When I embarked on a close reading of Pride and Prejudice in preparation for writing my own version, I expected to enjoy it. I would hardly have tried something like this with a book I knew I did not care for. But a strange thing happened as the story progressed. The more I read, the more I admired the writing. The irony, the precise language, the wicked characterisations— it’s wonderful. But also, the more I read, the more I disliked the writer, and by extension her central character. Austen’s observations, which in the story are often Lizzy’s, are funny, clever, sharp— and remarkably unfeeling. She wrote to amuse, not to move the reader, and this reader definitely prefers being moved. It is a preference I think I share with many romance readers, and while writing The Quaint Convictions of Kit Bennet was easy in one sense – I had a ready-made plot to work with – I found it unexpectedly difficult to add this emotional layer while still staying true to the source material. There is so little space given to feelings in the novel. Once she has acknowledged it to herself, Lizzy insists that her love for Darcy is ‘if not quite so tender, at least as reasonable and just, as what Jane felt for Bingley’. Reasonable! Of course, I can see where she’s coming from. In a time when women were supposed to be volatile, immature, irrational beings, Lizzy hopes people will consider her ‘a rational creature speaking the truth from her heart’. It is also of a piece with Austen’s attitude towards strong feelings elsewhere in her writing. She is always suspicious of passionate love, and it is never rewarded with a happy union: Marianne’s grand passion in Sense and Sensibility is doomed, Lydia’s elopement is very nearly calamitous. The author never appears to consider that Wickham and Lydia may be a well-suited couple, and that not everyone they meet will share the older sisters’ concerns with the proprieties. To Austen, strong feeling is dangerous, and never indulged in by the people she wants us to admire. It is significant that when Darcy stresses ‘how ardently’ he loves Lizzy, he does so before he understands her, in a proposal that is downright insulting. No one is getting swept off their feet here.
This rational approach extends to story as well as character. In romance terms, Pride and Prejudice is the mother of all enemies-to-lovers plots, but it predates the romance formula as we know it, and the basis of the plot is firmly economic. So why, I found myself wondering, is this considered one of the great romantic novels?
One reason is undoubtedly that for generations now, readers have come to the book with their perceptions filtered through the screen adaptations, which add all the immediacy and embodiedness the novel lacks. But I think it may also be exactly Austen’s habit of distancing the reader which explains why Pride and Prejudice remains so popular. In the gap between description and perception, readers are given the room to read what they want into Lizzy and Darcy, to see the romantic hero they expect instead of a responsible landowner with bad manners, to see the intelligent woman they prefer instead of a naïve, superficially clever girl. But, as I found when I made my slow and careful way through the novel, this doesn’t work when one isn’t invested in the heterosexual marriage plot. Lizzy and Darcy resemble no subconscious ideal of mine, and so I am left with what Austen chose to give us, which is interesting, and diverting, and often funny, but not, alas, romantic. I had not expected that to be the area where I had to be inventive. But while the material changes made necessary by the gender-switching in Quaint Convictions came easily to me, it took some time before I could get a sense of Kit as a character, and it only happened when I realised that I could not use Lizzy’s feelings as a guide. Austen’s characters are too unlike the ones I would write myself, and I realised that while I could keep her setting and language, I had no desire to share her opinions.
Charlotte Brontë said that there was in 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’.* Critics have a distressing tendency to take this literally, as if the actual vegetation, rather than the imaginative landscape, were the issue. Many words have been written to show that there is wildness in Austen’s books, but I’m with Charlotte on this. The world of Pride and Prejudice is too neat and narrow. Not because it is confined to the famous ‘3 or 4 families in a Country Village’,** but because it never imagines a different one. Austen shows how the system of late Georgian society throws up absurdities like Mr Collins and Mrs Bennet, and invites us to agree that yes, it is ridiculous, but she never proposes an alternative. The economic circumstance which sets the plot in motion is an entail which prevents Mr Bennet from leaving anything to his daughters, and we may think it criminally thoughtless to tie up your property in such a way that at least half of your descendants are guaranteed financial insecurity, but the only character to voice this idea is the one everyone knows they can safely ignore: the girls’ mother. Lizzy Bennet is clever and articulate and sometimes ‘almost wild’, and heaps better than snobbish Miss Bingley or sententious Mary, but she is still entirely conventional. And this is not just how things were at the time. Pride and Prejudice was written in the decade that gave us A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and published in the one that gave us Frankenstein. Austen’s contemporaries were questioning social norms and investigating alternatives, but she did not, and for later readers the appeal of her novels was often nostalgic. And these nostalgic fans were not predominantly women. Henry James and Winston Churchill were admirers, Rudyard Kipling coined the word ‘Janeite’. To these readers her books showed a world as they wished it still was, a world without uppity women, a world where the term ‘gentleman’ went unquestioned, a world where one did not ask where that ten thousand a year came from.
It is a small world, and while I find it historically fascinating, and I greatly admire its literary creation, it also makes me yearn for others and outsiders, for the open country and the blue hill. It was nice to visit, and I’ll probably come back, but I wouldn’t want to live there.
Ally Hastings, June 2026
* letter from Charlotte Brontë to G.H. Lewes, quoted in The Cambridge Companion to Pride and Prejudice
** letter from Jane Austen to her niece Anna, quoted in Jane Austen at Home