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Originally Posted by issybird
Which it is! It’s a black mark against Elizabeth that she can’t understand Charlotte’s motivation.
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Absolutely. Elizabeth is flawed, but that is part of what makes her an interesting character. Jane is the most perfect person of the sisters, and the most boring
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Originally Posted by Hitch
(I also wonder, female heroism aside, if she really WOULD HAVE turned down Darcy. I mean, come on!!! It sounds good in P&P and all that, righteous anger, realizing that he wasn't all wrong, that her horrible family was weighing her down, etc.--and her denial drives him to acts of compassion and all that--but still. Would she really have declined, all things considered? Hard to believe so.)
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You mean, if she were a real person, not a character in a book? I'm sure you're right, and most women would have accepted a proposal in that situation. But since the book became popular at the time, I have to believe that Elizabeth's behaviour wasn't seen as outrageously unrealistic by readers then.
(In the book she definitively
does decline. He proposes, she answers literally "not if you were the last man on earth", and that's that. At the time she has no reason to believe he will ever renew his proposal, and if lady Charlotte hadn't meddled, he never would have.)
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And if I hadn't read Austen, at a time in my life when I needed to, I wonder if I ever would have appreciated women's lack of choices, in that period? I doubt it. Those books, starting with P&P, really drove it home for me and made me grateful that I was a girl in the 60's and early 70's, when AT LEAST we had some rights and were actively campaigning for more/full rights.
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Same here. (Well, I was a girl in the 70s and early 80s, but I recognize those feelings.)