To have just realised that Mr Collins got Mrs Collins in the family way.

[squoosh]

Have just re-read Pride & Prejudice for the first time in yonks and at the end Mr Collins mentions 'dear Charlotte’s situation, and his expectation of a young olive-branch. How had I not noticed that before?

I'd always imagined dear Charlotte avoiding that messy business by keeping him occupied with his sermon writing and his gardening and his pash on Lady Catherine.

But she was a woman who knew what she wanted so I wouldn't be surprised if she was the one who took conjugal matters in hand.

Good old P&P, the book that keeps on giving.

And I also think BBC Jane was well cast. She had a serene old fashioned beauty. Pale and fair, no bold colouring that would indicate a flighty unladylike temperament!

Not only was Mrs Forster a total air-head, but she married Colonel Forster during the regiment's time in Meryton.

While Jane lay ill at Netherfield, much had been done and much had been said in the regiment since the preceding Wednesday; several of the officers had dined lately with their uncle, a private had been flogged, and it had actually been hinted that Colonel Forster was going to be married.

So Mrs Forster could well have been not much older than Lydia, and even an old friend. A demonstration of what could be achieved in the way of marrying officers!

Darcy was super duper rich, as in rich in a way that the income from a fabulous estate in Derbyshire couldn't explain.

Old money, foreign investments, workers paid a tuppence a year and farming being a boom trade. Interest rates were also sky high due to the rich being mega rich since everyone else being poor. He likely lived mainly off interest.

Not at all over invested in British social history, nooooooo

Since? And!

But squoosh

The Bingley sisters were so dread disdainful of Uncle Phillips who worked in TRADE and lived on CHEAPSIDE

PP - I love you for having a Shakespeare In Love joke as your username

I agree about the BBC casting. Jane was just as I thought she would be. Blonde, sweet and obedient, while Lizzy was dark haired and a bit wild. Beautiful but not in the classic blonde, blue eyed sense.
I must say I haven't enjoyed myself on a thread quite so much in a long time! I'm going to re-download P&P on my Kindle now as a result

Don't forget that JA was writing during the Industrial Revolution. Enormous fortunes were being made by entrepreneurs who then tried their best to join the landed gentry. They sent their sons and daughters to schools where they would mingle with the upper classes in the hope that they would learn the etiquette and pick up the right accent and connections. That's what I've always assumed had happened with the Bingley siblings. They didn't have an estate of their own because the family had had no money to speak of a generation earlier. It wasn't necessarily all from the slave trade.

Mansfield Park, though - that's a different story. Sir Thomas goes off to the West Indies to sort out a problem on his plantations.

EverySongbird Caroline Bingley wasn't that far away from serving behind a shop counter herself. I doubt the Bingley family tree would have stood up to rigorous scrutiny beyond a couple of generations!

(I do like Caroline the acidic cow)

WellErr I prefer your scenario that Mr D benefited from a favourable (for him) economic climate. I will scrub all thoughts of a plantation from my mind!

Can we keep the thread going as long as poss?

This sounds a bit sad but there's a fairly shit Emily Blunt film were they all read a JA book a month and I was thinking of suggesting we copy it?

AIBU? A saddo?

Kindle pigs a Kindle??

Do wash your mouth out!

I have the Coralie Bickford Smith Clothbound Hardback if you please

But then you may not be as fortunate in your acquaintance as I

You've all got me pondering on the ages of the Bennett sisters - Lydia was 15, Kitty two years older so 17, Lizzie 20 so how old was Mary? Jane about 22?

It comes across as the two eldest being very close in age and very close to each other and the same for the two youngest but what about Mary she must have been close in age to all of them?

