#while end of the book elizabeth is so far from being intimidated or awed by him that she's sweeping in to save him

[anghraine]

It's kind of fascinating to me that towards the end of P&P, Elizabeth has become protective of Darcy and either a) actively tries to insulate him from Situations or b) wishes that she could and gets stressed that she can't.

Darcy deeply loves her and is very ready to do whatever he can to secure her happiness, but narratively, I think the emphasis at the end is very much more on Elizabeth's protectiveness towards him.

It's like:

When Bingley and Darcy first come back to Hertfordshire, Darcy is very quiet and Elizabeth can barely bring herself to say anything—until Mrs Bennet insults Darcy. Then Elizabeth speaks up.

Mrs Bennet enlists Elizabeth to separate Darcy from Bingley with another insult to Darcy. Elizabeth finds this both convenient and enraging.

That day, Elizabeth decides to privately tell Mrs Bennet about her engagement to Darcy, specifically so that Darcy will be spared Mrs Bennet's first unfiltered response.

Elizabeth fiercely defends Darcy's character and love for her, as well as hers for him, to Mr Bennet. She not only says she loves Darcy but that it upsets her to hear Mr Bennet's criticisms of him.

Elizabeth is both relieved by Mrs Bennet's ecstatic reception of the engagement and a bit disappointed by how completely shallow she's being about it, and 100% sure she made the right call in keeping Darcy away.

Elizabeth defends Darcy against Darcy himself, repeatedly.

There's a period where Elizabeth seems to unwind and laugh, but this passes, especially after Charlotte and Mr Collins show up. Darcy manages to stay calm around Mr Collins (I think this is framed as a significant and admirable achievement for him), but Elizabeth does not like him being in a situation where he has to deal with Mr Collins in the first place.

Elizabeth tries to shield Darcy from being noticed by Mrs Phillips and Mrs Bennet, who do seem to make him pretty excruciatingly uncomfortable.

Ultimately, Elizabeth ends up trying to keep Darcy to herself or to shepherd him around to relatives he can handle more easily, and is so stressed at this point that she just wants to get married and escape to Pemberley.

After their marriage, things are actually great at Pemberley and in their married life, despite the occasional complication.

Lydia writes a congratulatory letter to Elizabeth, asking for Darcy to get Wickham a promotion unless Elizabeth would rather not bring it up with him. Elizabeth really does not want Darcy to have to deal with this and handles it by privately setting aside a Lydia fund out of her personal expenses. (IIRC, it's not clear if Darcy even knows about this.)

Elizabeth also is the driving force behind Darcy's reconciliation with Lady Catherine.

This could read as an unsettling, unbalanced dynamic and a very odd ending point for the arc of a woman like Elizabeth, but in the context of the overall novel, it doesn't feel that way. Or maybe I'd see it more that way if I interpreted Darcy (and for that matter, Elizabeth) + their arcs differently? But as it is, I do think that by this point in the story they are genuinely doing the best they can, independently and for each other, and they've both come a long way. They shine in different contexts and support each other as much as they can in the circumstances that do arise.

It seems very them, in terms of their temperament and abilities, that Elizabeth would put all this effort into shielding Darcy, while at the same time, Darcy completely cuts off Lady Catherine for insulting Elizabeth and only ever speaks to her again because Elizabeth wants him to.

[roaringgirl]

Books read in January

I am keeping this as a little record for myself, as I already keep a list (my best new year’s resolution - begun Jan 2018) but don’t record my thoughts

General thoughts on this - I read a lot this month but it played into my worst tendencies to read very very fast and not reflect, something I’m particularly prone too with modern fiction. I just, so to speak, swallow it without thinking. First 5 or so entries apart, I did quite well in my usually miserably failed attempt to have my reading be at least half books by women.

1. John le Carré - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974): I liked this a lot! I sort of lost track of the Cold War and shall we say ethics-concerned parts of it and ended up reading a fair bit of it as an English comedy of manners - but I absolutely love all the bizarre rules about what is in bad taste (are these real? Did le Carré make them up?).

2. John le Carré - The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963): I liked this a lot less. It seemed at the same time wilfully opaque and entirely predictable. Have been thinking a lot about genre fiction - I love westerns and noir, so wonder if for me British genre fiction doesn’t quite scratch the same itch.

