«Pride and Prejudice», Jane AustenA novel about balls. “Letter” appears three times as often

Why it is a thriller

Start with the money. Nearly all Mr Bennet has is an estate of two thousand a year, and only a man can inherit it. The Bennets have no son and five daughters. When their father dies, the house goes to a cousin, Mr Collins, who, as Mr Bennet himself puts it, may turn them all out as soon as he pleases.

So “everybody gets married” is not about romance here, it is about a roof over your head. And Austen builds the plot like a proper thriller: a charming liar, a secret from the past, a girl who disappears, a hunt through London with a bribe in it, and a secret rescuer.

Only the characters learn all of this by post. The word “letter” appears 132 times in the book, “ball” 44. The novel gives fifteen letters in their own words, and three of them turn the plot over.

“They are generally long”

In chapter ten Darcy sits in the drawing-room writing to his sister, while Miss Bingley hovers beside him. Does he always write such long letters? “They are generally long,” says Darcy. And when she praises his speed, he corrects her: he writes rather slowly.

Twenty-four chapters later he proposes to Elizabeth. He begins with how ardently he admires and loves her, and goes on, at length and with warmth, about how far beneath him her family is. She refuses him and throws two charges at him: he separated her sister Jane from Bingley, and he ruined Wickham.

The next morning he finds her in the park and hands her a letter dated eight o’clock: two sheets written quite through in a very close hand, and the envelope full as well. It runs to 2,608 words, longer than the whole chapter in which he proposed. He could not say it. He could write it.

A liar with good manners

Mr Wickham turns up in chapter fifteen, and in chapter sixteen, in a single evening, he tells Elizabeth how Darcy denied him the living that Darcy’s father left him. She believes every word. So does the reader: Austen serves him up so that it is hard not to. The first version of the novel was called First Impressions, and this is exactly what that means.

Elizabeth learns the truth from Darcy’s letter. Wickham talked Darcy’s fifteen-year-old sister into an elopement, and her fortune is thirty thousand pounds. Later he courts Miss King, who has just come into ten thousand. In the end he runs off with Lydia, to whom, as Jane writes, their father can give nothing.

The letter that went astray

The crisis comes by post as well. Elizabeth is touring Derbyshire with her aunt and uncle when two letters from Jane arrive at once: one had been missent, because Jane wrote the direction remarkably ill, and it was written five days ago. Lydia has run off with Wickham. Elizabeth darts for the door, and at that very moment Darcy walks in.

Lydia herself left a note for a friend: “You will laugh when you know where I am gone.” Mr Collins writes Mr Bennet a letter of comfort: the death of his daughter would have been a blessing in comparison. And the chase that everything hangs on happens off stage.

We learn of it from Mrs Gardiner’s letter, 1,797 words long. Darcy left Derbyshire one day after them to hunt the pair down, spent two or three days getting their address out of his sister’s former governess and, Mrs Gardiner suspects, did not manage it without a bribe. He paid Wickham’s debts, more than a thousand pounds, and settled another thousand on Lydia. Even the street in the letter is a blank.

Charlotte, who did not wait

The most clear-headed woman in the book is Elizabeth’s friend Charlotte Lucas. She is twenty-seven. Mr Collins proposes to Elizabeth, is refused, and manages two offers of marriage within three days: the second is to Charlotte, and she accepts.

Austen does not laugh at her. Charlotte thinks highly of neither men nor matrimony, but marriage is the only honourable provision for a well-educated young woman of small fortune. Back in chapter six she says that happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance. And in her new house she sits with her guests in a room at the back, though the dining-parlour is nicer. Elizabeth wonders at it, then sees why: that way Mr Collins stays in his own room.

Verdict

Read it. Not because it is a classic about balls, but because it is a story of two people who were wrong about each other, and both admit it. Elizabeth does when she finishes the letter. Darcy does after her refusal, and near the end he tells her so himself.

It is also very funny: Mr Bennet and his library, Mr Collins and his letters, Lady Catherine and her advice. One point off for the chase we only hear about in Mrs Gardiner’s letter. Though who am I to complain about long texts.