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 the class thing is all relative. 'Poor' girls would be 'encouraged' to marry men with jobs that paid regular money, churchgoers, boys from 'good' families. The same pressures would exist, just a social setting down.

Squoosh - yy, and I think Baker evokes the grind very well.

I always thought that Charlotte was a very strong woman who made her choices and went through with them

I agree with SabineUndine that Charlotte Lucas knew the world she lived in, knew her options within it, and made the best of it that she could.

She knew what she was getting herself into and decided with full information that she preferred it to the alternatives.

I don't see how you could sod off and marry who you liked. You'd have your dad pointing out he bought the clothes you were standing up in, wouldn't you? And your mum pointing out that if you married John Smith the Beggar she wouldn't look after your babies and you'd have no support network.

I just can't imagine eloping being a standard practice in any class.

Yes, you would still have social pressure, but there was plenty of geographical mobility, migration to towns etc.

Also, I could be wrong, but I think at this point if you wanted to set up home in a parish, you were meant to prove you had means, or you'd be classed as a vagrant? You couldn't easily just move out of your home and hope to support yourself.

Cross post.

Ah, ok, I stand corrected.

At least the boys didn't have their reputations to worry about. And they could join the navy and catch syphillis make their fortune.

After all, it wasn't his fault he was to inherit the living, and he was doing his best to secure the girls' (and Mrs Bennet's future) by marrying one of them.

You forget how he reacted to the rejection - namely, by not believing her.

She was polite to him until that point, and he would never have known what she thought of him (actually, he never did, fully) if he hadn't persisted in this. She is entitled to think that he's an idiot.

Sure, he wasn't worse than Mrs. Bennett, but that's rather the point - Lizzy didn't want to repeat her father's mistakes.

This is the best thread I've come across in ages

Doesn't Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey have to face loss of inheritance for defying his father and marrying Catherine?

I have completely missed this and I have read the book tens of times!!

Also shocked that i didn't know there was a US ending

It wasn't much better for poor boys (or indeed younger sons of rich families). They had to marry as told and/or take jobs given.

Except for, you know, the marital rape. Or the rape-induced pregnancy forcing them to marry.
And the fact that they earned a lot more money in whatever job they took, rich and poor alike.

And Edward Ferrers in Sense and Sensibility.

JA was perfectly au fait with the facts of life - remember that she essentially grew up in a boys' boarding school on a farm (her clergyman father took in boys to tutor as well as farming to make ends meet) and shared small lodgings with more than one childbearing sister-in-law (while her sailor brothers were away at sea). She makes a few acidly sympathetic remarks about the dangers of childbirth and pregnancy in letters - one woman is referred to as a 'poor Animal' because of her frequent pregnancies - and there's even a thoroughly nasty joke that escaped Cassandra's post-mortem censorship about how a neighbour had had a stillbirth 'because she had happened to see her husband unawares' in late pregnancy.

I think that Charlotte Lucas's story is a hugely important bit of P and P, which is too often overlooked or played only for laughs (though both David Bamber and Tom Hollander are brilliant in the films). Marriage is the only option open to the women of the Bennet and Lucas class. Charlotte's fate is Lizzy's in a few years, if she hasn't managed to construe her good looks and charm into a husband who can support her - Charlotte hadn't the good looks to help her to anything like a good love match, but in fact her situation is less desperate than the Bennet girls. (The Lucas estate isn't entailed to a distant relation as the Bennets' is, and there is at least one son to inherit and house a spinster sister.)

Most film adaptations encourage us to laugh at Mrs B's rage to marry off her girls, but in fact, for all her silliness, she's being more responsible about their future than their head-in-the-sand father. Their father hasn't saved to leave his daughters money to support themselves after his death, when they will no longer have a home and income from the estate - they will have only a tiny income via their mother unless they marry.

Charlotte has behaved sensibly, bartering her respectability and fertility for a home of her own and a husband who, even if he's a pompous fool, isn't abusive or cruel.

Hang no......right, now, thinking about it, the men whose marriages are controlled due to the bequeathal of money by relatives:

1. Henry Tilney
2. Edward Ferrers
3. John Willoughby (also Sense and Sensibility)
4. Frank Churchill (Emma)

and isn't there something in Mansfield Park too?

See, I always though Mr Collins was misinterpreted and misunderstood on the screen for comic value. Matt Smith in the zombie version looks physically and played him the most like I imagined the Collins in the book, although I haven't seen Tom Hollander. He's a bit thick and mired in correctness and etiquette, but as pp said, he's 25 and slim. He's not physically repulsive. Marrying one of the Bennet sisters seems like a fair enough solution to the problem of the entail. He was punching above his weight with Lizzy though.He should have gone for one of the middle two that don't do anything

Jane Austen herself never married in spite of having a number of proposals. I assume she couldn't bring herself to do what Charlotte did but that did leave her in the position of spinster aunt and dutiful daughter, having to do what her parents told her, all her days. Her parents made the decision to leave Steventon in Hampshire, where she had lived all her life, and move their household to Bath, without consulting her at all. She apparently fainted when she was told the news. This always reminds me of Anne Elliot in Persuasion (my favourite).

I think 'few people had any choice at all' is massively overstating things for 1800ish England. Most people did have a choice in who they married, albeit within constraints tighter than ours. If there was no choice most of Jane Austen wouldn't make any sense.

I always thought that Mary should have married Mr Collins. They would have been very well suited, and unbearable to sit beside at dinner.

Yes! I always thought mr Collins and Mary would have been a good match. But I think he was supposed to think too much of himself to go for the plain option.