Pride and Prejudice

by W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

1

THE events of Jane Austen’s life can be told very briefly. The Austens were an old family whose fortunes, like those of many of the greatest families in England, had been founded on the wool trade, which was at one time the country’s staple industry; having made money, again like others of more importance, they bought land and so in time joined the ranks of the county gentry.

Jane was born in 1775 at Steventon, a village in Hampshire, of which her father, the Reverend George Austen, was rector. She was the youngest of seven children. When she was sixteen her father resigned his living and with his wife and his two girls, Cassandra and Jane, for his sons were already out in the world, moved to Bath. He died in 1805 and his widow and daughters settled at Southampton. Not long afterwards her son Edward inherited estates in Kent and in Hampshire and offered his mother a cottage on either of them. She chose to go to Chawton in Hampshire — this was in 1809— and there, with occasional visits to friends and relatives, Jane remained till illness obliged her to go to Winchester in order to put herself in the hands of better doctors than could be found in a village. She died at Winchester in 1817 and was buried in the cathedral.

She is said to have been in person very attractive; “her figure was rather tall and slender, her step light and firm, and her whole appearance expressive of health and animation. In complexion she was a clear brunette with a rich colour; she had full round cheeks with mouth and nose small and well-formed, bright hazel eyes, and brown hair forming natural curls close round her face.” The only portrait of her I have seen shows a fat-faced young woman with undistinguished features, large round eyes, and an obtrusive bust; but it may be that the artist did her less than justice. She had a rare and racy sense of humor and since she says that her conversation was exactly like her letters and her letters are full of witty, ironical, and malicious remarks, it is impossible to doubt that her conversation was brilliant.

Most of the letters that have remained were written to her sister Cassandra. She was greatly attached to her. As girls and women they were constantly together and indeed shared the same bedroom till Jane’s death. When Cassandra was sent to school Jane went with her because, though too young to profit by such instruction as the seminary for young ladies provided, she would have been wretched without her. “If Cassandra were going to have her head cut off,” said her mother, “Jane would insist on sharing her fate.” Cassandra was handsomer than Jane, of a colder and calmer disposition, less demonstrative and of a less sunny nature; she had “the merit of always having her temper under command, but Jane had the happiness of a temper that never required to be commanded.”

Many of Jane Austen’s warmest admirers have found her letters; disappointing and have thought they showed that she was cold and unfeeling and that her interests were trivial. I am surprised. They are very natural. Jane Austen never imagined that anyone but Cassandra would read them and she told her exactly the sort of things she knew would interest her. She told her what people were wearing and how much she had paid for the flowered muslin she had bought, what acquaintances she had made, what old friends she had met and the gossip she had heard.

Of late years several collections of letters by eminent authors have been published and for my part, when I read them, I am too often disposed to suspect that the writers had at the back of their minds the notion that one day they might find their way into print. They give me not seldom the impression that they might have been used just as they were in the columns of a literary journal.

In order not to annoy the devotees of the recently deceased I will not mention their names, but Dickens has been dead a long time and it is possible to say what one likes of him without offense. Whenever he went on a journey he wrote long letters to his friends in which he described eloquently the sights he had seen and which, as his biographer justly observes, might well have been printed without the alteration of a single word. People were more patient in those days; still, one would have thought it a disappointment to receive a letter from a friend who gave you word pictures of mountains and monuments when you wanted to know whether he had come across anyone interesting, what parties he had been to, and whether he had been able to get you the books or ties or handkerchiefs you had asked him to bring back.

2

JANE AUSTEN hardly ever wrote a letter that had not a smile or a laugh in it and for the delectation of the reader I will give a few examples of her manner. I can only regret that I have not space for more.

“Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor, which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony.”

“Only think of Mrs. Holder being dead! Poor woman, she has done the only thing in the world she could possibly do to make one cease to abuse her.”

“Mrs Hall, of Sherborne, was brought to bed yesterday of a dead child, some weeks before she expected, owing to a fright. I suppose she happened unawares to look at her husband.”

“The death of Mrs W. K. we had seen. I had no idea that anybody liked her, and therefore felt nothing for any survivor, but I am now feeling away on her husband’s account, and think he had better marry Miss Sharpe.”

“I respect Mrs Chamberlayne for doing her hair well, but cannot feel a more tender sentiment. Miss Langley is like any other short girl with a broad nose and wide mouth, fashionable dress and exposed bosom. Admiral Stanhope is a gentlemanlike man, but then his legs are too short and his tail too long.”

Jane Austen was fond of dancing. Here are a few comments connected with balls she went to:—

“There were only twelve dances, of which I danced nine, and was merely prevented from dancing the rest by want of a partner.”

