Pride-and-Prejudice

Nor, for that matter, does the other ostensibly foolish character of the novel,
Mr. Collins himself, seem so oblivious in refusing to acknowledge Elizabeth’s
rejection of his proposal. He may be pompous, but he is also practical, and he
knows minutely the details of Elizabeth’s meager future inheritance. The idea
that she might turn him down is simply inconceivable to him, for, as he
rightly points out, given her family circumstances, she may never receive
another offer. That she declines Mr. Darcy’s first proposal, is, in practical
terms, even more astonishing. Remaining single after her parents’ deaths
might mean an annual income of £40 (4 percent annual interest, as Mr.
Collins estimates it, on a £1,000 share of her mother’s legacy), a portion of
which would go toward renting a room somewhere in the village. Marriage to
Mr. Darcy, by stark contrast, would mean having at her disposal a reputed
£10,000 annually, plus the amenities of Pemberley, the house in London, the
carriages, the servants, and so forth. It is difficult to convert these sums into
the modern British pound or American dollar, in part thanks to inflation but
mostly because the nineteenth-century economy and culture are so very
different from ours, but suffice it to say that Elizabeth, in declining Mr. Darcy,
has rejected fantastic wealth for the likelihood of a quite modest existence, far
beneath that to which she has become accustomed.
The conventions of romantic comedy, however, do not allow us to focus on
the folly of Elizabeth’s decision to follow her heart and her principles or to
dwell for very long on the grim financial future of these five unwed women.
The narrator, in fact, offers no sustained commentary on how limited the
options are for women in this society. The only real defenses of women’s
moral and legal entitlement to inherit property fall from the lips of the two
caricatural aging women: Mrs. Bennet, who refuses to recognize the legality
of the entail that will disinherit herself and her daughters, and Lady Catherine,
who opines, “I see no occasion for entailing estates from the female line” (p.
164). The romantic narrative would also lead us to believe that Elizabeth
should indeed be true to herself, for there is something terribly dull about the
financially “prudent” marriage, and something disgraceful about the
“mercenary” one, although the two motives amount to the same thing, as
Elizabeth explains to Mrs. Gardiner (p. 153). The prospect of repudiating the
desire for romance and settling for “a comfortable home,” as Charlotte Lucas
has done (p. 125), is represented to be a fairly dismal choice, which is one
reason why the novel looks so very different from the conservative morality
tales that were popular in this period. Austen’s narrator tends to see the world
from Elizabeth Bennet’s perspective, and so, therefore, do we, and the plot
reconciliation confirms the legitimacy of this view. When the two elder
Bennet sisters finally become engaged, we know that Elizabeth’s match is