with commentary by Sadie Stein
It is an enduring fantasy in English fiction: the proud, rich, guarded man who falls for the sharp girl with no money and no connections, not because he means to, but because he cannot help it. Reading Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice for Rebind Classics, Sadie Stein is clear-eyed about why this particular dream has held readers for two centuries, and where in the novel it actually takes hold. The answer, in Stein's reading, is that Elizabeth Bennet is the one woman in Mr. Darcy's orbit who does not perform for him: she challenges him at every turn, free of the deference his rank commands, and he falls for her in spite of himself. It happens in the Netherfield chapters, the stretch Stein calls the least eventful and the most consequential in the first half of the book.
The mechanism, Stein argues, is resistance overcome. Darcy does not court Elizabeth; he tries not to want her and fails. "We are told that he's starting to become interested in spite of himself," Stein says, tracing how he keeps trying to busy himself with something else and keeps getting "drawn away" because "her conversation is too interesting, because she's too appealing, because he's too intrigued." And Elizabeth has no idea any of this is happening. "She comes away thinking they dislike each other. He comes away with an enormous crush on her."
The Fantasy of Being Loved in Spite of Himself
Stein is candid that this is wish fulfillment, and she names exactly what makes it potent. "That's one of the things that I think a lot of, especially female readers find very appealing about this, is that he falls in love with her in spite of himself," she says. "There's something very attractive about the idea of being so smart, so cute, so kind of impudent, that a man of quality just can't resist you even when you don't like him." She does not pretend it is realistic advice. "It's a little bit of a fantasy. I don't think most people can go on that little encouragement. But in this case, clearly it works and has worked for many hundreds of years."
She Does Not Perform for Him
What makes Elizabeth irresistible, in Stein's reading, is precisely that she does not perform for him. Where Caroline Bingley calibrates every word to impress, Elizabeth "challenges him at every turn, and to his credit, not only does he not mind it, he loves it." Stein offers a sharp hypothesis about why this lands: "maybe he has no inoculation to anyone challenging him, and maybe Elizabeth only does because she doesn't quite understand how important and rich he is, or she hasn't been brought up in a world where she knows to be in awe of people like him." Her freedom from deference is the whole attraction.
The novel dramatizes this in small, domestic moments. When Elizabeth jokes that bad poetry can kill a fragile love faster than anything, Darcy is charmed rather than offended, and Stein notes that "we hear that he smiles for the first time." He says explicitly that he admires a woman who reads. Stein reads the contrast Austen builds: where Miss Bingley would seize the opening to flatter him, Elizabeth simply is herself, and "it's also a strange compliment to Elizabeth, which Miss Bingley notices, even if no one else does." The wit is not strategy. It is character, and that is what he cannot resist.
Trapped at Netherfield, Where the Falling Happens
Stein also points to the structural cleverness that makes the attraction legible. Austen traps these people in a house with nothing to do but talk, and Stein observes that "you get to know them more quickly dealing with each other than you do seeing them talk to anyone else. They reveal more of themselves. They nettle each other." Austen "sets this up structurally almost like a play," using "every single aspect of parlor living, these tiny things" to develop the two characters against each other. The falling-in-love happens in card games declined and letters written and books read across a room.
Caught by the One Not Trying to Catch Him
So why does Darcy fall for Elizabeth? Because she is the one woman in his orbit who is not trying to catch him, and that, paradoxically, is what catches him. Stein's reading honors the fantasy while naming it as one. The appeal of being loved "in spite of himself" is the appeal of being valued for exactly who you are, wit and impertinence included, by someone who had every reason and intention not to. It is a dream the novel has been selling, successfully, for a very long time.