“There was one gentleman, an officer of the Cheshire, a very good-looking young man, who, I was told, wanted very much to be introduced to me; but as he did not want it quite enough to take much trouble in effecting it, we never could bring it about.”

“There were few beauties, and such as there were, were not very handsome. Miss Iremonger did not look well and Mrs Blunt was the only one much admired. She appeared exactly as she did in September, with the same broad face, diamond bandeau, white shoes, pink husband and fat neck.”

“Charles Powlett gave a dance on Thursday to the great disturbance of all his neighbors, of course, who you know take a most lively interest in the state of his finances, and live in hopes of his being soon ruined. His wife is discovered to be everything that the neighbourhood would wish her to be, silly and cross as well as extravagant.”

“Mrs Richard Harvey is going to be married, but as it is a great secret, and only known to half the neighbourhood, you must not mention it.”

“Dr Hall is in such very deep mourning that either his mother, his wife or himself must be dead.”

When Miss Austen was living with her mother at Southampton they paid a call and this is what she wrote to Cassandra: —

“We found only Mrs Lance at home, and whether she boasts any offspring besides a grand pianoforte did not appear. . . . They live in a handsome style and are rich, and she seems to like to be rich; we gave her to understand that we were far from being so; she will soon feel therefore that we are not worth her acquaintance.”

A relation of Jane’s seems to have given occasion to gossip owing to the behavior of a certain Dr. Mant, behavior such that his wife retired to her mother’s, whereupon Jane wrote: “But as Dr M. is a clergyman their attachment, however immoral, has a decorous air.”

She had a sharp tongue and a prodigious sense of humor. She liked to laugh and she liked to make others laugh. It is asking too much of the humorist to expect him — or her — to keep a good thing to himself when he thinks of it. And, heaven knows, it is hard to be funny without being sometimes a trifle malicious. There is not much kick in the milk of human kindness. Jane had a keen appreciation of the absurdity of others, their pretentiousness, their affectations, and their insincerities, and it is to her credit that they amused rather than annoyed her. She was too well-bred to say things to people that would pain them, but she certainly saw no harm in amusing herself at their expense with Cassandra. I find no ill nature in even the most biting and witty of her remarks; her humor was based, as humor should be, on accurate observation and frankness.

It has been remarked that though she lived through some of the most stirring events of history, the French Revolution, the Terror, the rise and fall of Napoleon, she made no reference to them in her novels. She has on this account been blamed for an undue detachment.

It should be remembered that in her day it was not polite for women to occupy themselves with politics — that was a matter for men to deal with; they did not even read the newspapers; but there is no reason to suppose that because she did not write about these events she was not affected by them. She was fond of her family, two of her brothers were in the navy, often enough in danger, and her letters show that they were much on her mind.

But did she not show her good sense in not writing about such matters? She was too modest ever to suppose that her novels would be read long after her death, but if that had been her aim she could not have acted more wisely than she did in avoiding to deal with affairs which from the literary standpoint were of passing interest. Already the novels concerned with the Second World War that have been written in the last few years are as dead as mutton. They were as ephemeral as the newspapers that day by day told us what was happening.

There is a passage in Austen Leigh’s Life from which, by the exercise of a little imagination, one can get an idea of the sorl of existence Miss Austen must have led during those long quiet years in the country. “It may be asserted as a general truth, that less was left to the charge and discretion of servants, and more was done, or superintended by the masters and mistresses. With regard to the mistresses, it is, I believe, generally understood that . . . they took a personal part in the higher branches of cookery, as well as in the concoction of home-made wines, and distilling of herbs for domestic medicines. . . . Ladies did not disdain to spin the thread out of which the household linen was woven. Some ladies liked to wash with their own hands their choice china after breakfast or tea.”

Miss Austen took a healthy interest in gowns, bonnets, and scarves; and she was a fine needlewoman, both plain and ornamental. She very properly liked young men to be good-looking and had no objection to flirting with them. She loved not only dancing, but theatricals, card games, and other more simple amusements. She was “successful in everything that she attempted with her fingers. None of us could throw spillikens in so perfect a circle, or take them off with so steady a hand. Her performances with cup and ball were marvellous. The one used at Chawton was an easy one, and she has been known to catch it on the point an hundred times in succession, till her hand was weary.” It is not surprising to learn that she was a favorite with children; they liked her playful ways with them and her long circumstantial stories.

