[In the following essay, Moler discusses the relationship between Pride and Prejudice and the novels of Fanny Burney and Samuel Richardson.]

In Pride and Prejudice, it is generally agreed, one encounters a variant of the eighteenth-century “art-nature” contrast when Elizabeth Bennet's forceful and engaging individualism clashes with Darcy's by no means indefensible respect for the social order and his class pride. Most critics agree that Pride and Prejudice does not suffer from the appearance of one-sidedness that makes Sense and Sensibility unattractive. It is obvious that neither Elizabeth nor Darcy embodies the moral norm of the novel. Each is admirable in his way, and each must have his pride and prejudice corrected by self-knowledge and come to a fuller appreciation of the other's temperament and beliefs. Ultimately their conflicting points of view are adjusted, and each achieves a mean between “nature” and “art.” Elizabeth gains some appreciation of Darcy's sound qualities and comes to see the validity of class relationships. Darcy, under Elizabeth's influence, gains in naturalness and learns to respect the innate dignity of the individual.¹

This essay is concerned with the relationship between certain elements in Pride and Prejudice and the novels of Richardson, Fanny Burney, and some of their imitators. Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy bears a marked resemblance to what may be called the “patrician hero,” a popular character type in the novels of her day, and it is rewarding to investigate the relationship between Darcy and his love affair with Elizabeth Bennet and the heroes of Richardson's and Burney's novels and their relations with their heroines. Jane Austen's treatment of her patrician hero has a marked relevance to the theme of the reconciliation of opposite values and qualities that plays such an important part in Pride and Prejudice. Moreover, it is possible that the study of Darcy's origins may help to account for some inconsistencies in his character that have troubled a number of Jane Austen's readers. I shall begin by outlining some of the characteristics of the patrician hero.

I

Authority figures of various sorts play prominent roles in many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels. There is the patriarch or matriarch—Fielding's benevolent Allworthy, Godwin's terrifying Falkland, Dickens' Miss Havisham—whose relationship with a young dependent acts as a sort of metaphor for the relationship between the social order and individual, “natural” man. In the novels of Richardson the relationship—prosperous, or, in the case of Lovelace and Clarissa, mutually destructive—between a young man of rank and fortune and a girl who is naturally good but socially inferior performs a similar function. The chief concern here is with the particular sort of figure that Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison represents.²

Richardson's Lovelace is a lost soul; his Mr. B——— has to be reformed by the virtuous Pamela. In Sir Charles Grandison, however, Richardson depicted a perfect Christian aristocrat. Sir Charles, Richardson would have his readers feel, combines the glamor of a Lovelace with the principles of a Clarissa. He is handsome and accomplished, dresses exquisitely (out of respect for his father's memory!) and has charming manners. He is immensely wealthy, an owner of splendid mansions and manors, and a powerful, important landholder. Yet he is a man of the strictest Christian virtue, a just, benevolent, and superefficient steward of his estates, a protector of the weak and a friend to the poor. In short, as Richardson describes him in the preface to Grandison, Sir Charles is “a man of religion and virtue; of liveliness and spirit; accomplished and agreeable; happy in himself, and a blessing to others.”³

In the concluding note to Grandison, Richardson admits that “it has been observed by some, that, in general [Sir Charles] approaches too near the faultless character which some critics censure as above nature” (7: 327). The reaction Richardson describes is not uncommon among readers of his novel. “Pictures of perfection,” Jane Austen once wrote, “… make me sick and wicked” (Letters, pp. 486-487, March 23, 1817⁴); and most readers are wicked enough to resent a character who demands so much admiration as Sir Charles does. In addition to being dismayed by Sir Charles' incredible glamor and goodness, one tends to be annoyed by the sycophantic deference with which he is treated by nearly every character in his history. Sir Charles' male friends attempt to emulate his virtues—and admit it on every possible occasion. His female acquaintance worship him as “the best of men,” take his word for law, and all too frequently fall in love with him. His admirers—repeatedly, indeed ad nauseam—entrust their most important affairs to him when they are living, and leave their estates to his management when they die. Thus, Sir Charles, at his sister's request, frees her from an unfortunate engagement; later he arranges a suitable marriage for her. He extricates his uncle from the clutches of an unmanageable mistress and, on the uncle's insistence, provides him with a worthy wife. He assists in bringing about a reconciliation between his friend Mr. Beauchamp and Beauchamp's stepmother. He sees to it that the relatives of Mr. Danby—Mr. Danby having left his estate in Sir Charles' hands—are provided with fortunes, employment, and matrimonial partners, and arranges for the distribution of the remainder of Danby's estate in charity. He is entrusted with the negotiation of a “treaty” between the unfortunate Lady Clementina della Poretta and the tyrannical relatives from whom she flees to England. Indeed, it is a rare moment when Sir Charles is not dispensing advice and assistance to half a dozen of his family and friends simultaneously. “Such a man,” the lovelorn Harriet Byron writes shortly after she has come to visit Sir Charles and Miss Grandison, “cannot, ought not to be engrossed by one family. … Let me enumerate some of his present engagements that we know of.”

The Danby family must have some further portion of his time.

The executorship in the disposal of the 3000 £ in charity, in France as well as in England, will take up a good deal more.

My Lord W——— may be said to be under his tutelage, as to the future happiness of his life.

Miss Jervois's affairs, and the care he has for her person, engage much of his attention.

He is his own steward. …

His sister's match with Lord G——— is one of his cares.

He has services to perform for his friend Beauchamp, with his father and mother-in-law, for the facilitating his coming over.

And the Bologna family in its various branches, and more especially Signor Jeronymo's dangerous state of health, and Signora Clementina's disordered mind—O Lucy!—What leisure has this man to be in love!

(vol. 4, letter 5, pp. 49-50)

Among the most fervent of Sir Charles' aficionados is the heroine of Grandison, Miss Byron. Sir Charles is her oracle; she treasures up his every word, and is embarrassingly grateful when he “condescends” to give her advice. She makes no pretensions to equality with her hero. She asks only that he: “‘Teach me, sir, to be good, to be generous, to be forgiving—like you!—Bid me do what you think proper for me to do'” (vol. 6, letter 24, p. 206). Her relationship with him is like that of an adoring younger sister to an older brother, or that of an infatuated pupil with a favorite teacher: he is, to use her own word, her “monitor,” as much as he is her lover. Harriet is in love with Sir Charles long before she knows that he cares for her; and when, after months of heartburning, she learns that he has decided to marry her, she is overwhelmed with joy and gratitude. “My single heart, methinks,” she writes in her last letter to her grandmother,

is not big enough to contain the gratitude which such a lot demands. Let the over-flowings of your pious joy, my dearest grandmamma, join with my thankfulness, in paying part of the immense debt for

Your undeservedly happy Harriet Grandison.

