AIBU to wonder if Mr Bennet was having an affair?

[Whatsleftnow]

I’m leaning in to Jane Austen to get through a tough time and no one irl understands my desire to obsess over fictional characters, so I’m hoping to find a few kindred spirits online.

Reading P&P as a middle aged, perimenopausal woman has changed my perspective of MrsB. She’s relatively young yet unable to bear more children, and suffers from a nervous disorder. Given that anything to do with women’s health was taboo, reading between the lines as a modern woman, I’m very concerned for her.

Mrs B is clearly unwell, and Mr B just doesn’t give a flying fuck about anyone, with the possible exception of Elizabeth (and even then ignores her entreaties to step in with Lydia). He’s downright nasty to his wife, and negligent towards his dc. It’s a pattern that you see over and over on the relationship board.

Of course, it is a truth universally accepted that any man’s flaws can be laid at the feet of the nearest female relative, and Mrs B’s silliness is the accepted root cause of Mr B being a bastard.

I suspect if she posted on MN we’d suggest he had a bit on the side.

I really didn’t warm to The Wide Sargasso Sea either. I only read it recently and was expecting something quite different - less racist maybe?

I think it was describing racism not racist itself.

I doubt Mr B was 60-65 and even if he was there's nothing to suggest ED(!) as the book says that for many years after Lydia was born Mrs B still thought there was great hope for a DS or words to that effect, which seems not to indicate ED/zero intimacy. It suggests that they still tried to conceive but either nothing happened, or perhaps there were miscarriages.

Thanks to a MN recommendation, I read Longbourn couple of years ago, I absolutely adored it and was bereft when I had finished it. I can’t fathom how someone can hate it 😮

So my recommendation would be read Longbourn, it does answer a lot of these questions in here. I’ll get Other Bennet Sister next, thanks!

It doesn’t, though, any more than Wide Sargasso Sea tells us what ‘really’ happened to some of Charlotte Bronte’s characters. It’s just another author rifling off characters written by someone else.

It doesn’t, though, any more than Wide Sargasso Sea tells us what ‘really’ happened to some of Charlotte Bronte’s characters. It’s just another author rifling off characters written by someone else

Yes, exactly! Well written though those books may be, it's fan fiction at best and holds no more weight than anyone else's opinion of what really happened behind the scenes or what the characters motivations were.

I quite like it, and things like it - I found Rebecca's Tale unputdownable, and I adored Wide Sargasso Sea.

To me, it's like JA wrote the original story from the perspective of those characters, and it can be quite fun to have someone else with another perspective write from another character's POV. Like a fresh pair of eyes. It does get trickier, though, when people try to attach modern 'sensibilities' to the people of the time - I do agree about that.

The spin offs (and there have been a few) like Longbourn show what a fascination we have with P&P, the intricacies and possibilities.

My view of Mrs Bennett definitely changed over time - thought she was a silly, vain caricature when I first read the book in my teens, but as I've got older, her dilemma with regard to her daughters makes me increasingly sympathetic. The life of/in the house actually revolves around her, not her husband.

Mr Bennett doesn't have the energy for any extra marital action.

Jane Austen has a way of using background, characters of slightly lower social class to show up truths - Mr and Mrs Gardiner shine a favourable light on Darcy, Mrs Smith in Persuasion confirms the younger Mr Elliott's dubious character, the infamous Box Hill incident confirms Emma Woodhouse as a spoilt young woman.

Wide Sargasso Sea is a brilliant novel, I agree — I’m only saying I don’t consider Jean Rhys’s version of the Jane Eyre backstory canonical any more than I consider it canonical that Cecile Varens was a tightrope dancer who eloped to Italy rather than dying young, and that Rochester genuinely mourned her (from Emma Tennant’s Adele) or that Henry and Mary Crawford were genuinely, lastingly in love with Fanny and Edmund in Mansfield Park to the point where Mary, terminally ill, returns to Mansfield to die (Joan Aiken’s Mansfield Revisited).

I don’t have a problem with well written “fan fiction” that is honest about what it is. I don’t much care for Another Lady’s conclusion to Sanditon, for example, because imho it’s just a weak copy that pretends to be the real thing, rather than a new perspective that is open about where JA’s writing stops and the Other Lady’s begins. I like Jack Maggs, for example, and I think Clueless is clever and funny.

I really enjoyed Longbourn - thanks PPs for the recommendation. The Other Bennet Sister has a slow start but I think I know where it’s going now and I’m warming up to it.

But Sanditon is a bit different to sequels or prequels because it was left unfinished by Austen, and also because it’s very different in many ways to the rest of her writing — it’s pretty standard for publishers to commission someone to ghostwrite a ‘finish’ and prioritise the total reading experience of the novel as a whole, only indicating where the other writer took over in an afterword, presumably because they think that saying ‘Austen ends here and AN Other has written the next 200 pages’ would be distracting or alienating for the reader. (I mean, I agree with you, I like to see the ‘join’, but I can see why publishers think many people wouldn’t.)

Clare Boylan finished Charlotte Bronte’s unfinished Emma Brown, and Marion Mainwaring Edith Wharton’s The Buccaneers (in fact, I think there are two different ‘finished’ versions of that by different writers…) And there’s a whole industry of modern prequels/sequels, most (imo) not much cop.

Completely agree with you on both points - I understand why it was done that way, but I would rather see the join and see a different perspective after the join.

Another fan here of Longbourn. Great to find so many others have enjoyed it.

