We've Been with Lizzie All Along
A conversation about the enduring appeal of Pride & Prejudice
As half the Western world is now feverishly reminding the other half, Jane Austen's most-read novel, Pride and Prejudice, was published 200 years ago – on 28 January 1813. The author, who died a spinster at the age of 41 only four years later, famously referred to the book as “my own darling child,” and the verdict has been shared by countless aficionados in the ensuing centuries. In addition to the humdrum little miracle of remaining in print for 200 years, Pride and Prejudice has been adapted and re-imagined in just about every way a work of fiction can be adapted or re-imagined: movies, mini-series, musicals, stage plays, operas, action-oriented Japanese anime, theme parks, costume balls, erotica, and 'mash-ups' featuring vampires and zombies – in these and countless other ways, the reading public has taken the book to its heart in ways more personal and persistent than those lavished on any other single work of fiction, including the comedies of Mark Twain and the plays of Shakespeare. The bicentennial hoopla may have temporarily pitched things to a new volume, but the fact is, Jane Austen mania is apparently a permanent part of the cultural landscape. In an attempt to get at the heart of this phenomenon, Open Letters Managing Editor Steve Donoghue recently sat down with Rohan Maitzen, professor of English at Dalhousie University in Halifax and Open Letters' in-house authority on 19th-century literature. Unconfirmed rumors allege that both were wearing crino-lines.SD: Everyone in the world, suddenly, seems to be talking about Pride and Prejudice as it turns 200! In-print and online articles abound on “the Magic of Jane” and “the Eternal Appeal of Austen-land” - and yet, there have always been famous dissenters, right? Charlotte Brontë, perhaps most famous of all, writing to a friend that she'd read Pride and Prejudice and basically didn't see what all the fuss was about:
And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders, and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.
In almost anybody else, we could dismiss this kind of thing as sour grapes, but surely we have to allow that the author of Jane Eyre knew a thing or two about fiction. So apart from any issues of psychology (never very far away when dealing with any of the Brontës!), the obvious first question is: What was Charlotte missing? Or, more controversially, is there a chance she was right?RM: Oh, she was absolutely right! But she was also completely wrong, in just the way you’d expect of one genius contemplating another’s masterpiece. Think of Henry James blithely pronouncing that Middlemarch is a “treasure-house of details but an indifferent whole”: he just didn’t get it, or perhaps he couldn’t afford to get it, because he needed to believe in his own vision of greatness in the novel in order to achieve it. Jane Eyre is a passionate assertion of self, a literary gauntlet thrown down to a world that idealized women who were meek little domesticated mice. “It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility,” declares Jane:
they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.
Brontë’s novel is (and was received as being) itself a revolutionary document: it trumpets its resistance to a “stiller doom” on every page.Austen’s sensibility is not revolutionary, and for Brontë Austen’s restraint comes across as repression. And yet Pride and Prejudice also makes pretty radical claims, doesn’t it? Elizabeth Bennet may not burn down Rosings (if only!), but when she faces down Lady Catherine, rebuffing her assertions of aristocratic privilege (“Miss Bennet, do you know who I am?”) with the proud resolve to “to act in that manner which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness” — that opens the windows of those “elegant but confined houses” wide to let in a blast of fresh air. Pemberley with Elizabeth in it is hardly commonplace.That line about there being “no open country” in Pride and Prejudice always reminds me of Elizabeth’s walk across the fields to see Jane at Netherfield. She arrives with “weary ankles, dirty stockings, and a face glowing with the warmth of exercise.” Miss Bingley has no difficulty seeing and condemning her “indifference to decorum”; it seems ironic that Brontë would be less perceptive!SD: A quick digression! In the great scene you mention, isn't there a chance Lady Catherine is justified? Not about aristocratic privilege but rather about the danger of a young girl who's governed only by her own happiness? In that same scene, Lady Catherine herself brings up the damning example of Elizabeth's sister Lydia, who threatens to disgrace the whole family precisely by trying to constitute her own happiness. How was Lady Catherine – how was anybody – to see the difference between the two sisters? And what were readers supposed to make of it all, for Heaven's sake?RM: The danger — which I agree is perfectly illustrated by silly, self-indulgent Lydia — is not the reasoned pursuit of happiness but the thoughtless pursuit of sensual gratification. Readers are in a much better position to see the difference than Lady Catherine, don’t you think? Because after all, we’ve been with Lizzie all along and know how closely she observes and how astutely she judges. One of the great pleasures of reading Pride and Prejudice is tucking ourselves into her point of view, laughing at other people’s follies and appreciating the real privilege, which is superior wit, not higher class. In that way, Austen arms us against Lady Catherine’s confusion.Mind you, Austen also sets us up to make Elizabeth’s big mistake right along with her: that Lizzie too initially falls for Wickham helps us understand the dangerous seduction of that kind of shallow, selfish charm — but we’re susceptible, as she is, because we know she deserves to be appreciated, and so we’re offended by Darcy’s self-satisfied condescension. Austen is so good at taking us through that process of mutual re-education! As is so often the case for characters in 19th-century novels, what Lady Catherine needs, to understand where she’s going wrong, is to read the novel she’s in.