(vol. 8, letter 62, p. 325)

As noted above, all of this deference, added to Richardson's insistence on Sir Charles' perfection, tends to make the reader react unfavorably toward both Sir Charles and his creator. One is inclined, in spite of Richardson's insistence on his humility, to think of Sir Charles as a stuffily superior, rather supercilious character, rather than as the noble and magnanimous hero that Richardson envisioned, and inclined, too, to tax Richardson as well as some of the characters in his novel with an unduly sycophantic attitude toward his highborn hero. That Jane Austen reacted to Grandison in a similar fashion will become apparent later.

All of the three novels that Fanny Burney published before 1813 deal, as Sir Charles Grandison does, with the relationships between exemplary young authority figures who are wealthy or wellborn or both and heroines who are in some respects their social inferiors. Cecilia, however, is the Burneyan novel most frequently cited as a source for Pride and Prejudice, some critics, indeed, feeling that Jane Austen's novel is simply a realistic rewriting of Cecilia. R. Brimley Johnson, for instance, has referred to the “title and plot, the leading characters and most dramatic scenes of Pride and Prejudice” as “frank appropriations” from Cecilia.⁵

Cecilia is certainly an important source for Pride and Prejudice. In plot and theme it resembles Jane Austen's novel more nearly than any other single work does. It is possible—though by no means certain—that the title of Pride and Prejudice was borrowed from Cecilia.⁶ It is often suggested that the first proposal scene in Pride and Prejudice was influenced to a large extent by the scenes in Cecilia in which Mortimer Delvile states his objections to a marriage with Cecilia, and there are similarities between the scene in which Mrs. Delvile prevails on Cecilia to give Mortimer up and the scene in which Lady Catherine de Bourgh descends on Elizabeth Bennet. There are, however, a number of significant points of resemblance between Pride and Prejudice and novels other than Cecilia. In some respects the situation of Fanny Burney's Evelina is closer to that of Elizabeth Bennet than Cecilia's is. Both Elizabeth and Evelina are relatively poor in addition to being inferior in rank to their heroes, while Cecilia is rich, and both are surrounded by sets of vulgar relatives who embarrass them in the presence of their lovers. Moreover, some specific scenes in Pride and Prejudice are almost certainly based on similar scenes in Evelina. Some others, on the other hand, would seem to have their originals in Sir Charles Grandison. I believe that in her novel Jane Austen is not rewriting Cecilia, but manipulating a character type and a situation made familiar to her audience in various novels by Richardson and Fanny Burney—and in numerous works by their imitators as well. The relationship between Evelina and Pride and Prejudice has never been fully explored; and since it seems in some respects rewarding to compare Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy to Fanny Burney's Lord Orville, I shall rely primarily on Evelina to illustrate Fanny Burney's treatment of the patrician hero.

While all of Fanny Burney's heroes resemble Richardson's patrician hero somewhat, Lord Orville is Sir Charles Grandison writ small. He is “a picture of perfection,” a paragon among men—at least in the eyes of his heroine and his author. Evelina describes him as “one who seemed formed as a pattern for his fellow creatures, as a model of perfection” (p. 280). He is handsome, wellborn, rich, wise. “His conversation,” Evelina gushes after her first encounter with him, “was sensible and spirited; his air and address were open and noble; his manners gentle, attentive, and infinitely engaging; his person is all elegance, and his countenance, the most animated and expressive I have ever seen” (p. 33).

The relationship between Orville and Evelina is much the same as that between Sir Charles Grandison and Harriet Byron. Evelina adores Orville from their first meeting, and she is fully convinced of her own inferiority. “That he should be so much my superior in every way, quite disconcerted me,” she writes after their first dance together (p. 33). She cringes when she learns that he has referred to her as “a poor weak girl” and is “grateful for his attention” even after she believes that he has insulted her with a dishonorable proposal. Orville, like Sir Charles, is regarded as an oracular “monitor” by his heroine, and Evelina seeks, and is delighted to receive, his counsel. “‘There is no young creature, my Lord, who so greatly wants, or so earnestly wishes for, the advice and assistance of her friends, as I do,’” she says to him on one occasion (p. 331), and Orville quickly becomes a substitute for her absent guardian. It is he who arranges an interview with Mr. Macartney for her at Bristol, who persuades the repentant Sir John Belmont to receive her—and who, later on, magnanimously disposes of half of her fortune to provide for Macartney and the onetime Miss Belmont. Like Harriet Byron, Evelina is overcome with gratitude when her hero finally proposes to her. “To be loved by Lord Orville,” she writes, “to be the honoured choice of his noble heart,—my happiness seemed too infinite to be borne, and I wept, even bitterly I wept, from the excess of joy which overpowered me” (p. 383). And just before her marriage she writes to Mr. Villars: “Oh my dearest Sir, the thankfulness of my heart I must pour forth at our meeting … when my noble-minded, my beloved Lord Orville, presents to you the highly-honoured and thrice-happy Evelina” (p. 438).

The relationship between the heroes and heroines of Cecilia and Camilla is similar to that between Orville and Evelina. In both of the later novels a most exemplary hero stoops to marry, and there is doubt as to whether the heroine will be found worthy of his hand. Both Cecilia and Camilla are “in love and in some doubt of a return” during a considerable part of their histories; both are left in suspense to await the approval of their heroes—and that of their heroes' advisors as well. And the reader reacts to all of Fanny Burney's first three novels in much the same way that he reacts to Richardson's “picture of perfection” Sir Charles Grandison, and his sycophant-heroine, Harriet Byron. One is amused and irritated by the relationship between hero and heroine: he longs for an Evelina who will tell Orville that her conversations with Mr. Macartney are her own affair; a Camilla who will tell Edgar Mandlebert to send Dr. Marchmont packing; a Cecilia who will tell the Delvile family what they really are. Such longings were apparently not felt by many novelists of the day, however, for the Burney-Richardson character type and situation were often imitated in the minor literature of the period. In Thomas Hull's The History of Sir William Harrington, for example (1771), the exemplary Lord C———, nobly born, extremely wealthy, and “as perfect as a human being can be” in person, mind, and character, is obviously modeled on Sir Charles Grandison. And Mr. Charlemont, the hero of a novel by Anna Maria Porter entitled The Lake of Killarney (1804), is “a young Apollo,” “the god of his sex,” and the son of a lord. Rose, a dependent in a family of Charlemont's acquaintance, loves him desperately, but is by no means unaware of his vast superiority to her. At one point in the novel, in an episode that seems to have been inspired by the scene in Cecilia in which Mrs. Delvile warns Cecilia to beware of falling in love with Delvile, Rose is cross-examined by an older woman who is a friend of Charlemont's family. “‘If nothing else were wanting to crush presumptuous hopes on my part,’” Rose replies, “‘… the difference in our rank, our birth, our fortune, would place them beyond all doubt. Mr. Charlemont is … a prize, for which all his equals may contend.’”⁷ Similar heroes, often similarly difficult of attainment to admiring heroines, are to be found in numerous other works of Jane Austen's day. The patrician hero, clearly, was a character type that Jane Austen's audience could readily identify.

