#actually my favorite austen family. obnoxious as fuck and i love them

[anghraine]

In P&P, Elizabeth asks Colonel Fitzwilliam about what sort of ward Georgiana makes, with the comment, "if she has the true Darcy spirit, she may like to have her own way."

I always find this pretty funny, though it's understandable (all things considered) that Colonel Fitzwilliam doesn't, and is alarmed for Georgiana's sake. And Elizabeth definitely makes inaccurate assumptions about Georgiana, so it's not even ill-founded alarm.

But. By all accounts, Darcy and Georgiana's father was a perfectly amiable and good-natured man who got along with everyone without stepping on toes. The extreme of Darcy's autocratic tendencies isn't his father, it's very obviously Lady Catherine, who is not a Darcy at all, but a Fitzwilliam. IMO, the supposed Darcy spirit is really the Fitzwilliam spirit.

And Colonel Fitzwilliam said just a few lines earlier that he would like to get his own way as much as Darcy and simply lacks the means, and that he assumes this is true of everyone.

I think it's clear enough that this is not true of everyone, actually. I feel like, personable though he is, he's also got a pretty recognizable Fitzwilliam strain in some ways. So there's just something kind of bizarrely comical to me about this whole "Darcy spirit" exchange happening with him.