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.

dido, this is several hundred years after 'medieval times'.

Great thread.

I think the film P&P does do Mrs Bennet's worry over what will happen to the girls very well.

I always preferred charlotte to either Jane or Elizabeth. Jane was Impossibly goody goody while Lizzie is smug and a romantic bubble.

It always struck my that Mrs Bennett was badly treated by Jane Austen, after all she wanted security and safety got her daughters and In those days that meant marriage or inherited wealth. She is the pragmatic one with a whimsical and scoffing husband who undermines her at every turn.

I was very pleased to see the film version treat her with more gentleness and understanding.

Are you suggesting Lizzie should've been forced to marry Collins? As that is when Mr Bennet most undermines his wife !

I can wholly recommend 'What Matters In Jane Austen?' by John Mullan. It has chapters entitled:
'How do JA characters look?'
'Do we ever see the lower classes?'
'Is there any sex in JA?'
'Which important characters never speak?'
'How much money is enough?'

One of the interesting points made was how the actors cast to play JA characters are always much older than the character is in the book. For example, Mrs Bennet would've likely to have been in her forties.

No not forced but Mary would have.

I think Mrs Bennett was just worried about their security.

Mr Bennett is all fine and dandy to take the piss and not saying he should have supported his wife on this matter but he seems shut up in his study and self indulgent while he should be worried about his wife and daughters security after he's gone.

Lydia is a typical teenager really.

To be fair 'cosmic without makeup we all might look a tad older

Great thread

I mean, in adaptations the actors cast are much older than the characters actually are, like we think of Mr and Mrs Bennet as being in their 50s/60s as they are shown that way on film.

Mrs Bennett wouldn't have even been 40 necessarily. Jane was 21, she could have been 17 when she married. She wouldn't have been much more than 40 anyway.

Really Tea, are the shades of Rosings to be thus polluted?

squoosh anyone who can do Lady Catherine De Bourgh is my favourite

Yes, the bit at the beginning of the novel where Mr Bennet says that Mrs B should send the girls over the visit the newly-arrived Bingley on their own because he might prefer mother over daughters is usually played for sarcastic laughs in film versions - but it may be perfectly likely.

Jane is remarkably beautiful and may have inherited her looks from her mother - and there had to have been some reason that bookish, clever Mr B married Mrs B, so we have to assume it was her beauty, because it wasn't her conversation! - and as Jane is 22, Mrs Bennet may well be a very beautiful woman in her late 30s.

(If she isn't menopausal, did something happen during one of her confinements to mean she couldn't conceive again, to keep trying for a boy who would cut off the entail? We're told Mrs B went on being sure a boy would come along for years after Lydia's birth, so it's clearly not that the Bennet parents were no longer having sex... Would it explain some of her 'nerves' if we thought of her as having had a string of miscarriages?)

The unhappiness of the Bennet's marriage does partly excuse why Mr Bennet is such an ostrich about his daughters' marriages. He tells Lizzy she should not marry where she cannot respect her husband because that's his own experience of marital misery, but - realistically - Mr Collins is a decent, if unexciting prospect for the almost penniless Lizzy, who has clearly been doing the rounds of the Assembly balls for a few years now without attracting any proposals at all. Likewise even the beautiful Jane.

Mr Bennet behaves as though his wife is a total lunatic when she urges him to visit Mr Bingley when he first arrives at Netherfield in the hope that he might marry a Bennet daughter, but it's actually a perfectly sensible thing to urge, in their circumstances, with the spectre of homelessness after Mr B's death hanging over them - at least some of the girls need to marry to house the others and their mother. (It's presumably also why Mrs B gets so hysterical when she images Mr B fighting a duel with Wickham after the elopement. She and the girls are homeless once he dies.) Neither Lizzy nor Jane have had any luck with local men or the militia, so a new man like Bingley is a real chance!

Tea, that image is just going to lodge itself inside my head forever.

I liked the way Mr Collins was handled in Bride and Prejudice - the whole story translated very well to modern India. He was young and embarrassing, but not bad at heart. Charlotte could have done a lot worse.

We definitely see Mr Collins through Lizzie's (prejudiced) eyes. Even the bit where he doesn't believe her rejection of his proposal is more about misplaced gallantry and a belief in prevalent ideas about gender rather than bullying, as I read it.

