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.

Don't the servants in Longbourn think so too?

Mary was very plain though. Collins always thought he could do better.

Yes, Mr Collins had ideas above his station, remember his first choice was the beautiful Jane! He'd have been appalled at the idea of marrying the 'plain one'.

YY, I think in theory people have had a 'choice' for millenia, strictly under law. Marriage law has pretty much always insisted that people enter into marriage freely. But ...!

I always think Mary gets a raw deal. She's what, 15? And Lizzy is not particularly kind to her as an older sister.

Second sons had a bloody awful time. Primogeniture meant that, on the whole, the older son got the lot and the younger one had to make his own way in the world. Colonel Brandon and Colonel Fitzwilliam are examples of this, had to gain a commission in the regular army and hope they did well. Even in the 'lower orders' second sons had an equally crappy time, although they could be sent to be apprenticed somewhere, so not all bad.

I'd be hard pushed to be kind to Mary either. Imagine spending day after day listening to her pompous ramblings. No music or TV to drown her out.

I think you are meant to understand that Elizabeth is at this point thinking the Georgian equivalent of "eeuuw TMI" .

Being an 'old maid' was a horrendous fate in those days, until your parents died you had all the rights you had at 17, post their death you would essentially become a lodger in your SILs home unless you became a carer/companion to an aging relative, no autonomy, no agency.

Being a servant was worse obviously, like washing other people's period rags with soap you'd made yourself from pigs fat.

Mmm, but aren't most of her ramblings are seen through Lizzy's eyes?

I would like to imagine there wasn't much wrong with her except being a bit OTT and shit at piano.

Mary must have been older than 15, more like 18 or 19. Lydia was the youngest and she was nearly 16.

Second sons were for the church weren't they?

Such as Old Mr Darcy getting Wickham the "living" of a local parish, by essentially giving the church his wages?

Never really got how "the living" at a church worked. Brandon gives his to Edward, the church on the estate, and pays his way i think.

Sorry, you're quite right, Lydia's 15.

Still, I will persist in sympathising with her.

Imagine if your dad and your older sisters spent all their time rolling their eyes over you.

Well the whole family seem to equally eye-rolly when it comes to poor old Mary. I'm sure she was perfectly harmless but I know that if I had to spend every day in her company my nerves would fray pretty quickly. Especially without much wine to dull the edges.

I am very impatient though.

There's a fascinating book by Hodgson Burnett called the making of a marchioness ( the Mitford girls read it ) about 80 years later when she points out that if you had no money, no education, and no family to support you, and you were middle class, you might if you were lucky be a companion, but otherwise you starved.

[ spoiler alert]

Our heroine, Emily, is talking to a girl who is being thrown at the head of a Marquess 30 years older than her to save her sisters from penury. She doesn't expect to like or love him. All that is needed is complaisance and the semblance if respectability in return for which she gets security and is off her parents' hands. Our heroine, who gets the Marquess, has been a companion and now runs errands for people, not being clever enough to be a governess. It's one if the most revealing passages about the plight of mIddle class women I've read. Emily expects to end up either in the poor house or starving to death. Becoming a housemaid is obviously not on. There is an anxious moment when she thinks the Marquess is asking her to be his mistress not wife. ( for anxious readers, the other girl marries the young man she is in love with who is also fabulously wealthy. Phew. )

Ah, you're probably right. I just have a soft spot for the underdog.

I bet they had shitloads of wine, though, right? Gout and all.

Back in those days if you had a baby, you, your midwives, and anyone else hanging around could get shitfaced* on spiced booze laced with spirits, for example.

*this bit may be my interpretation of the facts

Don't mean to derail but does anyone else think that Aneurin Barnard should be the next Darcy? Or is it just me

I was listening to something about Victoria Sackville-West today. Apparently she married her cousin so she could stay home with her father, discovered sex and neglected the house, then after she had Vita she decided no more childbirth therefore no more sex.
So maybe Mrs Collins just did it the once or twice a night until she achieved the olive branch.

I think the 'love match' vs' arranged marriage' thing is a bit of a false opposition at this period, though. Marriage was to a large extent an economic/tribal proposition - the Assembly balls were purely to offer an opportunity for the gentry to meet one another as marriage partners - and JA's novels are stuffed with instances of unwise love matches. (Look at the Bennet parents - Mrs B was clearly as pretty as Jane when young, Mr B loses his head and ends up marrying beneath him, and is stuck with a prattling hysteric that he goes on desperately impregnating in the hope that eventually a boy will arrive to cut off the entail and provide for all the girls until she hits menopause).

Even Lizzy, the romantic heroine, stops considering Wickham, whom she finds very attractive, as a potential husband because, as her sensible aunt points out, he hasn't a bean to support her. She takes that completely seriously. Anne Elliot in Persuasion isn't ever entirely condemned by JA for choosing caution over a match with a penniless naval lieutenant. Yes, he does well and comes home with lots of prize money, but he could easily have not, and left Anne alone on shore for years at a time raising children on a pittance (like Fanny Price's mother and father in Mansfield Park).

Lizzy (and to an extent, Jane) get the fantasy ending - love matches which are also nonetheless economically way out of their league, but Charlotte isn't doing anything at all unusual for a woman of her class and period in marrying Mr Collins for his money and prospects. She's not being grasping, she's taking the only chance life has offered her of a home of her own and a kind of independence.

I bet when you were a 'nice girl' from a 'nice family' you got a measly thimble of wine in the evening and that was it. With sisters like Mary and Lydia yammering in your ear you'd want a box of some Australian plonk by your person at all times.

Aneurin Barnard looks a bit consumptive DrJulia. And wheezy.

'a prattling hysteric that he goes on desperately impregnating'

Now there's a vivid image of the Bennets!

There's quite a lot of wine in Austen. Lots of women with glasses, women being offered glasses if they're feeling a bit shaky, and Mrs Bennett pointing out moderately that a bottle a day is a bit much.

But I take your point.

I see missmayhem's beaten me to it - I always imagine Jane Austen cackling with glee as she wrote this line and muttering (in suitably Georgian terms) "Mwa ha ha, my readers are going to barf at this line."

Also, I think the tendency to cast actors who look slimy is actually right - because (regardless of physical appearance which is left blank) he is written as slimy, and unctuous, and (to quote a wonderful reference my father once received from a public school housemaster for one of his students) "overbearing to his inferiors and sycophantic to his superiors." Remember his comment about Lady Catherine: "Such affabililty, such condescension." Charlotte chooses marriage utterly pragmatically, but it really is hard work for her to put up with him (hence the time in the cold study at the wrong side of the house).

I always wonder about the earlier line of Charlotte's: "However well known the characters of the two parties are beforehand, it does not advance their felicity in the slightest" - or something like that. Are these Charlotte's thoughts, or is she actually voicing Austen's thoughts at this point? It's one of the most cynical things ever written about marriage, I think.

You have the gift of the living as squire. But keep it for eg Edmund. But until he is old enough, you get old codger to buy it off you for his tenure, until he dies or gets promotion. The vicar gets the tithes to live off. If you are unlucky, the vicar is still there inconveniently when Edmund is ready and you can't get rid of him. If he's just a curate, not vicar or rector, you can prob arrange to have him moved. But if he's rector he's there for life until promotion to the upper realms or a deanery...

There are still a few livings in the gift of estates, and done , royal peculiars, in the gift of the queen. But most now come under dioceses and rectors have for the most part been abolished so you can move people around. One if DH's friends is / was the longest serving rector in England, still going strong at ninety plus, irritating the hierarchy...

Do you think mary and kitty ever marry?