Growing old with Jane Austen means new perspectives on characters we once loved to hate

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On a first read of Pride and Prejudice at perhaps age 12, girls like me probably find themselves relating profoundly to Elizabeth “Lizzy” Bennet. She’s a reader, she loves her sister (well, at least one of them), she’s a daddy’s girl, she likes to run around outside and isn’t afraid of mud, and she stands up to the rich proud man who sees fit to insult her and her entire family for no other reason than he’s rich and in his eyes, they are ill-behaved.

Relatable! Lizzy’s also just turned 20, which helps and perhaps felt at the time like a glimpse into glowing, romantic future in which you, Reader Lizzy, would live in a house with your own fishing ponds and pin money, whatever that was, with a man who liked you enough to take criticism to heart and be better. Also, you’d get to live away from your “rather silly” sisters and that mother of yours, with her flutters and wailings and her pains in her side. And after all, your sardonic father, who openly favors you above the other four of his children and his wife, can always come visit.

The character in Pride and Prejudice that we, at a young and tender age, probably find most mystifying is Charlotte Lucas, in her late twenties and Lizzy’s best friend. Charlotte commits the double crime of deliberately pursuing Mr. Collins, the awful cousin whose marital overtures Lizzy declines, and then actually marrying the man. For those of us having our first dawnings about what it might mean to marry someone and have sex with them — well, the idea of engaging in that with Mr. Collins, just so you don’t have to remain unmarried, seems appalling.

But 27 is a long way from 20 … or 12. A growing awareness of what real-life women in Charlotte’s position faced — one that Jane Austen and her older sister Cassandra must have felt acutely — casts Charlotte in a different light. It’s not that Austen didn’t try to shine that light, and it may be that her contemporary readers understood and even sympathized with Charlotte’s motivations. The fate that Jane and Cassandra Austen eventually met was the one that awaited Charlotte if she did not marry — living with an aging parent under at-best modest means, no recourse to earning money (except, you know, by writing some of the most finely plotted, eternally relatable novels in the English language), reliant on generosity from others for any of the comforts of younger days, and facing years of dependence and constraint.

When Austen writes that Charlotte’s life with Mr. Collins will center on “her home and her housekeeping, her parish and her poultry, and all their dependent concerns,” she writes knowledgeably and with deliberately repetitive possessive pronouns about a life that people like her were expected to seek: genteel but relatively poor, respectable, well-educated, and married to a clergyman. Entering into that married state could be expected to offer some autonomy, with oversight of her parish, her poultry, her home, her housekeeping, with concerns that depend on her — none of which would be hers had she stayed as an unmarried daughter with aging parents.

In Emma, Austen later examines what superlative autonomy in that era meant for a woman, bestowing on the title character all the independence a woman of that time could imagine. Emma explicitly spells that out, saying she’d never really considered marrying because she treasured the maximum independence she already had. In Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte gained some portion of that independence by marrying, and did it essentially on her well-considered terms.

She’s almost thirty, with, as the books would say, “no prospects.” She herself tells Lizzy that she is “not romantic” and asks “only a comfortable home.” She is extremely practical, likely made even more so by spending a decade “in society,” which existed solely as a conduit for transferring oneself from almost no independence to attaining some control over a hearth and home. With age and an understanding of the relative constraints of a dependent daughter compared with the wife of a clergyman with his own parish, I can see so clearly now — and even support — the reasons someone like Charlotte would choose as she did.

Austen herself, when given the opportunity, made a different choice when she was about the same age as Charlotte: she accepted then rejected an offer from a man who aside from having substantial wherewithal, was not a regrettable loss.

Perhaps Austen felt as I still do about such Mr. Collinses of the world. I will never be old enough to fully withstand a sense of disgust at the idea of relations with a Mr. Collins, but Charlotte somehow managed, given mention of the “young olive-branch” at the end of the book. The book offers no discussion of the childbirth-related risk Charlotte takes in becoming pregnant and how that stacks up against autonomy gained by marriage. Austen doesn’t spend much time in her novels on childbirth-related mortality among women, despite its looming presence in her own life, so we must hope that it all worked out OK for Mrs. Collins.