Jane Austen must have been as much amused by the all-conquering heroes and too humble heroines of Richardson and Fanny Burney and their followers as many later readers have been, for in the juvenile sketch entitled “Jack and Alice” she reduces the patrician hero to absurdity with gusto. Charles Adams, in that sketch, is the most exaggerated “picture of perfection” conceivable. He is a young man “of so dazzling a Beauty that none but Eagles could look him in the Face” (Minor Works, p. 13⁸). On one occasion, indeed, when he attends a masquerade disguised as the sun, the reader is told that “the Beams that darted from his Eyes were like those of that glorious Luminary tho' infinitely superior. So strong were they that no one dared venture within half a mile of them” (Minor Works, p. 13).⁹ (The continual references in “Jack and Alice” to the brilliance of Charles' countenance are probably specific allusions to Sir Charles Grandison: Richardson repeatedly describes Sir Charles in similar language.)¹⁰ But the beauties of Charles Adams' person, striking as they are, are nothing to those of his mind. As he tells us himself:

“… I imagine my Manners & Address to be of the most polished kind; there is a certain elegance, a peculiar sweetness in them that I never saw equalled, & cannot describe—Partiality aside, I am certainly more accomplished in every Language, every Science, every Art and every thing than any other person in Europe. My temper is even, my virtues innumerable, my self unparalelled.”

(Minor Works, p. 25)

The superciliousness and conceit that readers, in spite of Richardson's and Fanny Burney's insistence on their modesty, cannot help attributing to Sir Charles Grandison or Orville or Delvile, becomes the very essence of Charles Adams' being; the kind of praise that Richardson and Fanny Burney heap on their heroes is most liberally bestowed by Charles on himself. And just as Charles himself is a burlesque version of the too perfect Burney-Richardson hero, so he is provided with two heroines who are ten times more inferior, and twenty times more devoted to him, than Evelina and Cecilia and Harriet Byron are to their heroes. Charles is the owner of the “principal estate” in the neighborhood in which the lovely Lucy lives, and Lucy adores him. She is the daughter of a tailor and the niece of an alehouse-keeper, and she is “‘fearful that tho' possessed of Youth, Beauty, Wit & Merit, and tho' the probable Heiress of my Aunts House & business'” Charles may think her “‘deficient in Rank, & in being so, unworthy of his hand'” (Minor Works, p. 21). Screwing up her courage, however, she writes him a “‘very kind letter, offering him with great tenderness my hand & heart,’” but, to her sorrow, receives “‘an angry & peremptory refusal'” from the unapproachable young man (Minor Works, p. 21). Alice Johnson, the titular heroine of the novel, is also infatuated with Charles. Although, like the rest of her family, Alice is “a little addicted to the Bottle & the Dice,” she hopes, after she has inherited a considerable estate, to be found worthy of him. But when Alice's father proposes the match to him, Charles declares:

“… what do you mean by wishing me to marry your Daughter? … Your Daughter Sir, is neither sufficiently beautifull sufficiently amiable, sufficiently witty, nor sufficiently rich for me—. I expect nothing more in my wife than my wife will find in me—Perfection.”

(Minor Works, pp. 25-26)

Fortunately, Alice is able to find consolation in her bottle, and fortunately there is a feminine “picture of perfection”—the outrageously exemplary Lady Williams—in the neighborhood of Pammydiddle for Charles to marry. “Jack and Alice,” however, was not Jane Austen's only attack on the patrician hero. There is a good deal of Charles Adams in her Mr. Darcy.

II

Darcy's actual circumstances are not an exaggeration of those of the patrician hero, as Charles Adams' are. In fact Jane Austen seems at times to be uncritically borrowing the popular Burney-Richardson character type and situation in Pride and Prejudice—altering them, if at all, only by toning them down a bit. Mr. Darcy is not the “picture of perfection” that Sir Charles Grandison is, but he shares many of the advantages of Sir Charles and Lord Orville, including a “fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien … and ten thousand a year” (p. 10). He has a mind that even Elizabeth Bennet, his severest critic, can respect. “His understanding and temper,” she admits when there seems to be little likelihood of their ever marrying, “though unlike her own, would have answered all her wishes … and from his judgment, information, and knowledge of the world, she must have received benefit …” (p. 312). Darcy is not as powerful and important as Sir Charles Grandison, but he is the owner of a large estate and a giver, and withholder, of clerical livings. He marries a woman who, like Evelina, is embarrassed by the inferiority of some of her nearest connections, although even Mrs. Bennet can scarcely approach the supreme vulgarity of a Madame Duval.

But Darcy is a Charles Adams in spirit, if not in circumstances.¹¹ It is his exaggerated conception of the importance of his advantages, his supercilious determination “‘to think well of myself, and meanly of others'” who are not so fortunate that causes him at times to sound very much like a caricature of the Burney-Richardson hero. He may not expect to have to address “an angry & peremptory refusal” to a fawning, lovelorn Elizabeth Bennet; but during Elizabeth's visit at Netherfield he is anxious lest, by devoting so much of his conversation to her, he may have been encouraging her to hope for the honor of his hand. On the eve of her departure from Netherfield, the reader is told:

He wisely resolved to be particularly careful that no sign of admiration should now escape him, nothing that could elevate her with the hope of influencing his felicity; sensible that if such an idea had been suggested, his behavior during the last day must have material weight in confirming or crushing it. Steady to his purpose, he scarcely spoke ten words to her through the whole of Saturday, and though they were at one time left by themselves for half an hour, he adhered most conscientiously to his book, and would not even look at her.

(p. 60)

The idea of a proposal which is humiliating to a heroine may come from Cecilia. But the language of Darcy's first proposal to Elizabeth sounds like something that might have come from Charles Adams' lips, rather than the gallant, ardent language of a Delvile.¹² During Darcy's proposal, the reader is told: “His sense of her inferiority—of its being a degradation—of the family obstacles which judgment had always opposed to inclination, were dwelt on with a warmth which seemed due to the consequence he was wounding, but was very unlikely to recommend his suit” (p. 189). And when Elizabeth rebukes him, he declares himself not to be “‘ashamed of the feelings I related. They were natural and just. Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections? To congratulate myself on the hope of relations, whose condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own?’” (p. 192).