I think Mrs Bennet is supposed to be a silly and unlikeable character, but after multiple readings I can see that she gets a bit of a raw deal. If Mr Bennet died and all his property went to Mr Collins, then Mrs Bennet and the five girls would all be destitute. It's a terrifying prospect. <Of course> she wants one of them to marry Mr Collins. You can see why she might be furious with Lizzy for turning him down. And then after Mr Collins marries Charlotte Lucas, it becomes even more of a matter of urgency for at least one of the girls to marry someone wealthy, so that she can offer financial protection to the others. How frustrating for her that her two eldest daughters treat her like an idiot. (Even if she is one.)

But the ones who sacrifice their happiness to let her and the rest of the family live in the comfort would be her daughters, not herself. Interestingly she does not do anything as well to save some money.

How much agency does Mrs B have though? I doubt she would have complete access to the family money, more than likely she would be only getting 'pocket money'. The options for her daughters were limited and they would more likely to make a good marriage while they were still living at Longbourn than after Mr B was dead and they were in genteel poverty.

I also read somewhere that the Bennet sisters dowry came from the money Mrs Bennet brought to the marriage. I assume all the money the Longbourn estate made went back into maintaining it, and there wouldn't be any inheritance from it for the girls as they were, well, girls. It was bad enough being a second son and even worse being a daughter in some circumstances.

How much agency does Mrs B have though? I doubt she would have complete access to the family money, more than likely she would be only getting 'pocket money'.

From the same passage I quoted upthread:

”Mrs Bennet had no turn for economy, and her husband’s love of independence had alone prevented their exceeding their income.”

If she had ‘no turn for economy’, then it doesn’t sound as if Mr B was exactly financially abusing her, or even particularly controlling the purse-strings.

I think his treatment of Elizabeth has turned her into a classic 'pick me girl'. It's quite a classic father/ daughter dynamic where they both think themselves very clever compared to Silly Old Mum and undermine her/ laugh at her/ never take anything she says seriously.

Entails were fairly common. He was married Mrs B due to lust, which was over quickly, so he then had to make do with the library to get away from her annoying nerves and gossip

The last time I read P&P, I came to the conclusion that this whole business is a real flaw in the book. It's entirely reasonable for Mrs B to want one of her daughters to marry Mr Collins or a wealthy man, but Austen had to make her as silly as possible to drive the plot along. If we all felt sympathetic towards Mrs B it just wouldn't work as a novel.

Are Mrs B being silly and Mrs B needing to marry off her daughters actually related facts, though? We might see her as overly meddlesome but for the time was she much different from every other mother in terms of her need to get her daughters well married? It strikes me that Austen may have felt more criticism for Mrs Dashwood, seemingly content for her daughters to marry for love, than Mrs Bennet. Certainly both Mrs D and Mrs B fail to manage their daughters properly to protect their reputations - Mrs D with Willoughby and Marianne and Mrs B with Wickham and Lydia.

Mrs B being uncouth and too obvious are more traits designed to make Darcy shudder at the inferiority of Elizabeth's connections. Darcy refers to Mrs B's 'total want of propriety, so frequently, so almost uniformly betrayed by herself' but this is things like all five girls being out at once, the blatant pushing Jane towards Bingley (which nearly finished Jane off), and openly talking of how she expected them to get engaged in front of all sundry at the Netherfield ball. I think it's the vulgarity of the way she does it, rather than what she's actually doing.

Agree tribpot especially this: "I think it's the vulgarity of the way she does it, rather than what she's actually doing." To me the two things are separate issues and the interpretation of Mrs B as being right in what she's doing whilst overlooking the way in which she's doing it is down to modern sympathies, I think, where peoples' faults must be conspicuously ignored or else it's somehow not kind. Mrs B may have some sensible principles at heart but she is indisputably a very silly and uncouth woman as well.

I think Mr Bennet finds sufficient solace in his library. He is not sociable, dislikes travelling, hates London and presumably other big towns, so it seems unlikely that he would have a mistress. And Meryton is a small village, full of gossips, so it seems unlikely that he would get away with meddling with any of the servants or village girls. Besides, while he is an indifferent husband and father, there is nothing to suggest that he is not a decent man. As for Mrs Bennet being sensible, nonsense. Yes she wants her daughters married, and married well, but she does nothing to actually help them. She has never bothered to encourage them to become accomplished at anything, she hasn't the sense to be polite to people of rank, and she is loud and crude in company. She wants her daughters married and rich for boasting rights, not to secure their happiness.

Yes, she is silly and vulgar but a woman in her position is not wrong to be worried. In a way JA is saying it’s better to live like Miss Bates than to be a thruster, which makes sense given her own life and morals, but isn’t much fun for Miss Bates; then of course the two “good” daughters marry terribly well so she has it both ways. With Mrs B it just feels a bit like she is punching down.

That sounds harsh, doesn’t it, but it’s just something I’ve been thinking about in the context of this discussion. And of course she is much tougher and funnier about Lady Catherine and the Bingley sisters!

Yes I feel the same way especially about Wide Sargasso Sea. It's an interpretation not canon.
There's always the possibility that Mrs Bennett thinks having fits of "the vapours" is what refined women do and that there's not much wrong with her.

Also that Mr Rochester was genuinely mislead by the Mason's and that Bertha had a serious mental illness that meant they could not have a relationship.

You could argue, I think, that Lizzie is selfish in not marrying Mr Collins. If she'd married him, she'd have secured her sisters' financial wellbeing. Being married to Mr C would have been pretty horrible, though.

The older I get the more it astounds me that this brilliant novel which has given so much pleasure for hundreds of years was written by a 21 year old.