How To Be A Heroine

by Samantha Ellis

  Mr Darcy doesn’t just insult Lizzy and refuse to dance with her (even though there is a shortage of men at the ball!). He does worse. He separates Mr Bingley from Jane. And then Lizzy finds out he stole fun, dashing Mr Wickham’s inheritance, which means Mr Wickham is now too poor to marry Lizzy even though they get on so well. I thought Mr Darcy was rude, pompous and a villain. But I still thought Lizzy was brave to refuse his proposal. Because he’s also fabulously rich, and this is her second proposal, and she’s not getting any younger. Yet she still says no. It’s magnificent. Then, I sneered at Lizzy’s friend Charlotte who jumped into marriage with slimy Mr Collins. I thought Charlotte was a weak, wrong-headed fool, but her acquiescence depressed me too. Would I really have to marry whoever asked me? And if not, would I end up like Jane, pining for a man who had vanished? Or would I get bitter like Lizzy, sniping that ‘Stupid men are the only ones worth knowing, after all’?

  I was so relieved when it all came right. Yes, Lydia gets a raw deal when Mr Wickham (not so fun and dashing after all) seduces her into an elopement. But Jane gets Mr Bingley, Lizzy gets Mr Darcy, their younger sisters start to blossom, and Mr and Mrs Bennet agree – possibly for the first time ever – that this is all good news.

  Lizzy gave me hope that I could find a husband my family liked as much as I did. The crucial thing was not to give in, like Charlotte, and marry any old man. And not to be blinded by charm like Lydia; Austen makes it clear that their marriage is unhappy. I didn’t want to be as passive as Jane, who only ends up with Mr Bingley because Mr Darcy engineers it. But if I could be like Lizzy, if I could stay strong, hold my nerve, say no to anyone I didn’t like, maybe I could find my own Mr Darcy, square my parents’ expectations with my own and make my own kind of marriage.

  Ideally I wanted someone just like Mr Darcy. I’m ashamed to admit that I had started reading books not just for the heroines I wanted to be, but for the heroes I wanted to be with. Bumbling Mr Bingley didn’t appeal at all, but Mr Darcy did.

  It wasn’t his ‘fine, tall person’ that captured my heart, nor his ‘handsome features’. It was his candour. I’d started to think that being a woman was about deceit – you straightened your curls, you wore clothes that made you look thinner, you used blusher to define your cheekbones, you never, ever told a boy you liked him, you played games. But at the same time, my friends and I wanted to be true to ourselves, not like the girls we called ‘plastics’, who fake-laughed and talked behind our backs and wore eyeliner to school. So when Mr Darcy told Lizzy ‘We neither of us perform to strangers’, I underlined it so hard the pen went through the page. I longed for someone I could be honest with, who understood the real me. And I thought Lizzy’s judgement on Pemberley (‘She had never seen a place . . . where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste’) said a lot about its owner too. Mr Darcy isn’t trying to be anything he’s not. And neither is Lizzy. And that’s why they work.

  I didn’t know yet who the real me was, so I wanted someone who could help me find out. And Mr Darcy really does this for Lizzy. I shivered when I read the chapter where Lizzy realises she’s been wrong about him, that she has been blinded by prejudice into being cruel. ‘Till this moment,’ she says, ‘I never knew myself.’ I wanted to learn what she learns: how to unflinchingly dissect her own behaviour, question her judgements and strive to do better – and to do it without being a goody-goody. Lizzy learns, but she doesn’t become sanctimonious about it. And if Mr Darcy helps her overcome her prejudice, she helps him right back, getting him to confront his pride. I loved the idea of a marriage of equals.

  Mr Darcy had other, more minor, attractions. As he falls for Lizzy, he starts thinking she’s pretty. His love makes her beautiful. He’s a good friend too. He wants the best for Mr Bingley, and when he realises he’s got it wrong, he rushes to correct it. He’s willing to learn – Gilbert Blythe seemed to know everything all along, not to have a journey of his own, but Mr Darcy really changes. When Lizzy rejects him, he shows what kind of man he is by the way he responds. He isn’t sceptical and angry and rude like Mr Collins. He takes Lizzy’s criticisms on board and tries hard to be nicer to her, which is amazingly unresentful, as she’s just rejected him. He also saves her family’s reputation; rejection doesn’t make him bitter. And he doesn’t stop loving Lizzy because she’s said no to him. He still cares about her and wants to help her. He is doing his best to change into the kind of man she might want, but he isn’t hoping for a reward for saving Lydia’s reputation; he’s doing it because it’s the right thing to do. And he’s so good in a crisis! When Lizzy tells him Lydia has run away he says how sorry he is then he heads straight for London and quickly sorts things out with the minimum of fuss. That’s a hero.