On two occasions, Darcy is specifically a caricature of Fanny Burney's Lord Orville. The scene at the Meryton assembly in which Darcy makes his rude remarks about Elizabeth Bennet is a parody of Lord Orville's unfavorable first impression of Evelina.¹³ In Evelina, shortly after Orville and Evelina have had their first dance together, Miss Mirvan overhears a conversation between Orville and Sir Clement Willoughby. She repeats the conversation to Evelina, much to Evelina's mortification, and the scene is recorded in a letter to Mr. Villars:

… a very gay-looking man [Sir Clement Willoughby, as the reader learns later] stepping hastily up to him, cried, “Why, my Lord, what have you done with your lovely partner?”

“Nothing!” answered Lord Orville, with a smile and a shrug.

“By Jove,” cried the man, “she is the most beautiful creature I ever saw in my life!”

Lord Orville, as well he might, laughed, but answered, “Yes; a pretty modest-looking girl.”

“O my Lord!” cried the madman, “she is an angel!”

“A silent one,” returned he.

“Why ay, my Lord, how stands she as to that? She looks all intelligence and expression.”

“A poor weak girl!” answered Lord Orville, shaking his head.

(p. 39)

In Darcy's remarks about Elizabeth at the Meryton assembly, Orville's gentle mockery becomes supercilious rudeness. Mr. Bingley enters into conversation with Darcy on the merits of the various ladies at the assembly, hoping to persuade his friend to dance. Like Sir Clement Willoughby, Bingley praises the heroine: Elizabeth, he declares, is “‘very pretty, and I dare say, very agreeable'”; and he proposes that Darcy ask her to dance. Darcy replies: “‘She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me; and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men'” (p. 12).

A second ballroom scene in Evelina is also parodied in Pride and Prejudice. At one point in Evelina Sir Clement Willoughby, who is determined to punish the heroine for pretending that Lord Orville is to be her partner in a dance for which Sir Clement wished to engage her, conducts her to Lord Orville and presents him with her hand. Evelina writes:

…—he suddenly seized my hand, saying, “think, my Lord, what must be my reluctance to resign this fair hand to your Lordship!”

In the same instant, Lord Orville took it of him; I coloured violently, and made an effort to recover it. “You do me too much honour, Sir,” cried he, (with an air of gallantry, pressing it to his lips before he let it go) “however, I shall be happy to profit by it, if this lady,” (turning to Mrs. Mirvan) “will permit me to seek for her party.”

To compel him thus to dance, I could not endure, and eagerly called out, “By no means,—not for the world!—I must beg—. …

(pp. 51-52)

Orville, with true politeness, attempts to help Evelina recover from her confusion. Darcy, “all politeness,” as Elizabeth ironically describes him, signifies his willingness to oblige Elizabeth Bennet with a dance when Elizabeth is placed in a similarly embarrassing situation at Sir William Lucas' ball.¹⁴ Sir William and Darcy are conversing. Elizabeth approaches them and Sir William, “struck with the notion of doing a very gallant thing,” calls out to her:

“My dear Miss Eliza, why are you not dancing?—Mr. Darcy, you must allow me to present this young lady to you as a very desirable partner.—You cannot refuse to dance, I am sure, when so much beauty is before you.” And taking her hand, he would have given it to Mr. Darcy, who, though extremely surprised, was not unwilling to receive it, when she instantly drew back, and said with some discomposure to Sir William,

“Indeed, Sir, I have not the least intention of dancing.—I entreat you not to suppose that I moved this way in order to beg for a partner.”

Mr. Darcy with grave propriety requested to be allowed the honour of her hand; but in vain. Elizabeth was determined; nor did Sir William at all shake her purpose by his attempt at persuasion.

“You excel so much in the dance, Miss Eliza, that it is cruel to deny me the happiness of seeing you; and though this gentleman dislikes the amusement in general, he can have no objection, I am sure, to oblige us for one half hour.”

“Mr. Darcy is all politeness,” said Elizabeth, smiling.

(p. 26)

Mr. Darcy is a complex human being rather than a mere vehicle for satire such as Charles Adams. Nevertheless, I think it is likely that Darcy has somewhere in his ancestry a parody-figure similar to the ones in which Jane Austen's juvenilia abound. Such a theory of Darcy's origins is consistent with generally accepted assumptions about the development of Jane Austen's first three novels from prototypes. It is not unreasonable to assume that Pride and Prejudice, as well as Sense and Sensibility, grew, through a process of revision, from an original containing large amounts of satire of literature to a differently oriented work. Moreover, the theory helps to account for a feature of Pride and Prejudice that has been noted by a number of readers: the inconsistency between the Darcy of the first ballroom scene and the man whom Elizabeth marries at the end of the novel. It is often said that the transition between the conceited and arrogant young man of the book's early chapters and the polite gentleman whom Elizabeth loves and admires is too great and too abrupt to be completely credible.¹⁵ Several critics have defended Jane Austen, showing among other things that some of Darcy's conversation can be interpreted in various ways, and that the reader's reactions to him are often conditioned by the fact that he is seen largely through the eyes of the prejudiced Elizabeth.¹⁶ But even these theories do not account for all the things in Pride and Prejudice that trouble readers. Darcy's remark about Elizabeth at the Meryton assembly, for instance, remains almost unbelievably boorish, and there is no reason to believe that Elizabeth has misunderstood it.¹⁷ His fears lest he should be encouraging Elizabeth to fall in love with him during the visit at Netherfield, the extraordinarily haughty language of his first proposal, and other such things remain stumbling blocks to the reader's acceptance of the later Darcy. The three things just mentioned could have originated in pardoy of the patrician hero, as has been shown. If one postulates an origin in parody for Darcy and assumes that, like many characters in Jane Austen's novels, he was subjected to a refining process, these and perhaps others of the early, exaggerated displays of rudeness and conceit can be accounted for, if not excused, as traces of the original purely parodic figure that Jane Austen was not able to manage with complete success.

