Mr. Collins, to be sure, was neither sensible nor agreeable; his society was irksome, and his attachment to her must be imaginary. But still he would be her husband. Without thinking highly either of men or matrimony, marriage had always been her object; it was the only provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want. This preservative she had now obtained; and at the age of twenty-seven, without having ever been handsome, she felt all the good luck of it.

What manner of degradation and subjugation could lead someone to feel lucky for securing a husband like Mr Collins? Nevertheless, Charlotte is unswervingly loyal to her new husband. Elizabeth can’t help looking at her for signs of discontentment, but sees very little.

[Elizabeth] looked with wonder at her friend that she could have so cheerful an air with such a companion. When Mr. Collins said anything of which his wife might reasonably be ashamed, which certainly was not unseldom, she involuntarily turned her eye on Charlotte. Once or twice she could discern a faint blush; but in general Charlotte wisely did not hear.

Charlotte and Elizabeth have a giggle over the ridiculous Mr Collins in the 1980 adaptation

To me, this just makes it all the more horrible. She can’t complain about him to her friends, nor tweet nor blog of her troubles. Rather, she must express gratitude to her husband and of course his patroness, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and avoid giving any signs of her discontentment. What she does say, for example about encouraging Mr Collins to spend time in his garden, is in a kind of code.

Charlotte appears 'cheerful' and 'content' at Hunsford in the 1995 BBC and 2005 movie adaptations

This all has the potential to be very dark, but in the major adaptations the filmmakers have generally tried to keep it fairly light. In the 1980 adaptation, Charlotte and Elizabeth even share a giggle over the former’s new husband. Extra little comedic scenes with Collins are added to lighten the mood, when it would surely have been more interesting to explore the reality of such a life. It is, after all, a future that Elizabeth only narrowly avoided through her own strength of will. In my view, the 1995 and 2005 adaptations both do the same to an extent, with the 1995 series coming closest to recreating the tone of the book.

Jane is understandably sickened by the creepy Mr Collins in Lost in Austen

Marriage to Mr Collins was, as critic Robert M. Polhemus put it, ‘a kind of socially respectable prostitution in which Charlotte acquiesces.’ Her plight is just one example of how the main story – so ‘light and bright and sparkling’ – nevertheless flirts with many darker themes. It’s interesting that, of all the dramatizations, it’s Lost in Austen that presents life with Mr Collins in the darkest and most uncompromising manner. They do this by transforming Collins into an almost unrecognizable middle-aged slimely, fetishistic letch, which lessens some of the impact.  In the book, so much is left unsaid between her and Elizabeth that it only adds to the sense of gloom.

Darcy

The ladies of Meryton eagerly await the arrival of eligible young men

In Pride and Prejudice, Mrs Bennet’s pursuit of advantageous marriages for her daughters is obsessive, unrelenting and often counter-productive. Mr. Bennet considers his wife’s schemes ridiculous, while Elizabeth has, of course, decided that she will marry only for love. Elizabeth, like the first-time reader of Pride and Prejudice, is shocked and saddened when Charlotte accepts Mr. Collins’ proposal:

[Elizabeth] had always felt that Charlotte’s opinion of matrimony was not exactly like her own, but she had not supposed it to be possible that, when called into action, she would have sacrificed every better feeling to worldly advantage. Charlotte the wife of Mr. Collins was a most humiliating picture! And to the pang of a friend disgracing herself and sunk in her esteem, was added the distressing conviction that it was impossible for that friend to be tolerably happy in the lot she had chosen.

Charlotte’s decision seems so extreme to modern readers of Pride and Prejudice, and Mrs Bennet’s obsession with marriage so irrational, but what was life like for unmarried ladies in the early 19th Century? What was the alternative to marrying an idiot? Did Mrs. Bennet – or even Charlotte Lucas – have a point?

Spinsterhood in Jane Austen’s Day

In 1787, 26 years before Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was published, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote about the degradations of life for so-called spinsters. In her ‘Thoughts on the Education of Daughters’ she explained:

Few are the modes of earning a subsistence, and those are very humiliating. Perhaps to be an humble companion to some rich old cousin, or what is still worse, to live with strangers, who are so intolerably tyrannical, that none of their relations can bear to live with them, though they should even expect a fortune in reversion. It is impossible to enumerate the many hours of anguish such a person must spend. Above the servants, yet considered by them a spy, and ever reminded of her inferiority when in conversation with the superiors. If she cannot condescend to mean flattery, she has not a chance of being a favorite; and should any of the visitors take notice of her, and she for a moment forget her subordinate state, she is sure to be reminded of it.

Painfully sensible of unkindness, she is alive to every thing, and many sarcasms reach her, which were perhaps directed another way. She is alone, shut out from equality and confidence, and the concealed anxiety impairs her constitution; for she must wear a cheerful face, or be dismissed. The being dependent on the caprice of a fellow-creature, though certainly very necessary in this state of discipline, is yet a very bitter corrective, which we would fain shrink from.

The other options for unmarried ladies, like the Bennet girls of Pride and Prejudice, that Mary Wollstonecraft spells out are becoming a teacher (who ‘is only a kind of upper servant, who has more work than the menial ones’) or becoming a governess. This, she says, is equally disagreeable. Furthermore, ‘The few trades which are left, are now gradually falling into the hands of men, and certainly they are not very respectable.’

Mrs Bennet gasps at Mr. Bennet's indifference

Does this alter your opinion of any of the characters in Pride and Prejudice, for example Mr or Mrs. Bennet, Charlotte Lucas or even Elizabeth? To my mind, it certainly makes Mrs. Bennet’s motivations clearer, even if we mock the ridiculous methods she employs in Pride and Prejudice. Also, Elizabeth’s rejection of Mr. Collins – and certainly her rejection of Mr. Darcy’s first proposal – appear even bolder than before. Perhaps Elizabeth Bennet was a rebel after all?

Wishing you all felicity in marriage,

Fitzwilliam Darcy