  The best thing about Mr Darcy was that he said his ideal woman had to have done ‘extensive reading’. Reading might spoil my eyes, as my grandmother warned me it would, but Mr Darcy showed it wouldn’t stop me finding a husband. A gorgeous, intelligent husband, in fact, because real men liked bookish girls. It said so in Pride and Prejudice.

  But there were perils to loving Mr Darcy. I wish I could tell my twelve-year-old self that not all arrogant men are secretly lovely; some are just arrogant. I had a crush on the coolest boy at Hebrew school. He smouldered (as far as a twelve-year-old could), he was funny, and universally adored. Painfully shy and clumsy, I didn’t stand a chance. We danced twice. And once he gave me his jacket to hold. It was a baseball jacket, like the boys wore in Grease. I still remember how warm and puffy it felt, and tracing the appliquéd letter with my finger, feeling proud to have been singled out. Later I went to his bar mitzvah – by then, I was taller than him, and he had to stand on an apple crate to reach the bimah, but I fancied him so much that I found this touching. At the party I was sitting at a table full of girls. And he’d kissed them all! Every last one. All I’d been allowed to do was hold his jacket. My heart was grazed.

  Lizzy gets over being rejected by Mr Wickham by seeking out fresh air and big landscapes; ‘What are young men to rocks and mountains?’ she asks. What indeed. But this wasn’t an option for me. My family weren’t big on the outdoors. We kept the windows shut. Our thermostat was set to Baghdad-hot. So I mostly stayed in my room, playing Strawberry Switchblade’s ‘Since Yesterday’ over and over, singing along to the world-weary chorus about how life’s joys are past. Then I realised Lizzy doesn’t just cope by climbing mountains; she also uses her wit.

  If I’d been in Lizzy’s place, hearing Mr Darcy say I wasn’t pretty enough to dance with, I would have crumpled. But Lizzy turns it into a funny story to tell her friends, venting her outrage by ridiculing Mr Darcy. Lizzy’s wit is her survival strategy. So much so that her aunt says, when Jane’s heart is broken, ‘It had better have happened to you, Lizzy; you would have laughed yourself out of it sooner.’

  Lizzy’s laughter isn’t mindless. Lydia can barely write her elopement letter because she’s in such hysterics, but Lizzy’s sense of humour never makes her too dizzy to think straight. She’s as particular about her wit as Anne Shirley is about her imagination. She tells Mr Darcy firmly that she is no cruel satirist: ‘I hope I never ridicule what is wise and good. Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies, do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.’ When I first read Pride and Prejudice, I was more like Mr Darcy than like Lizzy: I was achingly earnest.

  But I didn’t want to be. At secondary school, I’d made new friends, including Emma, who is not unlike Lizzy. Emma’s father is a Syrian Muslim, and her mother’s family are Austrian Jews, but she wore her cultural difference lightly. It didn’t restrict her, or define her. She seemed to do whatever she wanted. I was amazed when she dyed her hair (all by herself, without asking permission), anxious when it went pink (not as bad as Anne Shirley’s green, maybe, but still!) and in awe of the way she styled it out. She seemed so free. And so unworried. She gave me perspective. I started to see that there was life beyond the goldfish bowl of my community. And then as
now, like the best best friends, she never just automatically agrees with me. If I need her to hate someone, she does get stuck in but if she thinks I’m wrong, she’ll say so. (Hence, among other things, this book.) Our friendship was cemented, one lunchtime, when we were eating our sandwiches (ham for her, cheese for me) and I told her about my hair catching fire. Emma said that it was nothing more sinister than bad luck. I could flout convention again and my hair probably wouldn’t catch fire. She even pointed out that the product required to straighten my hair may have been a contributing factor. ‘Hairspray’s flammable,’ she said. It made me laugh. Not just because it was funny but because it was true. Maybe I didn’t have to worry so much any more. And maybe I would be able to do what I wanted.

  Lizzy does the same for Mr Darcy. He has been serious for so long that his friends don’t dare to tease him. When Lizzy hears this, she takes it as a challenge. ‘Mr Darcy is not to be laughed at!’ she exclaims, pretending to be shocked. In fact, she turns him into a figure of fun. She regrets this when she finds out she’s been wrong about him. ‘It is such a spur to one’s genius, such an opening for wit, to have a dislike of that kind,’ she admits to Jane. But even though she likes him better now, she’s not going to stop laughing at him altogether. When they get engaged, Lizzy still reflects that he has yet ‘to learn to be laughed at’, and she’s the woman to teach him. By the end, she’s obviously succeeded, because their marriage is ‘lively, sportive’ and full of ‘liberties’. When I was twelve, it sounded a blast.