Regardless of its origins, Pride and Prejudice, even as it stands, is in many respects a subtly humorous reflection on Richardson and Fanny Burney and their patrician heroes. In addition to Darcy's role as a comically treated Orville or Sir Charles Grandison, Lady Catherine de Bourgh is a reminiscence of Mrs. Delvile in Cecilia or Dr. Marchmont in Camilla, a humorous version of the kindly but mistaken friend who frowns upon the patrician hero's intended bride. And the scene in which she attempts to persuade Elizabeth not to marry Darcy is an exaggeration of what is potentially ridiculous in similar situations in Cecilia—not, as R. Brimley Johnson and others have suggested, a refined imitation. Mrs. Delvile is Mortimer's mother and exercises, according to Cecilia, an almost maternal prerogative upon Cecilia herself. Cecilia is grateful—exaggeratedly, unnecessarily grateful, many readers feel—to Mrs. Delvile for that lady's interest in her and for her kindness in providing her with a home during part of her minority. Mrs. Delvile has as much right as anyone could have to interfere in the love affair between Mortimer and Cecilia. And when she persuades Cecilia not to marry Mortimer, although what she says is prideful and humiliating to Cecilia, her language, at least, is kind and respectful. “‘Acquit me, I beg,’” she says to Cecilia at one point,

“of any intentional insolence, and imagine not that in speaking highly of my own family, I mean to depreciate yours: on the contrary, I know it to be respectable, I know, too, that were it the lowest in the kingdom, the first might envy it that it gave birth to such a daughter.”

And a little later she declares:

“You were just, indeed, the woman he had least chance to resist, you were precisely the character to seize his very soul. To a softness the most fatally alluring, you join a dignity which rescues from their own contempt even the most humble of your admirers. You seem born to have all the world wish your exaltation, and no part of it murmur at your superiority. Were any obstacle but this insuperable one in the way, should nobles, nay should princes offer their daughters to my election, I would reject without murmuring the most magnificent proposals, and take in triumph to my heart my son's nobler choice!”¹⁸

Lady Catherine is Darcy's aunt, and she hardly knows Elizabeth. Her attempt to prevent Elizabeth's and Darcy's marriage, her arrogant language and the manner in which she taxes Elizabeth with ingratitude, on the strength of having invited her to Rosings several times in the past, are a parody of the situation in Cecilia. Again, several scholars have remarked that Mr. Collins, with his moralizing and his flattery of his patroness and her family, parodies the didactic and obsequious clergymen found in Richardson's and Fanny Burney's works.¹⁹ Darcy's relationship with Mr. Bingley is humorously reminiscent of Sir Charles Grandison and the friends who continually depend on him for advice and assistance. Richardson's supercompetent hero was notable for his propensity to manage the lives and loves of his friends. Darcy, to the reader's and Elizabeth Bennet's amusement, domineers over the spineless Bingley, arranging and rearranging Bingley's love life, and at one point officiously separating him from the amiable and disinterested young woman whom Bingley truly loves. Darcy is provided with a mock Evelina or Harriet Byron in Miss Bingley, who is all too obviously willing to play the role of the patrician hero's female adorer in order to become the mistress of Pemberley. “‘Now be sincere’”; Elizabeth says to Darcy toward the end of the novel, “‘did you admire me for my impertinence? …’”

“The fact is, that you were sick of civility, of deference, of officious attention. You were disgusted with the women who were always speaking and looking, and thinking for your approbation alone. I roused, and interested you, because I was so unlike them … and in your heart, you thoroughly despised the persons who so assiduously courted you.”

(p. 380)

And it is not difficult to see whom she has chiefly in mind. The flattery Evelina and Harriet Byron unconsciously heap upon their heroes, their willingness to take their young men's pronouncements as law, become Miss Bingley's determined and obvious toadeating: when she is not praising Darcy's library or his sister, she is defending his views on the subject of feminine accomplishments or inviting his comments on the company at Sir William Lucas' ball.

Most important, while Miss Bingley is an exaggeration and distortion of qualities in Evelina or Harriet Byron, Elizabeth Bennet plays the role of an anti-Evelina in the novel's satiric pattern.²⁰ Throughout most of the novel she acts in a manner directly contrary to the way in which one would expect a heroine of Richardson's or Fanny Burney's to behave.²¹ While the would-be Harriet Byron, Miss Bingley, courts Darcy in the traditional manner, Elizabeth makes him the butt of her wit and the prime target of her attacks on snobbery and class consciousness. “‘My behavior to you,’” she says to him toward the end of the novel, “‘was at least always bordering on the uncivil, and I never spoke to you without rather wishing to give you pain than not'” (p. 380). While he worries lest he should have encouraged her to hope for the honor of his hand, she is regarding him as “only the man who made himself agreeable no where, and who had not thought her handsome enough to dance with” (p. 23). Instead of being overwhelmed with gratitude when he proposes to her, she prefaces her refusal by saying: “‘… if I could feel gratitude, I would now thank you. But I cannot—I have never desired your good opinion, and you have certainly bestowed it most unwillingly’” (p. 190). And she goes on to tax him with “arrogance,” “conceit,” and a “selfish disdain for the feelings of others” (p. 193), and to accuse him of being snobbish and overbearing in his interference with Jane and Bingley and of abusing the power he holds over Wickham. Even when she and Darcy are reconciled she laughs, though only to herself, at his casual assumption of the right to arrange and rearrange his friend Bingley's love affairs. When Darcy described the manner in which he sent Bingley back to Jane Bennet with his blessing, “Elizabeth could not help smiling at his easy manner of directing his friend. … [She] longed to observe that Mr. Bingley had been a most delightful friend; so easily guided that his worth was invaluable; but she checked herself” (p. 371). Again, Elizabeth answers Lady Catherine de Bourgh's demand that she renounce Darcy in a manner calculated to warm the hearts of readers irritated by Cecilia Beverly's deference to Mrs. Delvile's pride and prejudice:

“Allow me to say, Lady Catherine, that the arguments with which you have supported this extraordinary application, have been as frivolous as the application was ill-judged. You have widely mistaken my character, if you think I can be worked on by such persuasions as these. How far your nephew might approve of your interference in his affairs, I cannot tell; but you have certainly no right to concern yourself in mine. I must beg, therefore, to be importuned no farther on the subject.”

(p. 357)

“I am … resolved to act in that manner, which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to you, or to any person so wholly unconnected with me. …

“Neither duty, nor honour, nor gratitude … have any possible claim on me, in the present instance. No principle of either, would be violated by my marriage with Mr. Darcy. And with regard to the resentment of his family, or the indignation of the world, if the former were excited by his marrying me, it would not give me one moment's concern—and the world in general would have too much sense to join in the scorn.”