3. David Lodge - Ginger You’re Barmy (1962): This was fine. I don’t have much to say about it - I was interested in reading about National Service and a bit bogged down in a history of it so read a novel. As with most comic novels, it was perfectly readable but not very funny.

4. Dan Simmons - Song of Kali (1985): His first novel. This is quite enjoyable just for the amount of Grand Guignol gore, and also because I like to imagine it caused the Calcutta tourist board some consternation. Wildly structurally flawed, however. Best/worst quote: ‘Hearing Amrita speak was like being stroked by a firm but well-oiled palm.’ Continues in that vein.

5. Richard Vinen - National Service: A Generation in Uniform (2014): If you are interested in National Service, this is a good overview! If not, not.

6. Sarah Moss - Ghost Wall (2018): I absolutely loved this. About a camping trip trying to recreate Iron Age Britain. Just, very upsetting but so so good - a horror story where the horror is male violence and abuse within the (un)natural family unit.

7. Kate Grenville - A Room Made of Leaves (2020): Excellent idea, but not amazing execution - the style is kind of bland in that ‘ironed out in MFA workshops’ way (I have no idea if she did an MFA but that’s what it felt like). Rewriting the story of early Australian colonisation through the POV of John Macarthur’s wife Elizabeth.

8. Ruth Goodman - How to Be a Victorian (2013): I mostly read this for Terror fic reasons, if I’m honest. I skimmed a lot of it but she has a charming authorial voice and I really like that she covers the beginning of the period, not just post-1870.

9. Gary Shteyngart - Super Sad True Love Story (2010): I read this on a recommendation from Ms Poose after I asked for good fiction mostly concerned with the internet, and I thought it was excellent - it’s very exaggerated/non-realistic and that heightening of incident and affect works so well.

10. Brenda Wineapple - The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation (2019): What a great book. I had to keep putting it down because reading about Reconstruction always makes me so sad and frustrated with what might have been - the lost dream of a better world.

11. Halle Butler - The New Me (2019): Reading this while single, starting antidepressants and stuck in an office job that bores me to death but is too stable/undemanding to complain about maybe wasn’t a great decision, for me, emotionally.

12. Halle Butler - Jillian (2015): Ditto.

13. Ottessa Moshfegh - Death in Her Hands (2020): Very disappointed by this. I don’t really like meta-fiction unless it’s really something special and this wasn’t. Also, I’m stupid and really bad at reading, like, postmodern allegorical fiction I just never get it.

14. Andrea Lawlor  - Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (2017): This was really really hot! I will admit I don’t think the reflections on gender, homophobia, AIDS etc are very deep or as revealing as some reviews made out, but I also don’t think they’re supposed to be? It’s a lot of fun and all of the characters in it are so precisely, fondly but meanly sketched.

15. Catherine Lacey - The Answers (2017): This was fine! Readable, enjoyable, but honestly it has not stuck with me. There are only so many sad girl dystopias you can read and I think I overdid it with them this month.

16. Hilary Mantel - Wolf Hall (2010, reread): Was supposed to read the first 55 pages of this for my two-person book club, but I completely lack self-restraint so reread the whole thing in four days. Like, I love it I don’t really know what else to say. I was posing for years that ‘Oh, Mantel’s earlier novels are better, they’re such an interesting development of Muriel Spark and the problem of evil and farce’ blah blah blah but nope, this is great.

17. Oisin Fagan - Hostages (2016): Book of short stories that I disliked intensely, which disappointed me because I tore through Nobber in horrified fascination (his novel set in Ireland during the Black Death - which I really cannot recommend enough. It’s so intensely horrible but, like Mantel although in a completely different style/method, he has the trick of not taking the past on modern terms). A lot of this is sci-fi dystopia short stories which just aren’t... very good or well-sustained. BUT I did appreciate it because it is absolutely the opposite of pleasant, competently-written but forgettable MFA fiction.

18. Muriel Spark - Loitering with Intent (1981): Probably my least favourite Spark so far, but still good. I think the Ealing Comedy-esque elements of her style are most evident and most dated here. It just doesn’t have the same sentence-by-sentence sting as most of her work, and again I don’t like meta-fiction.

19. Hilary Mantel - Bring up the Bodies (2012, reread): Having (re)read all of these in about 3 months, I think this is probably my favourite of the three. I just love the way a whole world, whole centuries and centuries of history and society spiral out from every paragraph. And just stylistically, how perfect - every sentence is a cracker. I’m just perpetually in awe of Mantel as a prose stylist (although I dislike that everyone seems to write in the present tense now and blame her for it).

