Bennet and Darcy

More than two hundred years have passed since the publication of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, a novel that was never associated with the author’s name during her lifetime; for all, Austen was, and remained, the writer of Sense and Sensibility.

Yet there is no novelist, English but not only, who does not refer in any way to this book. Elisabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy are part of the British imagination, with continual references in films and successful texts — Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks talk about it in You’ve got mail, exchanging tender mail, Bridget Jones and Marc, coincidentally, Darcy, are an awkward and clumsy version — to the countless Holliwoodian and Bolliwoodian versions that have been drawn, to end with the recent reinterpretation in a zombie key, this book is in the Anglo-Saxon DNA.

Completed in 1797, after a pause between the first and second versions that lasted for fourteen years, and published in 1813, not long before the author’s death, the novel straddles the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, between Enlightenment and Romanticism.

Austen’s life was short and withdrawn, Praz, in his “History of English Literature”, makes a portrait of her which is, in our opinion, one of the ugliest pages of literary criticism ever written. He outlines a repressed woman, never kissed by anyone, whose greatest emotion is that of dancing. Luckily it is redeemed by comparing it to Vermeer, for the attention to detail, for the portraits of the environment and characters indoors and outdoors, in the living rooms and lawns.

“We admire in Austen,” he tells us, “the neat drafting of the notary, the punctuality of the actions and reactions, like the extreme limit of the anti-romantic, beyond which there is no longer art but a mere logical discourse.”

What is certain is that what Austen described in her novels — few, to be honest, but all milestones in the history of Anglo-Saxon literature (Emma, ​​Sense and Sensibility, Northranger Abbey, Persuasion) — is, in fact, a restricted ecosystem, three or four families in a rural area, far from the glittering capital, dedicated to seasonal dances and reciprocal visits. Conversation pieces, defines them Praz. Politics remain outside, historical events are far away, the clang of the battles does not arrive in the stone residences, in the quiet English countryside, in the pastures and in the woods where you stroll around, where the behaviors and vices of a certain bourgeoisie of the time are put under the magnifying glass and distorted, ridiculed.

Nothing to do with the novels of Smollett, Richardson, De Foe, nothing picaresque in Jane Austen, rather witty, salacious, thoughtful. Polite conversations, much of that witticism that was still in the wake of the Pope and Sterne, very sensible, reasonable, proper, which derives from the Enlightenment nonfiction. But if the century of Enlightenment fades, the romantic impetus is already looming — certainly not declined here in Sturm und Drang or in the turmoil of the Brontian passions — and Austen, in spite of herself, suffers, and the feeling transpires, from a gesture, a word, a suffused sorrow, a torment of the heart.

The prejudice is that of Elisabeth, second daughter of the Bennet family, intelligent and rebellious like her father, whose only flaw is being influenced by first impressions. It is no coincidence that the original title of the novel was First Impressions.

Mr Darcy already anticipates the romantic hero, as dark as Jane Eyre’s Rochester, beautiful, rich and intriguing as it is in the dream of every female from prehistory to today. His is the pride of the title, which leads him to fight against his own feeling for Elisabeth, to repress it, not considering her family at the height of his own.

The pre-romantic spirit belongs to them, while the eighteenth-century aura belongs to the crowd of characters deformed by the critical eye, similar to figures from the Goldonian comedy or the theater of Moliere.

It is precisely in this, in our opinion, in the contrast between “reason and feeling”, the charm that still makes Pride and prejudice one of the most widely read novels in the world.