What if poor old Mrs Bennet was Lydia's age when she had Jane? I'd honestly never thought of it and it's completely possible that Mrs Bennet is literally my age

I second the John Mullins book, it's great.

Also am a Mr Collins and Mrs Bennet apologist :) She had at least five babies in as many years. No wonder she is a tad highly strung!

It is interesting that Charlotte always gets off scot free about this. I mean the thing is that the entailment has left the Bennets in a pretty hopeless state. But then along comes Mr C, with a solution to reconcile the families and keep the house! Lizzy refuses, which is a bit silly but works out in the end. But before he even gets a chance to ask again, or ask another sister, Charlotte nabs him! If you think about this is a really underhanded, backstabbing thing to do, to steal Longbourn from out under her friends' noses. But somehow Lizzy etc forgive her and she gets to have two rather nice houses when they might be out on the streets! (I do love Charlotte really.)

Collins is more attractive than Darcy in the Zombie film which takes some doing. Collins is Matt Smith whereas Darcy is some bloke I'd never seen before who wasn't particularly attractive, had no charisma, and no chemistry with Lily James who evidently in real life chose Collins!!!!!

And Mr Bennet is a proper prick to her about her worrying that Charlotte Lucas may turn her out to starve in the hedgerows.

"let's hope I outlive you"

Bastard.

Lucy, you are my favourite 19thc literary character.

I don't agree about Charlotte being underhand, though. Even the most pompous young man, and even with Mrs Bennet's urging, isn't going to gradually work his way down through all the Bennet girls. Charlotte's loyalty is to her friend Lizzy, and they both know the others feelings about marriage (Lizzy being rather shocked at Charlott'e pragmatism), and Charlotte knows Lizzy has refused Mr C.

I don't think JA thinks she should have waited until Mrs Bennet had worn Mr C down and possibly persuaded him to propose to Mary - he's towards the end of his visit to Longbourn, and this is literally Charlotte's only chance to make a life other than that of a lifelong dependent spinster. I think JA actually approves of Charlotte's enjoyment of having her own house and her 'management' of Mr C to make their lives as bearable as possible, and her lack of self-pity when Lizzie visits.

lucysnowe I suppose Charlotte thought 'it's now or never time for me'. She knew that Jane and Lizzy being attractive women meant they were bound to have a few more offers but Mr Collins was Charlotte's only hope. And I suppose she thought that if a woman who wasn't a Bennet sister was going to marry him it may as well have been her.

EverySongbirdSays that Lady C quote is one of my favourites and I find it very easy to slip it into daily 21st c life!

Here's my pet theory about Mr Collins. I think Jane Austen based his character, in part, on an acquaintance with Asperger’s syndrome. Consider his obsession with numbers (“He could number the fields in every direction, and could tell how many trees there were in every distant clump.”; his social awkwardness and inability to understand the niceties of polite behaviour (for example, his insistence on introducing himself to Mr Darcy at the ball); and the difficulty he clearly has understanding the thoughts and motivations of other people.

But because psychologists had not yet identified the condition, the only way Austen could understand such behaviour was by considering what qualities might make a neurotypical individual behave this way. The answers she came up with were philistinism, snobbery, stupidity and conceit. The result was Mr Collins.

Me and my Mum are always quoting Pand P at each other

Staircases............BECAUSE THERE ARE SEVERAL

WOULD HE HAD SPRAINED HIS ANKLE IN THE FIRST DANCE

I SEND NO COMPLIMENTS TO YOUR MOTHER YOU DESERVE NO SUCH ATTENTION

I'm sure you know it's shades of Pemberley though she does live at Rosings

(not meaning to sound like a cunty goady pedant because this is the best thread ever)

I NEVER caught that before either!!

I watch the BBC version with the Mr Collins pictured on page 1 all the time (Colin Firth version) - because it is on Netflix and I cannot get the previous BBC version which was what I used to watch on video in Uni while stuck in the library regularly waiting for late night buses home.

I must go back to the book..... (once I finish my recent purchase of Charles Dicken (grand/greatgrand?) son doing a round the world yachting trip).