20. Muriel Spark - The Girls of Slender Means (1963, reread): (TW weight talk etc ) As always, Hilary Mantel sets me off on a Muriel Spark spree. I’ve read this too many times to say much about it other than that the denouement always makes me go... my hips definitely wouldn’t fit through that window. Maybe I should lose weight in case I have to crawl out of a bathroom window due to a fire caused by an unexploded bomb from WW2???? Which is a wild throwback to my mentality as a 16 year old.

21. China Mieville - Perdido Street Station (2000, reread): What a lot of fun. I know we don’t do steampunk anymore BUT I do like that he got in the whole economic and justice system of the early British Industrial Revolution and not just like steam engines. God, maybe I should read more sci-fi. Maybe I should reread the rest of this trilogy but that’s like 2000 pages. Maybe I should reread the City and the City because at least that’s short and ties exactly into my Disco Elysium obsession (the mod I downloaded to unlock all dialogue keeps breaking the game though. Is there a script online???)

22. Stephen King - Carrie (1974): I have a confession to make: I was supposed to teach this to one of my tutees and then just never read it, but to be honest we’re still doing basic reading comprehension anyway. That sounds mean but she’s very sweet and I love teaching her because she gets perceptibly less intimidated/critical of herself every lesson. ANYWAY I read half of this in the bath having just finished my period, which I think was perfect. It’s fun! Stephen King is fun! I don’t have anything deeper to say.

23. Hilary Mantel - Every Day is Mother’s Day (1985): You can def tell this is a first novel because it doesn’t quite crackle with the same demonic energy as like, An Experiment in Love or Beyond Black, but all the recurring themes are there. If it were by anyone else I’d be like good novel! But it’s not as good as her other novels.

24. Dominique Fortier - On the Proper Usage of Stars (2010): This was... perfectly competent. Kind of dull? It made me think of what I appreciate about Dan Simmons which is how viscerally unpleasant he makes being in the Navy seem generally, and man-hauling with scurvy specifically. This had the same problem with some other FE fiction which is that they’re mostly not willing to go wild and invent enough so the whole thing is kind of diffuse and under-characterised. Although I hated the invented plucky Victorian orphan who’s great at magnetism and taxonomy and read all ONE THOUSAND BOOKS or whatever on the ships before they got thawed out at Beechey (and then the plotline just went nowhere because they immediately all died???) I had to skim all his bits in irritation. I liked the books more than this makes it sound I was just like Mr Tuesday I hope you fall down a crevasse sooner rather than later.

25. Muriel Spark - The Abbess of Crewe (1974): Transposing Watergate to an English convent is quite funny, although it took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that’s what she was doing even though I lit read a book covering Watergate in detail in December. Muriel Spark is just so, so stylish I’m always consumed with envy. I think a lot of her books don’t quite hang together as books but sentence by sentence... they’re exquisite and incomparable.

Overall thoughts: This month was very indulgent since I basically just inhaled a lot of not challenging fiction. I need to enjoy myself less, so next month we’re finishing a biography of Napoleon, reading the Woman in White and finishing the Lesser Bohemians which currently I’m struggling with since it’s like nearly as impenetrable Joyce c. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man but, so far... well I hesitate to say bad since I think once I get into I’ll be into it but. Bad.

[douxreviews]

Pride and Prejudice - ‘Episode 6′ Review

“As a child, I was given good principles, but was left to follow them in pride and conceit. And such I might still have been, but for you. Dearest, loveliest Elizabeth.”

In which the ramifications of Lydia’s actions become clear, Bingley and Darcy return to town and our story comes to a very satisfactory conclusion.

Mr. and Mrs. Bennet are an interesting couple whose flaws become more than evident through the way they handle Lydia’s situation. Mrs. Bennet can only see that her daughter is to be married. The fact that so much money had to change hands or that her daughter has behaved so badly doesn’t register. Astonishingly, she can’t see how truly awful her new son-in-law is, only that she has one. Lydia is certainly her mother’s daughter. Unable to see what her life is really going to be like, she crows over her sisters that she is married; it doesn’t matter to whom.

