buonaparte.” After a long, boring digression, the reader would return “with increased delight to the playfulness ... of the general stile.”

The Austens all liked Pride and Prejudice. Jane read the book aloud to her niece Fanny Knight, who was often at Chawton. “[Aunt Jane] & I had a delicious morning together,” Fanny noted in her diary. Charles Austen reported that some of his fellow naval officers had read and enjoyed it. Jane tried to confine knowledge of her authorship to her family and close friends, but word was getting out.

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