Austen's classic love story

When I was at high school and our class read Pride and Prejudice, one of my classmates rejected the book with disdain. Once she came to Mr Darcy's first judgment of Elizabeth Bennet — "She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me" — and then Elizabeth's annoyed reaction to this, she said she just knew how the novel would finish: Elizabeth and Darcy would discover they were really attracted to each other, and would end up married. She'd read a lot of romances, and that was what always happened when the hero and heroine started at loggerheads.

What we didn't realise then, was that Pride and Prejudice was the novel that had contributed most to establishing the narrative pattern my friend had so easily predicted. Countless novels — and films — since Pride and Prejudice appeared nearly 200 years ago, have featured couples who've begun by sparring, realised they'd misread each other, and then, after coming to understand and appreciate each other, have acknowledged their love. Beneath the initial sparring, of course, have been the beginnings of sexual attraction.

So Pride and Prejudice has a storyline that readers can recognise, and usually don't disdain. That the storyline has been so popular, too, suggests that it reflects many people's experience of love, or more likely, what many hope the experience might be.

Elizabeth and Darcy, during their mutual misunderstanding, target each other with a wit and intelligence that reveal their underlying affinity. Then they're obliged by circumstances to re-evaluate each other, and, in so doing, to re-evaluate themselves. Consequently, both realise that they've not only gained self-knowledge from their courtship, but have had their true selves recognised and valued by the other. And isn't this sense of being truly understood, one of the feelings we often seek in relationships?

But to use a word like courtship of Elizabeth and Darcy is to recall that Pride and Prejudice is set two centuries ago. Although the novel's exploration of how men and women learn to understand one another, and themselves, speaks to contemporary readers, it is also the remoteness of the world Jane Austen creates that is now one source of her novels' popularity. Since at least the late 19th century, some readers have turned to her works partly as a refuge from the complexities of their own era. They seem to embody a simpler, more serene, self-contained kind of community, one apparently little troubled by the impact of national and international events, or the problems of poverty and inequality.

Some screen adaptations of the novels, too, with their meticulous attention to period costume, opulent meals, lavish interiors, and the stately homes of England, have fostered this sort of nostalgia.

There is also a strong drawcard in the extended development of the central romance — how the attraction between Elizabeth and Darcy emerges gradually, in a series of scenes where decorum requires that emotion be kept under the surface. In novels, the spectacle of desire kept under restraint, and revealing itself only slowly and even against the conscious wishes of those involved, can be very appealing. It is particularly satisfying for those who consider modern relationships — whether in fiction or in life — too rapidly formed and too casual. Moreover, Austen's narrative voice in representing her characters' feelings is itself a model of understatement, and sometimes amusingly ironic. Each word has its force, and less can express more.

Austen's omission of poverty and the working-classes was typical of novelists of her day. But she hardly needed to mention the Napoleonic Wars explicitly: her readers were living through them, and well knew that the man-shortage so striking in Pride and Prejudice was partly due to that conflict. Although not all contemporary readers identify the cause, they do register that the Bennet girls need husbands, and that a good man is hard to find.

Modern interpretations of Austen's novels, including some screen adaptations, emphasise the economic disadvantages suffered by women in her period. Some of the most chilling paragraphs in the novel describe the selfish relief of the Lucas family when the plain oldest daughter Charlotte engages herself to the bumptious clergyman Mr Collins, perceiving him purely as a meal-ticket.

Elizabeth Bennet won't accept just anyone: she has already turned down Collins herself. But with little money of her own, no way of gaining financial security except through marriage, and a mother and two sisters whose overt man-chasing deters suitors, her situation is difficult.

Nowadays, readers recognise that things are better for women. Although we might wonder how much, given the vogue of Bridget Jones's Diary, which is so clearly based on Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth Bennet's drawbacks in courtship are largely external, whereas Bridget Jones is consumed with self-contempt over her weight and her drinking, and is barely able to function in the workforce.

In any case, one reason for Elizabeth Bennet's appeal to readers, and especially to women, is their awareness of the odds she must overcome. As well as the embarrassing family and the financial pressure, there's the overbearing Collins, plus the snobbery of the Bingley sisters and of Darcy's aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Readers enjoy these characters immensely — Judi Dench should be a treat as Lady Catherine in the new film — while hoping that Elizabeth will marry Darcy despite all the obstacles they pose. We relish the spectacle of a Cinderella who turns out to be smart enough not to need a fairy godmother. No wonder Keira Knightley was so anxious to get this role!

Most of all, perhaps, we appreciate the style of the woman writer who could pack so much into a sentence — such as the celebrated one that launches the novel: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." Pages have been written in analysis of that sentence. My schoolfriend, of course, got at least that far into the book. And she did make a good match in the end.

* Dr Joanne Wilkes is an associate professor of English at the University of Auckland.

* Pride and Prejudice, the film, opens on Thursday.