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.

Paperbacked ooh thankyew - a v. nice example of a penniless lady making her way in the world too. :)

Yes poor old Charlotte - but she does nab him so quickly!

I think Austen did admire her, but didn't she (Austen) turn down a couple of suitors who might have been fairly eligible because she didn't really click with them?

I agree with posters that Death Comes to Pemberley is a pretty rubbish read but I love the TV version mostly because of Matthew Rhys as Darcy

Lucy Snowe is cool. Gruff, devious, secretive, love-starved, snobbish, xenophobic, but cool. (Though her adoration of Tiresome Graham Bretton/George Smith stretches my compassion at times, I'll admit.)

Yes, Austen had a proposal from the wonderfully-named Harris Bigg-Wither, the rich but not terribly bright younger brother of friends of hers (and six years younger than JA - he was 21). She was staying with them at the time, accepted the proposal, then - after what can only have been the most gruesome night of second thoughts and tossing and turning - told him she had changed her mind, and immediately left the house first thing in the morning after an engagement of about ten hours. Ouch.

The worst thing about Death Comes to Pemberley is the the arse they turn Colonel Fitzwilliam into! I love the Colonel, he was such a good natured fella, he even let Lizzy down gently by dropping into conversation that he'd have to marry for money.

Awww, poor Harris Bigg-Wither!

Maybe she couldn't handle being Jane Bigg-Wither...

Jane Bigg-Wither sounds almost Carry On-esque.

She made the right decision!

You probably read it in school Bear.

No, grew up in Dorset, so we were force fed Hardy.

But in Becoming Jane with Anne Hathaway it's because his papa refuses consent

Don't tell me a film were an American plays Jane is historically inaccurate

I agree about Mr Bennet - what a total arse. The older I get, the more I notice it. He is so irresponsible about his children's future - hasn't made any effort to actually save for them because he assumed he would have a son and by they time they realised they wouldn't it was 'too late' (even though Lydia is now 15, so it must have been clear for a while that it might not happen) - and constantly undermines his wife and encourages her children to do the same. I'm not surprised she's a bit hysterical - she's treated like an idiot by everybody and knows that her children will live in penury unless at least one of them marries well.

I also feel really sorry for Lydia. Sure, she's a annoying idiot, but she's 15! If I had to live by the decisions I made at 15 ... gahh! She's always played by much older people (wasn't Julia Sawalha about 30?), so you kind of feel she deserves it. But she's 15, and is groomed and taken advantage of by a much older man who plans to use her and throw her away. So sad that her 'happy ending' is being stuck with him for life - escape was impossible.

Don't tell me a film where an American plays Jane is historically inaccurate

Was that the same one where a highly-fictionalised JA is incredibly nice and close to her disabled older brother, rather than him being sent to live in a neighbouring village to live with a paid caretaker along with his disabled uncle, and there being no evidence at all JA, or anyone in the family, ever saw him again after early childhood, because it would make JA look flinty and uncaring by modern standards?

Sorry, I'm going to catch up in a moment, but paper, I love your whole post about Mrs B and the possible miscarriages.

I would really like to see a (good!) novel with her alternative point of view.

It is interesting, isn't it, that JA is credited with being so good at giving women interior lives - but never mothers. Mothers are either absent or sources of mockery.

I didn't even attempt to watch Becoming Jane. James McAvoy and Anne Hathway? Urgh, no thanks.

I've loved reading this thread. I studied P&P for my O Level in 1971 and we never considered the irresponsibility of Mr Bennet, why Mrs Bennet suffered with her 'nerves' and all the rest. I'm definitely going to have to read it again now with this new light shed on it. I'll also be downloading Longbourne to my Kindle.

That's the one Paperback also massively comical aging techniques used at the end.

Though the actress playing Lydia in the most recent film (Ikea Knightley) was mid 20s by then, as I first saw her in Donnie Darko a few years before that

Sorry that is to say Jena Malone, Ikea being the lead in that version

Becoming Jane? That the one with Anne Hathaway?

I thought the Bigg Wither marriage was consented to but the Lefroy one not consented to on the grounds that Jane was too lowly?

I love Charlotte's character. A true pragmatist.

I don't get why ppl read P and P as a romance. It's not, is it (unless I am missing something?).

Here you go - Obadiah Slope in shudder-making detail. He wasn't stupid, like Mr Collins, but I don't think even Charlotte would have accepted him, however desperate she was for 'an establishment'.

'His hair is lank and of a dull pale reddish hue. It is always formed into three straight, lumpy masses, each brushed with admirable precision and cemented with much grease; two of them adhere closely to the sides of his face, and the other lies at right angles above them. His face is nearly of the same colour as his hair, though perhaps a little redder: it is not unlike beef - beef, however, one would say, of a bad quality. His forehead is capacious and high, but square and heavy and unpleasantly shining. His mouth is large, though his lips are thin and bloodless; and his big, prominent, pale-brown eyes inspire anything but confidence. His nose, however, is his redeeming feature: it is pronounced, straight and well-formed, though I myself should have liked it better did it not possess a somewhat spongy appearance, as though it had been cleverly formed out of a red-coloured cork.
I never could endure to shake hands with Mr Slope. A cold, clammy perspiration always exudes from him, the small drops are ever to be seen standing on his brow, and his friendly grasp is unpleasant.'

That description stayed with me for many years after I first read it. I do love Trollope.

I was just about to say that in real life Jane seemed to be entertaining hopes of Tom Lefroy, but it didn't happen. We can't say for sure why, but the theory is that he needed to marry better (he did and ended up Lord Chief Justice in Ireland with vast numbers of children, from memory).

Greasy hair, red face, bulgy eyes, spongy nose, clammy hands! Well Obadiah sounds like one sexy peach!

Yech.

Sliding between the sheets with Mr Collins doesn't seem like too gruesome a prospect now.

Played by Alan Rickman in the lovely TV adaptation many years ago*. He was such a brilliant actor he made it work, but he didn't match that description!

*Good god, 1982! Retires to chaise longue, feeling very, very old indeed.

No, Jane was the one who (almost immediately) changed her mind after HB-W proposed. There's no hard evidence as to why. It's possible she accepted him for Charlotte Lucas-ish reasons, plus he was perfectly nice though stolid and unsure of himself, and she was fond of his sisters, and then realised she couldn't go through with it on those grounds. Or some people have suggested that Cassandra's fiancé dying meant that C became a prematurely middle-aged maiden aunt, and JA went along with her in sort of solidarity (mentions of the two of them going about together in matching elderly-looking bonnets when both were still quite young) and didn't want to abandon her.

Ditto Tom Lefroy, really - some people view him as the unacknowledged love of JA's life, others as a passing flirtation. She only mentions him three times in surviving letters, all in a very light-hearted way - in one, she jokes about his coat being too tight - and her last mention of him is something about his imminent departure and how her tears are flowing at the awful idea. Which is either sarcasm or serious, not very helpfully!

A friend of mine wrote a wonderful play about the whole Lefroy-Bigg Withers-Jane /Darcy-Collins-Lizzy thing - www.amazon.co.uk/Books-Lizzy-Darcy-Jane-Joanna-Norland/dp/0573112339?ie=UTF8&Version=1&entries=0 - it gets performed occasionally and is worth seeing if you ever come across a performance!

sorry, link again