(p. 358)²²

In earlier stages of the novel's growth, probably Lady Catherine, Mr. Bingley, and Miss Bingley were more exaggerated and distorted versions of their prototypes in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature than they are at present. Elizabeth Bennet was merely an antitype to the Burney-Richardson sycophantic heroine; Darcy, a caricature of the patrician hero. Later, although she retained an element of ironic imitation, Jane Austen refined her characters, transforming them from mere vehicles for satire into human beings interesting in their own right as well as because of their relationship to their literary prototypes.²³ And, as the remainder of this chapter implies, she also changed her attitude toward her patrician hero and her anti-Evelina, and accordingly altered her treatment of Darcy drastically and made Elizabeth, as well as Darcy, a target for her irony. Theories about the development of the novel aside, however, the fact remains that Pride and Prejudice in its final form is not simply, as critics have suggested, an imitation of the work of Jane Austen's fellow novelists. It is, in part at least, an attack on Richardson and Fanny Burney and their patrician heroes.

III

Jane Austen thoroughly humbles her patrician hero. Darcy is subjected to a series of what Mrs. Bennet would call “set-downs” at the hands of the anti-Evelina, Elizabeth Bennet; and through his love for Elizabeth, and the shock he receives from her behavior, he comes to see himself as he really is and to repent of his pomposity and pride. Toward the end of the novel Darcy is forced to admit to Elizabeth:

“I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle. As a child I was taught what was right, but I was not taught to correct my temper. I was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit … my parents … allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing, to care for none beyond my own family circle, to think meanly of all the rest of the world, to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with my own. Such I was, from eight to eight and twenty; and such I might still have been but for you, dearest, loveliest Elizabeth! What do I not owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You shewed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.”

(p. 369)

But Darcy's humiliation and attainment of self-knowledge do not constitute the whole story of Pride and Prejudice: Jane Austen does not allow her anti-Evelina to rout her patrician hero completely.

In discussing Sense and Sensibility it was noted that an ironic reversal of attitude toward the traditional deluded “sensibility” heroine and her sensible counterpart takes place in that novel. Something a bit similar happens in Pride and Prejudice, in Jane Austen's treatment of Darcy and his relationship to Elizabeth Bennet. Once Darcy has been humbled, Jane Austen turns her irony on Elizabeth. She shows that Elizabeth, in her resentment of Darcy's conscious superiority, has exaggerated his faults and failed to see that there is much in him that is good. Elizabeth proves to have been blind and prejudiced in her views on the relationship between Darcy and Wickham, too willing to accept Wickham's stories because they so nicely confirmed her own feelings about Darcy. When she reads the letter that follows Darcy's first proposal, she is forced to admit that her resentment has led her to be foolish and unjust. After reading the letter,

She grew absolutely ashamed of herself.—Of neither Darcy nor Wickham could she think, without feeling that she had been blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd.

“How despicably have I acted!” she cried. … “Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly.—Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment, I never knew myself.”

(p. 208)

Again, until Darcy's letter shocks her into self-knowledge, Elizabeth has seen Darcy's interference in the affair between Jane and Bingley only as an instance of coldhearted snobbery on Darcy's part. Reading Darcy's letter, and considering Jane's disposition, Elizabeth is forced to admit that Darcy's view of the affair, his belief that Jane was little more than a complacent pawn in her mother's matrimonial game, is not unjustified. Darcy's interference, Elizabeth must admit, was motivated not merely by snobbery, but by concern for his guileless friend's welfare as well. With her eyes thus opened, Elizabeth comes to see later in the novel that Darcy's position and fortune, and his pride in them, can be forces for good as well as sources of snobbery and authoritarianism. Seeing Pemberley, and hearing his housekeeper's praise of Darcy's conduct as a brother and a landlord, she learns that Darcy's position is a trust and a responsibility, and that his not unjustifiable self-respect leads to a code of conduct worthy of admiration. And in his action in the Lydia-Wickham affair she is provided with an impressive and gratifying instance of his power to do good and his sense of responsibility. At the end of the novel Jane Austen's anti-Evelina is defending her patrician hero. “‘I love him,’” Elizabeth says of Darcy to the astounded Mr. Bennet. “‘Indeed, he has no improper pride'” (p. 376).

As noted earlier, a pattern of “art-nature” symbolism in Pride and Prejudice served to add depth of suggestion, for Jane Austen's early nineteenth-century audience, to the novel's love plot. At the beginning of the story Darcy is the representative of a bias toward “art,” and an excessive class pride, and Elizabeth is the exponent of “nature” and aggressive individualism. In the course of the novel their mental and temperamental propensities are modified somewhat, and their marriage at the conclusion of the story is a union between a reasonable degree of “art” and a desirable degree of “nature.” Jane Austen's treatment of the figure here called the patrician hero serves a similar purpose and follows a similar pattern. One cannot, of course, assume that Jane Austen thought of her Mr. Darcy as an “authority figure,” in today's sense of the term, any more than one can assume that she considered Pride and Prejudice a treatise on the eighteenth-century “art-nature” antithesis. But she did expect the novel-reading audience for which she wrote to respond to her work on the basis of their impressions of the insufferable Sir Charles Grandisons and Lord Orvilles, the sycophantic Evelinas and Harriet Byrons, of noveldom. At the beginning of Pride and Prejudice Darcy is a pompous Burney-Richardson aristocrat, with many of the most disagreeable attributes of his literary progenitors as well as a representative of “art” and excessive class pride; Elizabeth is a determined anti-Evelina as well as a symbol for “nature” and aggressive individualism. The marriage at the end of the story joins a properly humbled patrician hero and an anti-Evelina who has also undergone a partial reformation.

In view of what has just been said, it is interesting to note that, paralleling Elizabeth's attainment of self-knowledge, there is a marked tendency on Jane Austen's part to cease laughing at the works of Richardson and Fanny Burney and even to imitate them rather obviously in the later chapters of Pride and Prejudice. At Pemberley, for instance, Darcy is allowed to behave toward Elizabeth with a marked tact and gallantry that is nonhumorously reminiscent of Sir Charles Grandison or Lord Orville. In the manner of Richardson's and Fanny Burney's heroes he takes over his heroine's affairs, rescuing Elizabeth and her family from imminent disgrace and providing for the erring Lydia.²⁴ Moreover, Jane Austen's audience might well have recognized some decidedly nonsatiric echoes of Sir Charles Grandison in the scenes in which Elizabeth visits Pemberley. Sir Charles, as one might expect, has excellent taste in landscaping. He “pretends not to level hills, or to force and distort nature; but to help it, as he finds it, without letting art be seen in his works, where he can possibly avoid it” (vol. 3, letter 23, p. 246). On his country estate he has a

large and convenient house, … situated in a spacious park; which has several fine avenues leading to it.

On the north side of the park flows a winding stream, that may well be called a river, abounding with trout and other fish; the current quickened by a noble cascade, which tumbles down its foaming waters from a rock, which is continued to some extent, in a ledge of rock-work, rudely disposed.

