Austen Does the Arithmetic

Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813 and opens with a sentence about a single man in possession of a good fortune being in want of a wife.

The sentence is a joke, and the joke is that the want runs the other way. It is not the wealthy man who needs anything. It is the households with daughters and no money, for whom a marriage is the only available route to security, and Austen is reporting their view of the world in the grammar of a universal truth.

She is filed as a romantic novelist and she is the great English novelist of constraint. Incomes appear constantly and precisely. Mr Bingley has four or five thousand a year; Darcy has ten; the Bennet estate is entailed away from the daughters entirely. That precision is not period colour. It establishes the exact dimensions of the cage each character is choosing inside, so that a choice can be assessed against what was actually available.

The hardest passage in the novel is not about Elizabeth and Darcy. It is Charlotte Lucas.

Charlotte is twenty-seven, plain by the standards the book is describing, and has no money. Mr Collins is a fool, and she accepts him days after Elizabeth refuses him. Asked to explain, she says she is not romantic, never was, and asks only for a comfortable home.

Austen does not punish her. Charlotte's marriage is not a disaster; she arranges her house so as to see as little of her husband as possible, and she is, within the terms available, competent and reasonably content. Austen also does not approve. The reader is simply shown what a clear-sighted woman does when the alternative is dependence on relatives for the rest of her life.

Charlotte is the control condition, and the novel does not work without her. Remove her, and Elizabeth's refusal of Collins looks like pure principle. Keep her, and it is also revealed as a bet, one that a woman with slightly less money and slightly less luck could not afford to make.

Which brings us to what Austen actually claims about love.

She is not against marrying for money. She is exact about what marrying for money costs, and exact about the fact that some people cannot afford not to. Her positive claim is that love becomes possible once security has stopped being the question that dominates everything, and that when it becomes possible it consists of perceiving another person accurately.

That is the structure of the main plot. Elizabeth is wrong about Darcy and Darcy is wrong about almost everybody, both of them publicly and at length, and the novel is the correction. The happy ending is not a genre requirement Austen tolerated; it is argued for, by making each of them do the work of seeing the other properly, which is difficult and initially fails.

Set that beside Aristotle in the first book of this course and they are saying something close to the same thing. Loving somebody for their character requires first being right about their character, and being right about a person takes time and costs you some of your favourite opinions about yourself.