Was Charlotte Lucas Right to Marry Mr. Collins?

Three days after Elizabeth Bennet refuses the ridiculous Mr. Collins, her best friend Charlotte Lucas accepts him. It is one of the small shocks of Pride and Prejudice, and in her Rebind Classics reading, Sadie Stein treats it as the moment the novel's romantic worldview cracks open. The question is not really whether Elizabeth was right to refuse him. It is whether Charlotte, marrying the same absurd man for reasons that have nothing to do with love, might be the one telling the truth about how this world actually works. Stein's answer is that, judged by the rules that actually governed women's lives in Jane Austen's England, Charlotte was right: her choice is clear-eyed, defensible, even admirable, and it is Elizabeth's freedom to refuse, not Charlotte's arithmetic, that is the rare exception.