Mary could have been 18/19 with less than an 18 mnth gap between her and Lizzie and her and Kitty. Is it any wonder Mrs Bennet was fed up she gave birth every year and must have had 5 under 6

The reason Caroline Bingley and Mrs Hurst are such raging snobs about the Bennets and so obsessed with 'good form' is because they know that despite their own wealth, its 'trade' origins are still too recent to be entirely genteel. (Also, Caroline Bingley is still single, despite her wealth and accomplishments, while Mrs Hurst doesn't exactly seem to have covered herself in matrimonial glory with the gluttonous card-playing bore Mr H...) They want to consolidate their status by Bingley marrying 'well', not to genteelly penniless Jane with her embarrassing family.

Lizzy is much more socially at ease than the Bingley sisters in some ways - she's not embarrassed at showing up muddy at Netherfield when Jane is ill - she's not afraid of looking 'uncouth'. Though part of that is town vs country ways.

It's nice Uncle Gardiner who lives on Cheapside almost in sight of his own warehouses - Uncle Phillips is married to Mrs Bennet's other sister in Meryton,

What interests me is why status- and prestige-obsessed 'old money' Darcy is the boon companion of 'new money' and nice but slightly dim Bingley? They don't seem to have been at university together, or Bingley would know Wickham too, which he doesn't. Someone (John Sutherland?) suggests B may have been D's fag at public school.

It's nice Uncle Gardiner who lives on Cheapside almost in sight of his own warehouses - Uncle Phillips is married to Mrs Bennet's other sister in Meryton,

THE HUMILIATION

Fag theory they could belong to the same 'Club' ??

Indeed, Every, that could explain a lot about Mrs B's character. I actually feel sorry for her when Lady C comes calling and is so dismissive towards her.

Coke of Holkham was Mr till ennobled later, and made a fortune out of farming. He was in his 60s or 70s by 1815, I think, but a Darcy equivalent. equally, the Chatsworth estate, which she might have gone round when she stayed in Bakewell, even though it wasn't apparently the one she mainly had in mind, gets / got its money not only from agriculture but mines, quarries, timber as well as interests in both industry and new towns. I think Eastbourne , the development of, used to belong to the Devonshires, who had to sell huge tracts if it fir death duties but you can still see the family names in the street names.

I think Lizzy has a much more modern beauty - she's rosy cheeked and tanned from roaming about outside in the fields, which would have been most unladylike. Jane is pale and blonde and delicate and unopininated and fits the 'beauty' description of the time.

I LOVED Alison Steadman as Mrs Bennett. The cries of 'My nerves!' and 'Hill, Hill, where is Hill?!?' were just perfect.

I'm confused by the fertility issue too. 5 healthy children, all close in age. Then nothing. What kind of birth injury with Lydia's birth could have stopped more children? Especially if it says they tried for a boy after Lydia, so didn't stop intercourse. I doubt Mrs Bennett would have given up on producing a boy since she is SO concerned about her and her girls' future so I'm guessing a sudden bout of repeated miscarriages (why though? Or worrying bleeding during one that meant a doctor told her more pregnancies might kill her?) and then an early menopause. Clearly overthinking this too but it is interesting.

It's nice Uncle Gardiner who lives on Cheapside almost in sight of his own warehouses - Uncle Phillips is married to Mrs Bennet's other sister in Meryton,

Mrs Bennet has one sister, Mrs Phillips in Meryton. Mr Gardiner is her brother, so her maiden name must have been Gardiner.

Every I just started S&S yesterday! Ido t have time to read at the moment though so it's the audiobook whilst I cook or drive

Around the time Jane Austen was alive one of the wealthiest and most influential families in the land were the Earls of Fitzwilliam. Apparently she called Darcy Fitzwilliam and also gave his cousin the same name to put readers in mind of this family and there enormous wealth (which they made from coal).

This family and their massive house, which is one of the largest stately homes in Europe, are largely forgetten now but I did find that quite interesting. Everyone seems to like Pemeberly with Chatsworth as its in Derbyshire but it is possible she based it on Wentworth Woodhouse which belonged to the Fitzwilliams.

This is a lovely thread btw and I'm finding it fascinating. P & P is my absolute favourite book.

Vestal - Sorry, it took me til this morning to see your post!