Mrs. Bennet is the character whom, at our young and tender age, we don’t love to hate as much as we love to disdain, quite as much as her husband does. She’s silly and grasping, materialist and, in one terrible episode, desperate to marry Lizzy off to Mr. Collins (before Charlotte carries him away). Mr. Collins sounds like a complete nightmare — fawning, pompous, boorish, and condescending. Yet he somehow pales in comparison to what we later learn about his patron, the insufferable Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

Lizzy, as everyone knows, declines to marry within her own family and instead chooses to marry within Lady Catherine’s, who is Mr. Darcy’s aunt. Lizzy no doubt perceived that the risk of condescension from that quarter was nothing alongside the benefits of marital bliss with Mr. Darcy.

So we disdain Mrs. Bennet for her grasping selfishness and loudly proclaimed afflictions, her lack of insight about the social harm she inflicts on her daughters through gauche public behavior and a too-free hand allowing the same in the younger sisters. We absorb from Mr. Darcy that this “want of propriety” is to be deplored, and if anyone is Queen of Wanting Propriety, it’s Mrs. Bennet.

Yet Mrs. Bennet is a woman who at least five times endured pregnancy and childbirth in the 18th century, with all of the related, considerable risks contemporary readers would have understood. Each time, as Austen writes, she reasonably yearned for a boy, but not because Mrs. Bennet was any more sexist than anyone else. Twisted legalities of inheritance meant that without a boy, the very house where she was bearing and bringing up these children would be taken from her one day.

That’s a lot to carry around for 20-something years. Given what we know about the fate of the Charlottes of that world, it’s no wonder that the business of Mrs. Bennet’s life was getting her daughters married. What other business could she have, what else could occupy her mind, beyond the incessant fear that someday, her sardonic, irresponsible, disrespectful husband would drop dead and … they would have nowhere to live and nothing to live on?

I didn’t contemplate such realities when I was a teen reading Pride and Prejudice. Mrs. Bennet seemed like a shallow, self-involved materialist willing to sell her second daughter to a clearly unsuitable man — just to keep a roof over everyone’s heads. That man is, of course, also the fellow who will inherit that house when Mr. Bennet finally goes to his reward, having failed to husband his wealth sufficiently to ensure protection of his widow and unmarried daughters.

Imagine that you’ve spent 20-plus years, day in and day out, knowing that if fate took away the man at your table spending a fortune on books, you and the other five women sitting there would have to turn everything except your own modest marriage portion over to a distant cousin. Then imagine that as fate would have it, that cousin seems to set things aright by offering marriage to your daughter. The roof over the head is preserved and all of those years of anxiety melted away in a single marital overture. It must have seemed unbelievable neat, tidy, and providential.

And then imagine that one of those very people you’ve spent years angsting over just … says no. That’s it. All prospect of security for you and these five people you love, swept away almost as soon as it materialized tantalizingly before you. I don’t know about you, but all of that, from beginning to end, would give me pains in my head and pangs in my side and a lot of other things that might make me a bit difficult to live with. Things that might make me a bit unable to filter my anxiety in public about the fate of my five otherwise completely unprotected children.

I didn’t see and sympathize with Mrs. Bennet this way until I experienced existential anxiety about my children and their fates, worrying about what I could do to set them on their feet and find a path to a comfortable and pleasant life for them. And I did that under circumstances nowhere near as dire as they would have been had Lizzy and Jane not so fortuitously married wealthy men with sufficient wherewithal to support sisters, mother, or anyone else who needed it once Mr. Bennet went to that great personal library in the sky.

I am a science journalist and author of The Tailored Brain: From Ketamine, to Keto, to Companionship, A User’s Guide to Feeling Better and Thinking Smarter (“fantastic and timely,” Salon) and of Phallacy: Life Lessons from the Animal Penis (which Pulitzer winner Ed Yong calls “a hilarious tour through a menagerie of dicks, and a ferocious guide to not being a dick yourself”). Find me on Twitter @ejwillingham.