No one would describe Jane Austen as a bluestocking (a type with which she had no sympathy), but it is plain that she was a cultivated woman. R. W. Chapman, the great authority on her novels, made a list of the books she is known to have read and it is an imposing one. Of course she read novels, Fanny Burney’s, Maria Edgeworth’s, and Mrs. Radcliffe’s (The Mysteries of Udolpho); and she read novels translated from the French and German (among others Goethe’s Sorrows of Werther); and whatever others she could get from the circulating library at Bath and Southampton. She knew her Shakespeare well, and among the moderns she read Scott and Byron, but her favorite poet seems to have been Cowper. It is not hard to see why his cool, elegant, and sensible verse appealed to her. She read Dr. Johnson and Boswell, a good deal of history, and not a few sermons.

3

THIS brings me to what is obviously the most important thing about her, the books she wrote. She began writing at a very early age. When she was dying at Winchester she sent a niece, who had taken to writing, a message to the effect that if she would take her advice she would cease doing so till she was sixteen and that she had herself often wished that she had read more and written less in the corresponding years (twelve to sixteen) of her life. At that time it was thought far from ladylike for a woman to write books. Monk Lewis wrote: “I have an aversion, a pity and contempt for all female scribblers. The needle, not the pen, is the instrument they should handle, and the only one they ever use dexterously.”

The novel was a form held in low esteem and Jane Austen was herself not a little shocked that Sir Walter Scott, a poet, should write fiction. She was “careful that her occupation should not be suspected by servants, or visitors, or any person beyond her family party. She wrote upon small sheets of paper which could easily be put away, or covered with a piece of blotting paper. There was between the front door and the offices, a swing door which creaked when it was opened; but she objected to having this little inconvenience remedied, because it gave her notice when anyone was coming.”

Her eldest brother, James, never even told his son, then a boy at school, that the books he read with delight were by his Aunt Jane; and her brother Henry in his memoir states: “No accumulation of fame would have induced her, had she lived, to affix her name to any productions of her pen.” So her first book to be published, Sense and Sensibility, was described on the title page as “by a Lady.”

It was not the first book she wrote. That was a novel called First Impressions. Her brother, George Austen, wrote to a publisher offering for publication, at the author’s expense or otherwise, a “manuscript novel, comprising three volumes; about the length of Miss Burney’s Evelina.” The offer was refused by return of post.

First Impressions was begun during the winter of 1796 and finished in August, 1797; it is generally supposed to have been substantially the same book that sixteen years later was issued as Pride and Prejudice. Then, in quick succession, she wrote Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey, but had no better luck with them, though after five years a Mr. Richard Crosbie bought the latter, then called Susan, for £10. He never published it and eventually sold it back for what he had paid. Since Miss Austen’s novels had been published anonymously he had no notion that the book he parted with for so small a sum was by the successful and popular author of Pride and Prejudice.

She seems to have written nothing but a fragment called The Watsons between 1798, when she finished Northanger Abbey, and 1809. It is a long interval for a writer of such gifts to wait and it has been suggested that her silence was due to a love affair that occupied her to the exclusion of other interests. But this is mere surmise. She was young in 1798 — twenty-three — and it is likely enough that she fell in love more than once, but she was hard to please, and it is equally likely that she fell out again without any great perturbation of spirit.

The most probable explanation of her long silences is that she was discouraged by her inability to find a publisher who would publish her books. Her close relations, to whom she read them, were charmed with them, but she was as sensible as she was modest, and she may well have concluded that their appeal was only to persons who were fond of her and had, it may be, a shrewd idea who the models of her characters were.

4

ANYHOW in 1809, in which year she settled with her mother and sister in the quiet of Chawton, she set about revising her old manuscripts, and in 1811 Sense and Sensibility at last appeared.

By then it was no longer outrageous for a woman to write. Professor Spurgeon, in a lecture on Jane Austen delivered to the Royal Society of Literature, quotes a preface to Original Letters from India by Eliza Fay. This lady had been urged to publish them in 1782, but public opinion was so averse to “female authorship” that she declined. But writing in 1816 she said: “Since then a considerable change has gradually taken place in public sentiment, and its development; we have now not only as in former days a number of women who do honour to their sex as literary characters, but many unpretending females, who fearless of the critical perils that once attended the voyage, venture to launch their little barks on the vast ocean through which amusement or instruction is conveyed to a reading public.”

Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813. Jane Austen sold the copyright for £110.

Besides the three novels already mentioned she wrote three more, Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion. On these few books her fame rests, and her fame is secure. She had to wait a long time to find a publisher, but she no sooner did than her charming gifts were recognized. Since then the most eminent persons have agreed to praise her. I will only quote what Sir Walter Scott had to say; it is characteristically generous: “That young lady had a talent for describing the involvements, feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I have ever met with. The big bow-wow I can do myself like anyone going; but the exquisite touch which renders commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me.”