Mr. Bennet, on the other hand, understands the situation but it doesn’t seem to change his life view in any way. He feels shame that he needed help to rescue his daughter, but as he says, “It will pass and, no doubt, more quickly than it should.” Here is a man who has been beaten down by his situation and appears to have no control over the household. No sooner does he make his pronouncement that Lydia and Wickham will never be invited to Longbourne than they turn up.

Likewise, Mr. Bennet gives his consent to Darcy before he speaks to Elizabeth about the engagement because he is unable to “refuse such a man.” He does, however, love Elizabeth and takes it upon himself to warn her off an unhappy marriage, the money be damned. It is to her father that Elizabeth finally admits how much she loves Darcy, a declaration that moves her father to tears.

Darcy has become a man truly worthy of Elizabeth’s love. By taking on the financial obligation to get Lydia married, he accepts his role in the elopement. Arguably, he takes too much on himself, but he does so without expectation of receiving anything for himself. The fact that Elizabeth discovers what he has done actually embarrasses him.

Even better, he comes clean with Bingley and admits that he orchestrated keeping Bingley and Jane apart. I’m afraid that Bingley is not shown in the greatest light during this exchange. He is obviously too easily manipulated by those around him and seeks approval where none is needed. He is, however, a lovely and kind man who is so pleased that the woman he loves returns his love, he forgives all instead of being justifiably furious with his best friend.

One of the great scenes in this entire series is Elizabeth squaring off with Lady Catherine who is rude from the moment she enters the drawing room. This is a woman who is accustomed to getting her own way in all things, especially when it comes to her family. Is it any surprise she surrounds herself with sycophants like Mr. Collins? Elizabeth, however, is not intimidated in the slightest and gives back as good as she gets. The language is brilliant. Never does Elizabeth admit that Darcy has already proposed or that she wishes he would do so again. She just keeps turning Lady Catherine’s words back on her.

Of course, the encounter is the catalyst that finally brings our two together. I adore the scene where Darcy and Elizabeth declare their love to one another. The two are so reserved, yet the emotions are not far below the surface. For the vast majority of their conversation, they can’t even look at each other. It’s almost as if they are both afraid that something they both want so much is at hand and they can’t quite believe it. As soon as Darcy calls her by name, however, all that falls away and they look into each others’ eyes with so much love, I always tear up. As they continue down the lane at the end of the scene, they keep brushing up against the other as if to reassure themselves that this has truly happened.

Like all good romances, we go out on the wedding. Brilliantly shot, one by one we revisit everyone who has played a part in the past six hours. The reactions range from happiness, to disappointment, to a frightening aspect of what the Wickham marriage has already become. In the final moments, we see how happy Jane and Bingley are and we see a kiss. And, what a kiss it is!

Historical Context:

Lydia is very young to be married at sixteen. Keeping in mind that young women were not in the company of men until they were out, fifteen or sixteen would be about as young as it were possible to be for someone of Lydia’s class.

The biggest sin that Lydia has committed is sleeping with Wickham before she marries him. Virginity in a bride was sacrosanct; more than one essay was written at the time warning woman not to give in to “just a promise.”

Mrs. Bennet manipulating the situation to leave Bingley and Jane alone, while hilarious, is telling. At this time, the proposal was often the first time that a couple was left alone.

Bits & Pieces:

Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle have yet to be beaten as the great Darcy/Elizabeth duo. When I read the book now, I picture them. This is not necessarily true of some of the other actors from this series.

The next time Firth and Ehle appeared together on screen was fifteen years later in a little film you may have seen called The King’s Speech. I went to see it in a packed cinema. At the moment that the King walks out of the back room and Myrtle sees him for the first time, a woman in the front of the cinema said, probably more loudly than she had intended, “Darcy and Elizabeth!” Everyone burst out laughing.

Darcy’s financial commitment to the Bennet family is extraordinary. Assuming that Wickham took the £10,000, that constitutes a full year of Darcy’s income.

Favorite Moments:

Elizabeth and Wickham’s conversation in the garden. Civil, bordering on friendly, Elizabeth makes it clear to her brother-in-law that she knows the truth.

Darcy stealing glances at Elizabeth the first time he and Bingley come to visit.

The sheer joy that Jane feels when Bingley proposes.

Lady Catherine chasing after Elizabeth and shouting at the end of their argument.

The final declaration and the kiss!

ChrisB is a freelance writer who spends more time than she ought in front of a television screen or with a book in her hand.