Page:Jane Austen (Sarah Fanny Malden 1889).djvu/93

 Prejudice that both the hero and heroine are uncommon in every respect, and yet thoroughly lifelike. A shade more of gaiety would have made Elizabeth a flippant, amusing, common-place girl, just as a degree less intellect would have made Darcy as intolerable as Mrs. Bennet thought him. But Jane Austen had shaken off all tendency to exaggeration by the time she brought out Pride and Prejudice, and henceforth her characters are kept well within bounds.

We see in Darcy the man who has had everything to spoil him, yet is really superior of being spoilt. He is handsome, wealthy, well-born, and of powerful intellect, and the adulation and submission he has always had from everyone about him wearies him into receiving such homage with cold indifference and apparent haughtiness, yet under this repellent exterior is a warm, generous, and tender heart, which is capable of great sacrifices for anyone he really loves. Elizabeth Bennet is exactly the right wife for him, for, with a nature as capable of tenderness and constancy as his, she has all the simplicity, brightness, ans playfulness which are wanting in him; yet from the day that she and Mr. Darcy first meet they take a mutual aversion to each other, and long after he has succumbed, and fallen in love with her, she is unconscious of his feelings, and continues to dislike him. Elizabeth lives in Hertfordshire with a clever satirical father (whose pet she is), an intensely vulgar silly mother, and four sisters, of whom only one is her equal and companion: Jane and Elizabeth Bennet are as Cassadra and Jane Austen were to one another. The Bennets, though well off, are not rich, and the daughters will be very poor, as their father's estate is entailed to male heirs, and, at his death, goes to a