PRIDE AND RACIAL AND SOCIAL PREJUDICE

“Perhaps after all it is possible to read too many novels” (Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey)


EITHER MY GOOD LADY WIFE or her friends, or one or two of the more girlie girls among my students, occasionally see fit to remind me that Jane Austen wrote, in their opinion, the most important and relevant novel of all times when she thrust a foolhardy, headstrong, feisty, air-headed young lady into the path of a sensible, calm, collected and organized gentleman called Mr Darcy. I have no idea why my wife should find acquaintance of herself in the shoes of this ringlet-ridden fritterer, and much less why any of my students should do so, when they would be better afforded to deal with the more productive and sensible aspects of their reality.

BUT IN CONSEQUENCE OF THESE DESIGNS I have once again, today, been subjected by my wife to another attempt to endear me to Miss Austen by this afternoon having me watch all four hour-long episodes of “Lost in Austen”, the ITV series in which a modern young lady finds herself hurled back into the time of and the narrative construction of Pride and Prejudice, a plot device development which necessitates comparison between our two epochs.

WHETHER OR NOT I CRIED AT THE END is neither here nor there, but I was struck by the fact that today, under our Conservative/Coalition government, our society is remarkably similar to that described and descried by the good Miss Austen.

MR DARCY THERE MAY NOT BE in Davy Cameron’s government, but candidates for the lily-livered fop Mr Bingley abound in the LibDems, starting with the mis-married Nick Clegg; the Bennets senior find their suitors in Vince Cable, the real finance minister, and Theresa May, the Home Secretary, one aloof and generally fed up with his lot, watching his fortunes be wasted by idiots, and the other unable to put order in her own household, hoping that someone from “abroad” (see the use of the word in the novel) could come along and save her from ruin.

WITH THE CONSERVATIVES, OF COURSE, there is always a Lady Catherine de Burgh skulking in the wings in the figure of Mrs Thatcher, a name suited to Austen if ever there was one. But what saves Pride and Prejudice is Elizabeth, with her outspoken approach to almost everything around her. There is no one in the government of this type at the moment; indeed, the government and the parliament have the lowest ratios of women for some time. And the only figure on the horizon likely to “shake things up”, as she herself states, is Diane Abbot, but she has as much chance as doing well in life nowadays as a Black woman in Jane Austen’s days.