Your point is very close, I think, to what JA is saying - that this society is highly interconnected, and that there are duties/responsibilities to others. (This goes hand-in-glove with a view of the 'naturalness' of social hierarchy, the need to have good, moral, wealthy 'leaders' - but it's not uncritical of sclerotic, class-based privilege for privilege's sake, and that critique grows in JA's later fiction, particularly if you think about Mansfield Park where the inheritors truly are a middle class couple).

The Rousseauvia school, by contrast, is about questioning social mores as potentially old-fashioned/the result of a corrupt and fallen society, and following your inner sense of virtue, sometimes against the grain of the social world, sometimes in order to build a better world. (This goes hand-in-glove with a more individualistic and democratic sense of morality, though that is complicated by the fact that there is often a more collective, radical political programme in there too - Rousseau is both the great theorist of the individual, and the great theorist of the general will).

Sense & Sensibility is possibly the JA novel where this contrast is most in evidence - Marianne's behaviour, her focus on feelings over forms, on inner guidance over social guidance, bring her close to the position of a heroine of 'sensibility' fiction, if not exactly Rousseauvian, then close enough to be both morally and politically suspect to JA. Versus Elinor's more calm, rational, undemonstrative heroism, which is all about a dutiful attention to the feelings of others.

Rousseauvian, sorry!

I'm not an economic historian, so bear with me until someone who is comes along to correct my many mistakes, but a lot of aristocrats made money out of slavery (plantations) and industrial exploitation of their estates. So to our eyes, isn't a huge distinction between those in commerce and those who are aristocrats in terms of income - in a modern Venn diagram, the two would overlap as 'selling stuff'. However, they are perceived really differently in the early nineteenth century. Where there is more of a difference is in activity: the operative distinction tends to be one of 'gentlemanliness', which is partly about status, partly about a certain income, partly about education, partly about manners, and partly about whence wealth derives: making money out of land is seen as qualitatively different to trading in objects directly (even if the exploitation of that land involves the production of objects e.g. minerals, sugar). Land, and particularly an old estate, is considered to bring a kind of distance from the mechanics of deal-making business which is still correlated by some people at this time with a kind of political neutrality: there is a crazy idea (inherited from civic humanism, Shaftesbury) that because you're not directly involved in business, because you make your wealth out of an estate, you don't have 'interests' and therefore can act as an impartial voter, who has the good of all at heart, where someone who makes deals is too 'interested' to do so - and probably lacks the 'proper' education to do so anyway (nowadays, this strikes us as complete nonsense - though you could argue that we still don't see land ownership itself as an interest in the same way as other things!) This is part of the rationale for middle class people not having the vote until 1832.

So I guess Bingley isn't getting his hands dirty everyday with the ins and outs of deals in trade - he's new money, but his inheritance makes him independent and able to live a lifestyle that is similar to Darcy's, though not as burdened with the long-term care of an estate (the business that attracts Lizzie to Darcy). He is 'gentlemanly', and his acceptance by Darcy does perhaps indicate that the latter isn't quite as snobby as Lizzie first thinks. Mr Bennett is also a gentleman, as Lizzie tells Lady Catherine ('He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman's daughter; so far we are equal')- the old professions, including being a clergyman, were considered respectable. The relations in Cheapside are more suspect - though JA makes it clear she has little truck with such snobbery, one of many signals of middle class virtue in her novels.

Love this thread - I studied JA for Eng Lit O & A Levels. Loved P&P and Emma.

I can't believe I went to work for 5 minutes yesterday and came back to 13 pages. This is the best thread ever and having now caught up somewhat breathlessly (my bosom is heaving with the effort) I'd love to know what you all think of Elinor and Marianne's sister in law in Sense and Sensibility. I didn't understand her very well other than just to think her grasping and mean until recently when I met someone just like her. This woman was mean and grasping and I'm sure that this came from her insecure background growing up with not very much and her desperation to ensure that her own children never went without a thing. Her husband was weak too and didn't see how manipulative his wife was.

Do any of you find people in RL like JAs characters?