The park is remarkable for its prospects, lawns, and rich-appearing clumps of trees of large growth.

(vol. 7, letter 6, p. 30)

The Pemberley grounds are kept up with a similar regard for nature and timber, and there is even a similarly managed, artificially swelled trout stream. Pemberley House, the reader is told, was

situated on the opposite side of a valley, into which the road with some abruptness wound. It was a large, handsome, stone building, standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of high woody hills;—and in front, a stream of some natural importance was swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance. Its banks were neither formal, nor falsely adorned. Elizabeth was delighted. She had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste.

(p. 245)

Was Jane Austen thinking of Harriet Byron's tour of Sir Charles Grandison's property when she described Elizabeth Bennet's visit to Pemberley? Both Elizabeth and Harriet are conducted around magnificent but tastefully appointed houses and both talk to elderly, respectable housekeepers who praise their masters' kindness to servants and tenants. “‘Don't your ladyship see,’” Sir Charles' housekeeper asks Harriet Byron, “‘how all his servants love him as they attend him at table? … Indeed, madam, we all adore him; and have prayed morning, noon, and night, for his coming hither, and settling among us'” (vol. 7, letter 9, p. 52). Darcy's housekeeper laments the fact that he is not at Pemberley “so much as I could wish” (p. 248), and declares that “‘he is the best landlord, and the best master … that ever lived. Not like the wild young men now-a-days, who think of nothing but themselves. There is not one of his tenants or servants but what will give him a good name'” (p. 249). Harriet and Elizabeth are both conducted around noble picture galleries, and both view pictures of their lovers with admiration during their tours.²⁵

As Darcy becomes a modified but genuine Sir Charles Grandison, so does Elizabeth cease to resemble an aggressive anti-Evelina or Harriet Byron. She becomes more and more impressed with her patrician hero, more and more attracted to his many good qualities. Indeed, as she stands in the gallery at Pemberley, there is even a trace of Evelina-like gratitude in her thoughts, and she feels honored by the love of such a man as Darcy:

As a brother, a landlord, a master, she considered how many people's happiness were in his guardianship!—How much of pleasure or pain it was in his power to bestow!—how much of good or evil must be done by him! Every idea that had been brought forward by the housekeeper was favourable to his character, and as she stood before the canvas, on which he was represented, and fixed his eyes upon herself, she thought of his regard with a deeper sentiment of gratitude than it had ever raised before; she remembered its warmth, and softened its impropriety of expression.

(pp. 250-251)

Pride and Prejudice is a story about two complex, sensitive and often blindly wrongheaded “intricate characters” and their progress toward a better understanding of one another, the world, and themselves. The drama of Elizabeth's and Darcy's conflict and ultimate harmony is played out in the context of a symbolism based on the antithesis between “art” and “nature,” in the comprehensive eighteenth-century sense of those terms. It is also referred at many points to the fiction of Jane Austen's day—particularly to her fellow novelists' handling of the figure called here the patrician hero. It may be that Jane Austen's first response to the patrician hero was purely satiric and that later she refined and complicated her treatment of him; this would help to account for some of the flaws in Darcy's character to which most of her readers object. At any rate, Pride and Prejudice is something more than a much-improved imitation of the novels Jane Austen knew. It is a work in which she tumbles an eighteenth-century authority figure from the pedestal on which Richardson and Fanny Burney had placed him—and, with a gesture typical of both her vision of life and her artistic technique, then stoops to retrieve him from the dust.²⁶

Notes

1. The most detailed study of Pride and Prejudice in terms of the “art-nature” dichotomy is Samuel Kliger's “Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice in the Eighteenth-Century Mode,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 16 (1947): 357-370. To note only a few more instances of similar interpretations, Dorothy Van Ghent, in The English Novel, (New York: Reinhart, 1953) p. 100, states that the novel deals with “the difficult and delicate reconciliation of the sensitively developed individual with the terms of his social existence”; and David Daiches, in the introduction to the Modern Library edition of Pride and Prejudice (New York: Random House, 1950), calls the conflict between Elizabeth and Darcy an “adjustment between the claims of personal and social life.”

2. Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy is sometimes compared to Richardson's patrician “villain-hero,” Mr. B———. E. E. Duncan-Jones, in “Proposals of Marriage in Pamela and Pride and Prejudice,” Notes and Queries, 202 (1957): 76, has suggested that the proposal scene in Pride and Prejudice is a reminiscence of Mr. B———'s first honorable proposal to Pamela. More general resemblances in situation and character types between Pamela and Jane Austen's novel are discussed in Henrietta Ten Harmsel's “The Villain-Hero in Pamela and Pride and Prejudice,” in College English, 23 (1961): 104-108, and in the chapter on Pride and Prejudice in Miss Ten Harmsel's A Study in Fictional Conventions. While it may be profitable to compare Pamela and Pride and Prejudice, it seems more rewarding to compare Darcy to heroes modeled on Sir Charles Grandison, for reasons to be made apparent later.

3. Sir Charles Grandison, in The Novels of Samuel Richardson (London: Chapman & Hall, 1902), 14: x. All references will be to this edition.

4. Jane Austen's Letters (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), p. 300 (February 4, 1813). All references to Jane Austen's letters will be to this edition.

5. The quotation is from Johnson's introduction to Sense and Sensibility in The Works of Jane Austen (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1950), p. v. The relationship between Cecilia and Pride and Prejudice is more fully discussed in Johnson's Jane Austen, pp. 124-127, and in his Jane Austen: Her Life, Her Work, Her Family, and Her Critics, (New York: Haskell House, 1974), pp. 137-139.

6. Cecilia is not necessarily the source for the title of Pride and Prejudice, since the terms “pride” and “prejudice” were frequently used in conjunction in Jane Austen's day. R. W. Chapman's notes to the Oxford edition of Pride and Prejudice and numerous articles in the Times Literary Supplement and Notes and Queries testify to the popularity of the expression. I have myself located versions of the phrase within the Austen family circle, in the sermons of Jane Austen's cousin Edward Cooper. (See my “Pride and Prejudice and Edward Cooper's Sermons,” Notes and Queries, 211 [1966]: 182.) And W. H. Welpley, in “Pride and Prejudice,” Notes and Queries, 196 (1951): 93, remarks that the expression is used in Sir Charles Grandison. See also above note 11 to the introduction.

7. Anna Maria Porter, The Lake of Killarney (London, 1804), vol. 1, chap. 4, p. 219. Jane Austen mentions this novel in a letter of October 24, 1808 (Letters, pp. 58-59).

