Raptures and rationality: fifty years of reading Pride and Prejudice

Even with the comfortable Hunsford living and the Longbourn estate in her future, Charlotte would abet her husband's grasping attempts to increase his income by nominally adopting another parish or two, to collect those incomes, while farming out their duties to an underpaid curate.3 Such thorough, continuing mercenary calculations prove that, indeed, Charlotte does not "'have a proper way of thinking,"' at least, by Lizzie's standards (154). [...]Charlotte believes that Elizabeth's determination not1"to find a man agreeable whom [she] is determined to hate'" (101) has itself been a performance, presumably a posture of defense from Darcy's criticism after his first remarks about her at the assembly. [...]I would bet that a twenty-first-century Miss Bingley would have been an accomplished cyber-bully in junior high school, before moving on to adult snipings.) More than once, at Netherfield, "as soon as [Elizabeth is] out of the room," "Miss Bingley [begins] abusing her" (38; 43). [...]Elizabeth's habit of "'giving her] opinion very decidedly for so young a person,"' as the exasperated Lady Catherine describes it (187), is how she reveals her true self to the world, not with "mean art[s]," "paltry device[s]»" or "cunning."