It is odd that Scott should have omitted to make mention of the young lady’s most precious talent: her observation was searching and her sentiment edifying, but it was her humor that gave point to her observation and a kind of prim liveliness to her sentiment. Her range was narrow. She wrote very much the same sort of story in all her books and there is no great variety in her characters. They are very much the same persons seen from a different point of view. She had common sense in a high degree, and no one knew better than she her limitations. Her experience of life was confined to a small circle of provincial society and that is what she was content to deal with. She wrote only of what she knew; and it has been noticed that she never attempted to reproduce a conversation of men when by themselves, which in the nature of things she could never have heard.

She shared the opinions common in her day and, so far as one can tell from her books and letters, was quite satisfied with the conditions that prevailed. She had no doubt that social distinctions were important and she found it natural that there should be rich and poor. A gentleman’s younger son was properly provided for by taking orders and being given a fat family living; young men obtained advancement in the service of the King by the influence of powerful relations; a woman’s business was to marry, for love certainly, but in satisfactory financial circumstances. All this was in the order of things and there is no sign that Miss Austen saw anything objectionable in it. Her family was connected with the clergy and the landed gentry, and her novels are concerned with no other class.

5

IT IS difficult to decide which is the best of her novels because they are all so good, and each one has its devoted, and even fanatic, admirers. Macaulay thought Mansfield Park her greatest achievement; other critics, equally illustrious, have preferred Emma; Disraeli read Pride and Prejudice seventeen times; today many look upon Persuasion as her most exquisite and finished work. The great mass of readers, I believe, have accepted Pride and Prejudice as her masterpiece and in such a case I think it well to accept their judgment. What makes a classic is not that it is praised by critics, expounded by professors and studied in college classes, but that readers generation after generation have found pleasure and spiritual profit in reading it.

My own feeling, for what it is worth, is that Pride and Prejudice is on the whole the most satisfactory of all the novels. Emma offends me by the snobbishness of the heroine; she is really too patronizing to the persons she looks upon as her social inferiors, and I can take no particular interest in the affairs of Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax. It is the only one of Miss Austen’s novels that I find long-winded. In Mansfield Park the hero and heroine, Fanny and Edmund, are intolerable prigs and all my sympathies go out to the unscrupulous, sprightly, and charming Henry and Mary Crawford.

Persuasion has a rare charm and except for the incident on the Cobb at Lyme Regis I should be forced to look upon it as the most perfect of the lot. Jane Austen had no great gift for inventing incident of an unusual character and this one seems to me a very clumsy contrivance. Louisa Musgrove runs up some steep steps and is “jumped down” by her admirer Captain Wentworth. He misses her, she falls on her head and is stunned. If he was going to give her his hands, as we are told he had been in the habit of doing in “jumping her off” a stile, she could not have been more than six feet up, and as she was jumping down, it is impossible that she should have fallen on her head. In any case she would have fallen against the stalwart sailor and though perhaps shaken and frightened could hardly have hurt herself. Anyhow she was unconscious and the fuss that was made is unbelievable. Everybody loses his head. Captain Wentworth, who has seen action and made a fortune out of prize money, is paralyzed with horror. The immediately subsequent behavior of all concerned is so idiotic that I find it hard to believe that Miss Austen, who was able to take the illnesses and deaths of her friends and relations with considerable fortitude, did not look upon their conduct as uncommonly foolish.

Professor Garrod, a learned and witty critic, has said that Jane Austen was incapable of writing a story, by which, he explains, he means a sequence of happenings, either romantic or uncommon. But that is not what Jane Austen had a talent for and not what she tried to do. She had too much common sense and too sprightly a humor to be romantic, and she was not interested in the uncommon, but in the common. She made it uncommon by the keenness of her observation, her irony, and her playful wit.

By a story most of us mean a connected and coherent narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Pride and Prejudice begins in the right place, with the arrival on the scene of the two young men whose love for Elizabeth and her sister Jane is the main theme of the novel, and it ends in the right place with their marriage. It is the traditional happy ending. This sort of ending has excited the scorn of the sophisticated and of course it is true that many, perhaps most, marriages are not happy, and further, that marriage concludes nothing; it is merely an entry upon another order of experience. Many authors have in consequence started their novels with marriage and dealt with its outcome. It is their right.

But I have a notion that there is something to be said for the simple people who look upon marriage as a satisfactory conclusion to a work of fiction.

