Tumblr crosspost (9 July 2020)

[anghraine]

Thinking of P&P again and one of my favourite evolutions (and I think one that’s semi-overlooked) is this:

Ch 10:

Elizabeth could not help observing, as she turned over some music books that lay on the instrument, how frequently Mr Darcy’s eyes were fixed on her. She hardly knew how to suppose that she could be an object of admiration to so great a man; and yet that he should look at her because he disliked her was still more strange.

Ch 56:

“If you were sensible of your own good, you would not wish to quit the sphere in which you have been brought up.”

“In marrying your nephew I should not consider myself as quitting that sphere. He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman’s daughter: so far we are equal.”

The latter is, I think, seen most often as a simple statement of sociological fact, even if it leaves out a lot of pragmatic details (and therefore an appropriate answer to Lady Catherine’s reliance on rigid hierarchies). But it is not what Elizabeth herself thought at the beginning of the novel and her relationship with Darcy, and I think her evolution from “too important to look at me” to “technically, we’re equals, so fuck off” is … something. An interesting something!