  It still does. Pride and Prejudice is bliss to reread. Lizzy’s as funny as she ever was. And so is Austen. It’s such a relief, after smiling through my tears at Sara Crewe, Anne Shirley and the Marches with their constant attempts to be good girls, to be laughing out loud at Lizzy, who is just trying to be herself. She’s a truly light-hearted heroine, arch, playful and bold. Austen famously said that when it came to heroines, ‘pictures of perfection . . . make me sick and wicked’, and compared to Little Women with its endless Victorian pieties, Pride and Prejudice, written 55 years earlier, seems positively amoral. Lizzy is sisterly too, and strong. And is there a better proto-feminist line than ‘Do not consider me now as an elegant female, but as a rational creature speaking the truth from her heart’? (Delivered, of course, to Mr Collins, who seems as vile to me now as he ever did.)

  Lizzy’s freedom seems even more idiosyncratic and extraordinary in her closed, difficult world. When Jane is taken ill and Lizzy walks to Netherfield ‘crossing field after field at a quick pace, jumping over stiles and springing over puddles with impatient activity’, she’s as unladylike as Jo March. And there’s a new reason to lust after Mr Darcy; I’d forgotten that this is when he really starts to fall for her. While Miss Bingley and Mrs Hurst start bitching about Lizzy as soon as she leaves the room (they are such plastics), pronouncing her hair ‘so untidy, so blowsy!’, her petticoat ‘six inches deep in mud . . . and the gown which had been let down to hide it not doing its office’, and finding her generally wild and undecorous, and Mr Bingley sticks up for Lizzy, saying she’s a good sister to race over to see Jane, Mr Darcy frankly admires her glowing skin and the way the exercise has brightened her eyes. He isn’t bothered about decorum and it’s not Lizzy’s kindness that interests him; he just thinks she’s gorgeous. The scene is thrillingly charged – Lizzy radiant in her filthy clothes, with her messy hair and flushed face, and Mr Darcy thinking she looks much better than when she was pretty and pristine in her ball gown. And though I wouldn’t ever want to be without Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy emerging from that lake in the BBC adaptation, it’s worth noting that this very sexy scene is actually in the book.

  But Lizzy is not as free as she seems. Mr Bennet used to make me laugh. I used to think he and Lizzy were similar. But now, I almost dislike him. He hates society’s pressures too, but he’s a man and he has his library to retreat to. No one can push him into marriage, or take away his home. He made a mistake in marrying a pretty girl who turned out to be shrill and silly, but instead of making the best of the situation and treating Mrs Bennet kindly, he cultivates a sardonic distance. He laughs at his wife and encourages his children to join in the fun. But it isn’t fun. In fact, his sense of humour is snarky and nihilistic; he thinks ‘we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn’. No, we don’t. Lizzy knows that her father is improper, even reprehensible, to treat his wife this way. And even if she wanted to live like him, she couldn’t. She can’t marry whoever she likes, and she can’t not marry. I skipped a lot of the talk about money when I first read Pride and Prejudice, but now I see it is crucial; even Mr Bennet’s supporting Lizzy’s decision to reject Mr Collins feels a bit irresponsible. It’s all very well to jeer at Mr Collins, but if one of the girls doesn’t marry him, they’ll all be forced out of their home when Mr Bennet dies.

  Now, I feel sorry for Mrs Bennet, mocked by her husband and doing her best to marry off her five daughters, none of whom appreciate her efforts. I don’t like her exactly, but I do see why she’s so desperate to hustle her girls into matrimony. Even a marriage as unsatisfying as hers is better than poverty and homelessness.

  I’m still shocked when Charlotte agrees to marry Mr Collins, but I don’t entirely agree with Lizzy that Charlotte ‘cannot have a proper way of thinking’. Austen is so deft here. Charlotte has always said she’s ‘not romantic’ and she is going into marriage with her eyes open. When Lizzy visits her in her married home, she notices that she’s arranged the house so she has as little contact as possible with her husband. She’s particularly impressed by one of Charlotte’s contrivances: ‘The room in which the ladies sat was backwards. Elizabeth had at first rather wondered that Charlotte should not prefer the dining-parlour for common use; it was a better sized room, and had a more pleasant aspect; but she soon saw that her friend had an excellent reason for what she did, for Mr Collins would undoubtedly have been much less in his own apartment, had they sat in one equally lively; and she gave Charlotte credit for the arrangement.’ The prose is a little laboured here because Austen is deliberately slowing us down, making us see how a woman can make the best of a bad marriage. In most adaptations, Charlotte is venal or stupid. But in the book, she is practical. And Lizzy is enough of a realist to learn to admire her for it.