I think they do so because they have a deep, instinelive feeling that by mating a man and a woman have fullfilled their biological function; the interest which it is natural to feel in the steps that have led to this consummation, the birth of love, the obstacles, the misunderstandings, the avowals, now yields to its result, their issue, which is the generation that will succeed them. To nature each couple is but a link in a chain and the only importance of the link is that another link may be added to it. This is the novelist’s justification for the happy ending. In Jane Austen’s books the reader’s satisfaction is considerably enhanced by the knowledge that the bridegroom has a substantial income from real estate and will take his bride to a fine house, surrounded by a park, and furnished throughout with expensive and elegant furniture.

Pride and Prejudice seems to me a very well constructed book. The incidents follow one another very naturally and one’s sense of probability is nowhere outraged. It is, perhaps, odd that Elizabeth and Jane should be so well-bred and wellbehaved, whereas their mother and three younger sisters should be so ordinary; but that this should be so was essential to the story Miss Austen had to tell. I have allowed myself to wonder why she did not avoid this stumbling block by making Elizabeth and Jane the daughters of a first marriage of Mr. Bennet and making the Mrs. Bennet of the novel his second wife and the mother of the three younger daughters.

Jane Austen liked Elizabeth the best of all her heroines. “I must confess,”she wrote, “that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print.” If, as some have thought, she was herself the original for her portrait of Elizabeth — and she has certainly given her her own gaiety, high spirit and courage, wit and readiness, good sense and right feeling — it is perhaps not rash to suppose that when she drew the placid, kindly, and beautiful Jane Bennet she had in mind her sister Cassandra.

Darcy has been generally regarded as a fearful cad. His first offense was his refusal to dance with people he didn’t know and didn’t want to know at a public ball to which he had gone with a party. Not a very heinous one. It is true that when he proposes to Elizabeth it is with an unpardonable insolence, but pride, pride of birth and wealth, was the predominant trait of his character and without it there would have been no story to tell. The manner of his proposal, moreover, gave Jane Austen opportunity for the most dramatic scene in t he book. It is conceivable that with the experience she gained later Jane Austen might have been able to indicate Darcy’s feelings in such a way as to antagonize Elizabeth without putting into his mouth speeches so improbable as to shock the reader.

There is perhaps some exaggeration in the drawing of Lady Catherine and Mr. Collins, but to my mind little more than comedy allows. Comedy sees life in a light more sparkling, but colder, than that of common day, and a touch of exaggeration, that is of farce, is often no disadvantage. A discreet admixture of farce, like a sprinkle of sugar on strawberries, may well make comedy more palatable.

With regard to Lady Catherine one must remember that in Jane Austen’s day rank gave its possessors a sense of immense superiority over persons of inferior station, and these persons accepted the position without resentment. If Lady Catherine looked upon Elizabeth as so much white trash, let us not forget that Elizabeth looked upon her Aunt Phillips, because she was the wife of an attorney, as very little better. In my own youth, a hundred years after Jane Austen wrote, I knew great ladies whose sense of importance, though not quite so blatant, was not far removed from Lady Catherine’s. And as for Mr. Collins, who has not known even today men with that combination of pomposity and sycophancy?

No one has ever looked upon Jane Austen as a great stylist. Her spelling is peculiar and her grammar often shaky, but she had a good ear. I think the influence of Dr. Johnson can be discerned in the structure of her sentences. She is apt to use the word of Latin origin rather than the plain English one, the abstract rather than the concrete. It gives her phrase a slight formality which is far from unpleasant; indeed it often adds point to a witty remark and a demure savor to a malicious one. Her dialogue is probably as natural as dialogue can ever be. To set down on paper speech as it is spoken would be very tedious, and some arrangement of it is necessary. Since so many of the speeches are worded exactly as they would be today, we must suppose that at the end of the eighteenth century young girls in conversation did express themselves in a manner which would now seem stilted. Jane, speaking of her lover’s sisters, remarks: “They were certainly no friends to his acquaintance with me, which I cannot wonder at, since he might have chosen so much more advantageously in many respects.”I am willing to believe that this is just how she put it, but I admit, it requires an effort.

I have said nothing yet of what to my mind is the greatest merit of this charming book: it is wonderfully readable — more readable than some greater and more famous novels. As Scott said. Miss Austen deals with commonplace things, the involvements, feelings, and characters of ordinary life; nothing very much happens and yet when you reach the bottom of a page you eagerly turn it in order to know what will happen next; nothing very much does and again you turn the page with the same eagerness. The power of making you do this is the greatest, gift a novelist can have and I have often wondered what creates it. Why is it that even when you have read the novel over and over again your interest never flags? I think with Jane Austen it is because she was so immensely interested in her characters and in what happened to them and because she profoundly believed in them.