Featuring commentary from Sadie Stein and Garth Greenwell
In chapter 59 of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mr. Bennet calls Elizabeth Bennet into his library, hears her out about Darcy, and tells her: "I could not have parted with you, my Lizzy, to anyone less worthy." Sadie Stein, in her Rebind commentary on Pride and Prejudice, ranks this scene above either of Darcy's proposals:
"But the part that really makes me cry is when Elizabeth goes in to talk to her father, which, for my money, is the most moving scene in the entire novel."
In Book Two of Henry James's The Golden Bowl (1904), Adam Verver proposes to Charlotte Stant at Brighton and is accepted, and his eyes fill. He isn't thinking about Charlotte but about his daughter Maggie Verver and what he believes she has arranged for him, "what my child does for me." Garth Greenwell, in his Rebind commentary on The Golden Bowl, reads the moment without sentiment: "This man being accepted by one woman cries for another. Being accepted by the woman who will become his wife, he cries instead, thinking about his daughter. A red flag."
These are two novels in which a father's love is the formative fact of the heroine's life, and both commentators say so. Where they differ is on what that love does to the daughter, and on who finally has to end it. In Austen the father gives his daughter up himself, in half a sentence, as a gift. In James the father can't, so the daughter has to do it for both of them, and the whole plot is the cost of the delay.
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