  I’m glad I didn’t see all this when I was twelve. I didn’t need to learn to compromise. I was doing that already. I longed to be bolder. I desperately wanted to shrug off my shyness and worries and I thought Lizzy would help me. But now, one sentence in particular in Pride and Prejudice jumps out at me. It comes after Lydia has eloped, and everyone is expecting her to be humble and contrite, but ‘Lydia was Lydia still; untamed, unabashed, wild, noisy, and fearless.’ And Lizzy is ‘disgusted’. But why? It’s not so long since she fancied Mr Wickham herself. And having failed to warn Lydia that he was bad news, she surely shares some of the blame for Lydia’s elopement. I like Lizzy better when she is pert and valiant than when she is primly advocating restraint. And at twelve, maybe I would have been better off trying to be less tame, less abashed; trying to be wilder, noisier and more fearless – more, in fact, like Lydia.

  Though I didn’t spot Lizzy’s primness at the time, it wasn’t long before I started to find Austen’s novels a bit, well, tame and the rest. Charlotte Brontë called Pride and Prejudice ‘a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck’, and I thought she had a point. And I didn’t like the story of Austen writing in a corner of the drawing room, hiding her work when she heard someone coming. In my community we were scared of gossip, wary of being looked at because of the Evil Eye, and we didn’t raise our heads above the parapet for fear of anti-Semitism. And I was sick of it. It would be years before I fully tried to live Wuthering Heights but I had read it and it was working its way into my heart. Would Emily Brontë have hidden her manuscript when people came to visit
? Not likely. My favourite story about Emily was the one where she gets bitten by a rabid dog and races home, bursts into the kitchen, seizes a hot iron and presses it to her skin to cauterise the wound. Such courage! How could Austen compete? Plus there was the problem of Mansfield Park. I didn’t know I’d end up making a life in the theatre, but I knew I hated humourless Fanny Price.

  In The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar say that Austen shows ‘how to inhabit a small space with grace and intelligence’, and that was absolutely what I got from Pride and Prejudice, and just what I needed, then. But later I started feeling that a battle was coming, a battle about what kind of woman I was going to be, and that laughter and irony would never win it. Lizzy wins the game of Regency society: she gets a desirable man, and she gets him on her terms. But I was starting to think I didn’t want to win my community’s game; I didn’t even want to play it.

  In Shakespeare’s plays, which we were reading at school, all the heroines resisted their families and society to marry the men they wanted. They did it not by learning how to win the game, but by breaking the rules. The plays made me ask myself questions like whether, if it came to it, I would have the guts to go into a forest at night with the man I loved, like Hermia and Helena. When a schoolfriend took me to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Regent’s Park, I marvelled at their bravery, and kept some of the confetti the actors threw at the audience, tucking it into my copy of the play for luck. All that’s left now is fine, sparkly dust.

  Next came Romeo and Juliet and I thought Juliet even bolder – and so self-possessed! Lizzy says no to two marriage proposals, but Juliet, who is only thirteen, deceives her nurse, marries in secret, sleeps with Romeo, stands up to her parents, plots an escape . . . Even death doesn’t faze her. And she’s the brains of the operation (not that Romeo is exactly the brawn). And the scheme she cooks up with Friar Laurence, to fake her own death and then run off with Romeo, so nearly works! It was such a proactive subversion of all those Sleeping Beauty stories too. Juliet is going into a death-like state, and she hopes Romeo will be there to kiss her when she wakes up. But she’s not swooning because of a curse or a spindle or flax; she’s calculatedly (and bravely) taking a drug that will enable her to start a new life. And she’s not waiting for any prince to wake her; she’ll wake up when the drug wears off. It’ll be nice if Romeo is there, of course, but if not she’ll surely have the sangfroid to wait for him, so they can escape. She’s not trying to become queen bee in Verona either; she wants to elope, to make a whole new life for herself. Her elopement is grown-up, thought-through and desperate, a world away from Lydia’s whimsical joke. The only thing I didn’t like about Juliet was her choice of man. Romeo was so boring, so inept (forever getting them into danger because he’s not careful enough to avoid it), and so fickle; he’s only just been saying he’s in love with Rosaline, so how can his love for Juliet be trusted? Love poleaxes him, but it empowers her. If I could have an ounce of Juliet’s courage, I’d be all right, I thought. And maybe instead of marrying a man my parents liked, I could even consider the radical possibility of marrying someone they didn’t like.