8. The Novels of Jane Austen (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), vol. 3: Mansfield Park, p. 459. All subsequent references to Jane Austen's fiction will be to the five volumes of this edition and to the subsequent The Works of Jane Austen (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), vol. 6: Minor Works.

9. The masquerade at which Charles shines is probably a humorous reminiscence of a similar scene in Cecilia, as I have pointed out in “Fanny Burney's Cecilia and Jane Austen's ‘Jack and Alice,’” English Language Notes, 3 (1965): 40-42.

10. As E. E. Duncan-Jones points out in “Notes on Jane Austen,” Notes and Queries, 196 (1951): 14-16. Numbers of heroes in the minor fiction of the period, however, among them Lord C——— in The History of Sir William Harrington and Mr. Charlemont in The Lake of Killarney, are similarly described.

11. Compare the opinion of F. W. Bradbrook (Jane Austen and Her Predecessors, Cambridge University Press, 1966, pp. 96-97) regarding Jane Austen's treatment of the Burney-Richardson hero. Bradbrook feels that Jane Austen “accepts Fanny Burney's conception of the hero” although he does suggest that she “deflates” Darcy somewhat.

12. Bradbrook (Jane Austen and Her Predecessors, pp. 127-132) compares the first proposal scene to one in Sir Egerton Brydges' Mary de Clifford, and suggests other parallels between Brydges' work and Jane Austen's.

13. In “A Critical Theory of Jane Austen's Writings,” pt. 1, Scrutiny, 10 (1941): 61-87, Q. D. Leavis recognizes the similarity between the two scenes.

14. Of course, as Reuben Brower, in The Fields of Light (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), pp. 168-169, points out, the reader sees this scene largely through the eyes of the prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet. Darcy is actually happy to dance with Elizabeth, although his manner of expressing himself is not as gallant as it might be.

15. See, for example, the comments on Darcy in Mary Lascelles' Jane Austen and Her Art (Clarendon Press, 1939), pp. 22 and 162, and Marvin Mudrick's complaints about the change in Darcy's character in his Irony as Defense and Discovery (Princeton University Press, 1952), pp. 117-119.

16. See the chapters on Pride and Prejudice in Brower's The Fields of Light (Oxford University Press, 1951), pp. 164-181, and in Howard S. Babb's The Fabric of Dialogue (Ohio State University Press, 1962), pp. 115-118, and Charles J. McCann's “Setting and Character in Pride and Prejudice,” Nineteenth Century Fiction, 19 (1964): 65-75.

17. Compare, however, Philip Drew's “A Significant Incident in Pride and Prejudice,” Nineteenth Century Fiction, 13 (1958): 356-368, in which Darcy's asperity toward the opposite sex at the assembly is explained as the result of temporary chagrin engendered by his sister's affair with Wickham.

18. Fanny Burney, Cecilia (London, 1893), vol. 3, bk. 8, chap. 3, p. 22, and chap. 4, p. 37.

19. For fuller discussion of this point see Alan D. McKillop, “Critical Realism in Northanger Abbey,” in From Jane Austen to Joseph Conrad: Essays in Honor of James T. Hillhouse, eds. Robert C. Rathburn and Martin Steinmann, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958), p. 37; B. C. Southam's “Jane Austen and Clarissa,” Notes and Queries, 208 (1963): 191-192; and Henrietta Ten Harmsel's A Study in Fictional Conventions (Mouton, 1964), pp. 83-84. For another aspect of Collins' literary background, see J. M. S. Tompkins' The Popular Novel in England, 1770-1800 (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), p. 132.

20. Q. D. Leavis (“Critical Theory,” pt. 1) adopts a view of Elizabeth's origins that is somewhat similar to my own, holding that much of Pride and Prejudice was originally a satire on Cecilia and that Elizabeth is an “anti-Cecilia.” She feels, however, that Darcy is simply a refined imitation of Mortimer Delvile, “Delvile with the minimum of inside necessary to make plausible his conduct”—an opinion with which, of course, I disagree; I believe, too, Elizabeth is an antitype to Harriet Byron, Evelina, and a number of other heroines as well as to Cecilia, and not simply a vehicle for satire of one particular novel.

21. According to Henrietta Ten Harmsel, in the chapter on Pride and Prejudice in her A Study in Fictional Conventions, Elizabeth is an antitype to conventional heroines in some ways other than the ones I am about to mention. She is a forceful, vigorous character, where the conventional heroine is passive. Where the traditional heroine is outstandingly beautiful and accomplished, Elizabeth is only “tolerably” handsome, and far from proficient in the feminine “accomplishments” of the period. The typical heroine of the Burney-Richardson tradition is a moral paragon (it would seem that Fanny Burney's Camilla is a notable exception to this rule), whereas Elizabeth's fallibility is stressed. Miss Ten Harmsel also feels that Elizabeth's originality is emphasized by contrast with Jane Bennet, who is a heroine of the conventional stamp.

22. Compare Ten Harmsel, A Study in Fictional Conventions, pp. 90-91. Miss Ten Harmsel notes the similarity between Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Mrs. Delvile, but feels that there is a more marked similarity between Lady Catherine's encounter with Elizabeth Bennet and the scene in Pamela where Lady Davers abuses Pamela for having captivated Mr. B—.

23. Another view of the novel's origins and development is found in B. C. Southam's Jane Austen's Literary Manuscripts (Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 59-62, where it is suggested that Pride and Prejudice was originally a satire, in epistolary form, on the theme of “first impressions” that was so prevalent in the literature of Jane Austen's day.

24. In the chapter on Pride and Prejudice in Marvin Mudrick's Irony as Defense and Discovery, Darcy's resemblance to conventional heroes in the latter part of the novel is interpreted as one of its failings.

25. The fact that the episodes in Grandison just mentioned had been imitated in the minor literature of the period strengthens my belief that Jane Austen's borrowings are purposeful. In Thomas Hull's The History of Sir William Harrington, for example, similar scenes occur when Lord C—'s bride reaches her new habitation. See Harrington (London, 1772), vol. 3, letter 52, pp. 1-7. Compare the suggestion of F. W. Bradbrook (Jane Austen and Her Predecessors, pp. 58-59) that the descriptions of Pemberley may have been influenced by passages in William Gilpin's Observations on the Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and Westmorland.

26. Jane Austen, of course, uses the patrician hero elsewhere. Henry Tilney, wiser and wealthier than his heroine, and adored by her almost from the moment they meet, is a more nearly “straight” Burney-Richardson hero. In a later chapter it will be noted that Edmund Bertram, mentor and eventual lover of Fanny Price, receives a treatment somewhat similar to Darcy's.