Pride and Prejudice and …

… the complete lack of any character development.

I recently listened to the audiobook of P&P (as my sister and mother affectionately call it). I had found an audiobook collection of Penguin Classics in a charity shop and decided to use it to make my commute more productive filling in the gaps in my classic book reading.

Crime and Punishment; excellent. Mayor of Casterbridge; solid. Jane Eyre; great. Pride and Prejudice; dull.

Key problems:

The only likeable character who is not a one-dimensional cliche is Mr Bennet.

All the female characters are the worst cliches and stereotypes imaginable. Jane is pretty. Elizabeth is less pretty but witty (see below). Kitty and Lydia are silly. Mary is bookish. Mrs Bennet is ridiculous. Miss Bingly is scheming and two-faced. Lady De Bourgh is proud and aloof. Charlotte Lucas wants a husband, any husband.
The men aren’t much better.
Mr Bennet at least has a little humor, a little wit and even listens to Elizabeth giving us a hope of some feminist ideas, dashed. The story should have been about his relationship with his favourite daughter, this could have explored and developed these characters and might have garnered some interesting insights. However, they have 2 real conversations in the entire book which gives us no believable foundation for why at the end ‘Mr. Bennet missed his second daughter exceedingly;’.

The only character who has any arc, any significant development is Darcy.

When Darcy initially proposes to Elizabeth she rebukes him in no uncertain terms and sends him off with his tail between his legs (again we have a hope of feminist direction which is not fulfilled). Darcy is prompted to rethink how he has acted and reform his manner. His reforms and efforts to improve win over Lizzie and it’s all smiles and rainbows in the happy ending. Elizabeth, you might say also undergoes a change but not in character or values. The only thing which changes is her opinion of Darcy, that opinion is still within the same structures and viewpoint as she started the novel with. Every single other person ends the book the same as they start it except for one thing in most cases; marriage. Some got married.

(In three lines in the epilogue Kitty, we are told, makes huge improvements; becomes respectable)

The biggest drama of the book is dull.

Lydia runs off with Wickham. Yep, obviously. They now must be made to marry. Shock, horror. The families reputation is in tatters. The scandal! Except it isn’t. It’s no different to before. They were lowly (by comparison) and embarrassing before, they still are. It might have had more impact when it was written but to the story it has none. The objections that all the snobs had before are confirmed but fundamentally unchanged.

We are told Elizabeth’s traits of character but see little evidence.

Elizabeth is witty and intelligent, that’s her thing. We see a few witty retorts but we do from many characters, this seems to be more Austin than Miss Bennet. What do we see instead? Stubborn, foolish, and in the end as susceptible to protocol and tradition as the rest of them.

But it’s a product of its time. Nope. 7 years prior to P&P’s publication Fanny Burney’s Camilla does a more interesting job of exploring manners and the propriety of the day and within 30 years the Brontës are blowing Austin out of the water with better female characters, better storylines and actual drama and depth. Austen herself complained that the novel lacked ‘shade’ and Charlotte Bronte thought it a disappointment describing it fabulously; “a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but … no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck”, quite.

What we need to admit is that Pride and Prejudice is a half rate cheap romance novel lacking in romance. It is stuffy, predictable and cliched. It should be confined to the transience afforded to all the curly-writing-covered books one finds for 50p in every charity shop and reads while refreshing one’s blue rinse.

Darren Ellis is a teacher, creative and owner of Rotten Poetry. He reads classic literature, fantasy, sci-fi, literary fiction and history.