Erin Blakemore - The Heroine's Bookshelf - Life Lessons, from Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder

Preoccupied, but energized, she threw herself into her work, completing her first two novels (Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice) before realizing that Tom wasn’t coming back. She never found out why her Irish love fell out of contact, but she suspected it had something to do with her poverty. Discouraged from his relationship with Jane by family members, he suddenly announced his engagement to a wealthy woman. Her marriage prospects dashed, Jane got down to the business of being a spinster. She took to wearing dowdy caps and retired from society, committed only to herself and her family, relegated to eternal dependence on her successful brothers, and caught somewhere between marriage market and matronhood.

So six years later, Harris Bigg-Wither’s proposal seemed like her out. Jane was a welcome addition to the Bigg-Wither circle at Manydown Park. She accepted the invitation to visit gladly, all too eager to escape her family’s home in loathsome Bath and spend time with Alethea and Catherine, Harris’s sisters and her intimate friends, in Steventon. And her happy holiday hinted at a permanent vacation: just a week after her arrival, she impulsively accepted Harris’s proposal, celebrating her engagement along with her future in-laws. It was only later that night, alone in her bedchamber, that she began to have her doubts.

The decision should have been simple. Her fiancé was eligible, well connected; his hand would mean the difference between financial security and poor-relative status. Marrying Harris wouldn’t just make Jane a wife: it would make her a wealthy woman, free of uncomfortable family obligations and the specter of poverty that had haunted her entire adult life.

Still, something about Harris just didn’t sit well with Jane. He was nearly six years her junior, an awkward, hulking young man with a distasteful stutter and a notorious temper. And though she had known him since childhood, nothing about his physical stature or gauche behavior had managed to endear him to her. Harris had family and fortune to recommend him, but was Jane’s friendship with his sisters enough to justify a loveless marriage?

Jane knew this was probably her last chance at a life as the wife of a respectable man. But it was an opportunity she could not take in good conscience: the next morning she broke off her engagement in a mixture of disgrace, relief, and resolve.

No diaries or correspondence recording Jane’s thoughts on her choice survive, but it’s no coincidence that most of her novels deal with the difficulty and rarity of mutual love. Later in life, Jane wrote to her niece, advising her to marry for love and love alone. “Having written so much on one side of the question,” she wrote, “I shall turn round & entreat you not to commit yourself farther, & not to think of accepting him unless you really do like him. Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection.”

Jane’s choice to end her embarrassing engagement was the first foray into the battle for self-definition she would fight for the rest of her life. An outsider by choice, Jane developed a keen sense of observation and sarcasm. She was drawn to parody and self-deprecation, absorbed by the absurd. And what better place to hone her talent than on the drawing-room scandals and small-town romances that surrounded her?

Though she wrote the book that would become Pride and Prejudice eight years before she cemented her single status forever, you wouldn’t know it to read it. Jane must have foreseen her own heroine’s journey toward self-reliance when she took to her pen in 1796, for her most famous book contains not one but two rejected suitors—and a heroine whose sense of self is rivaled only by her creator’s.

Modern women aren’t called upon to attach themselves to the first eligible man who shows his face, but that won’t keep them from seeing themselves in the book’s heroine. Elizabeth Bennet is vital, naughty, saucy, smart. And like her creator, she’s not about to sacrifice herself on the altar of a loveless life. Even in the company of other memorable Austen heroines like worldly Emma Woodhouse or wicked Mary Crawford, Lizzy more than holds her own. Her specialty? Poking holes in the ridiculous. Her cross to bear? A marriage-obsessed family with no money to support its five daughters.

Lizzy’s world is as uptight and constrained as a Regency-era dance, but this heroine isn’t exactly resigned to her fate. She’s happy to cooperate with the social niceties, but when it comes to major life decisions, she knows herself far too well to be taken in by mere words, formalities, or expectations. And nowhere is Lizzy’s raucous, flawed, and decided sense of self more clear or more enticing than in the moments in which she does exactly the opposite of what she is expected to do. When called upon to sit languid in some living room, Lizzy heads out for a bit of exercise in the muddy fields that surround Meryton. When presented with Wickham, a man of few credentials and many charms, she lets her true feelings show. Provoked by her wild sisters, she remains indifferent and ineffably calm. And when proposed to by the wrong man, she refuses to play along.

By all unimaginative calculations, bumbling Mr. Collins is the perfect match for Lizzy. After all, he holds the keys to the Bennet property, has a doting patroness, and is more than willing to share his estate in exchange for a fetching wife. But by a heroine’s standards, Mr. Collins is just not going to happen. He’s unattractive, pedantic, stifling… everything a self-respecting heroine must avoid. To her mother’s chagrin, Lizzy runs the other way, roundly rejecting Collins and refusing to place money before love. When her friend Charlotte Lucas accepts Collins instead, Lizzy gives vent to her true feelings:

“To oblige you, I would try to believe almost anything, but no one else could be benefited by such a belief as this; for were I persuaded that Charlotte had any regard for him, I should only think worse of her understanding than I now do of her heart. My dear Jane, Mr. Collins is a conceited, pompous, narrow-minded, silly man; you know he is, as well as I do; and you must feel, as well as I do, that the woman who marries him cannot have a proper way of thinking.”

Lizzie’s sense of self doesn’t just point her in the right direction, it prevents her from going down a dangerous path. We’re left feeling sorry for Charlotte, but we can’t exactly nod our heads in approval as Lizzie’s friend thumbs her nose at a heroine’s promise. By marrying a man so far beneath her, Charlotte has relegated herself forever to the annals of supporting characters. For any real heroine, Collins is the equivalent of literary kryptonite.

Okay, so it’s easy, even expected, for Lizzy to turn down Mr. Collins. But what about when the man making an offer is proud, conceited Fitzwilliam Darcy? Though Darcy has been introduced as diffident and self-absorbed, we can’t help but root for him a little. After all, preoccupied Lizzy has allowed her preconceived notions to mask his growing interest. Too absorbed in her dislike of him to acknowledge their complex flirtation, Lizzy doesn’t see Darcy for who he is. We don’t have that problem: though Jane doesn’t favor us with a full description, it’s hard to picture him as anything but brutally hot, staggeringly wealthy, and intelligent enough to really appreciate Lizzy despite his serious misgivings about her family.

It is these doubts, honestly but uncouthly stated, that trigger one of literature’s most withering marital rejections. Lizzy’s floored when Darcy suddenly asks for her hand, but we’ve been better prepared. Still, we cringe right along with her as Darcy lays down a proposal so backhanded it comes right around to slap him in the face. Her vanity insulted and any chance of romantic communion ground into dust under Darcy’s riding boots, Lizzy thinks fast. And self prevails: