Patricia Meyer Spacks

The professor of English says that Austen had the skill of reporting the most tedious possible speech and making you enjoy it. It’s not only Miss Bates nattering on and on in Emma, but the dinner-table scene where Emma’s father and her sister are talking about their apothecaries. ‘It is just the essence of boredom but she somehow manages to make it hilariously funny. It’s pure genius.’

Pride and Prejudice is the only one – at the end of Pride and Prejudice the author really thinks that her central characters are going to live happily ever after. It’s a wonderful ending. Everybody knows that famous first sentence: ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.’ There are many, many things that can be said about that sentence, but the view of marriage that it implies is what I might call the commercial view of marriage. This is the view that Mrs Bennet has, and that Charlotte has – that a woman has her attractiveness, variously defined, and the man has his money, and the woman exchanges her attractiveness for his money. But the last sentence of Pride and Prejudice is about the various people who come to visit at Pemberley, and how they are welcomed. It implies a view of marriage as the centre of a community, of marriage being a community and making a larger community. It’s a much larger and more romantic but also, in my view, a more moral view of marriage. It’s a view of marriage as a centre expanding outwards that is totally absent at the beginning of the book. It doesn’t recur in any of the other novels. At the end of Persuasion, which I was talking about as a love story, there is a happy marriage. But there is a reminder of the quick alarms of a sailor’s life that are before Anne, because she is married to a sailor. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with marrying a sailor, or the particular sailor she’s married to, but it is a reminder that she isn’t going to be nothing but happy. But at the end of Pride and Prejudice you can believe that they aren’t going to be anything but happy.
Patricia Meyer Spacks