Elizabeth Bennet is a fictional character and the protagonist of the 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. She is often referred to as Eliza or Lizzy by her friends and family. Elizabeth is the second child in a family of five daughters. Though the circumstances of the time and environment push her to seek a marriage of convenience for economic security, Elizabeth wishes to marry for love.
Elizabeth is regarded as the most admirable and endearing of Austen's heroines.William Dean Howells 2009, p. 48 She is considered one of the most beloved characters in British literature because of her complexity and wit. Austen herself described Elizabeth as "as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print."Wright, Andrew H. "Elizabeth Bennet." Elizabeth Bennet (introduction by Harold Bloom). Broomall: Chelsea House Publishers, 2004. 37–38. Google Book Search. Web. 22 October 2011.
Background Elizabeth is the second eldest of the five Bennet sisters of the Longbourn estate, situated near the fictional market village of Meryton in Hertfordshire, England. She is 20 years old by the middle of the novel.Pride and Prejudice. Chapter 29. Elizabeth is described as an intelligent young woman, with "a lively, playful disposition, which delighted in anything ridiculous". She often presents a playful good-natured impertinence without being offensive. Early in the novel, she is depicted as being personally proud of her wit and her accuracy in judging the social behaviour and intentions of others.
Her father is a landowner, but his daughters cannot inherit because the estate is entailed upon the male line (it can only be inherited by male relatives). Should Mr Bennet never have a son, Longbourn will therefore be inherited by his distant cousin and nearest male relation, Mr. William Collins, a clergyman in Kent. This future provides the cause of Mrs Bennet's eagerness to marry her daughters off to wealthy men.
Elizabeth is her father's favourite, described by him as having "something more of quickness than her sisters". In contrast, she is the least dear to her mother, especially after Elizabeth refuses Mr Collins' marriage proposal. Her mother tends to contrast her negatively with her sisters Jane and Lydia, whom she considers superior in beauty and disposition, respectively, and fails to understand her husband's preference. Elizabeth is often upset and embarrassed by her mother's and three younger sisters' impropriety and silliness.
Within her neighbourhood, Elizabeth is considered a beauty and a charming young woman with "fine eyes", to which Mr. Darcy is first drawn. Darcy is later attracted more particularly to her "light and pleasing" figure, the "easy playfulness" of her manners, her personality and the liveliness of her mind, and eventually considers her "one of the handsomest women" in his acquaintance.
Analysis From the beginning, opinions have been divided on the character. Anne Isabella Milbanke gave a glowing review of the novel, while Mary Russell Mitford criticizes Elizabeth's lack of taste.In a letter to Sir William Elford dated 20 December 1814. The modern exegetes are torn between admiration for the vitality of the character and the disappointment of seeing Elizabeth intentionally suppress her verve and submit, at least outwardly, to male authority.Lydia Martin 2007, p. 201. In Susan Fraiman's essay "The Humiliation of Elizabeth Bennett", the author criticises the fact that Elizabeth must forgo her development as a woman in order to ensure the success of "ties among men [such as her father and Darcy] with agendas of their own". The Bennet sisters have only a relatively small dowry of £1,000; and as their family's estate will pass out of their hands when their father dies, the family faces a major social decline, giving the Bennet girls only a limited time in which to find a husband.MacDonagh, Oliver "Minor Female Characters Depict Women's Roles", pp. 85-93 (88), in Readings on Pride and Prejudice, ed. Clarice Swisher, San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. About feminist criticism of the character, the French critic Roger Martin du Gard wrote that the primary purpose of Austen was to provide jouissance (enjoyment) to her readers, not preach, but the character of Elizabeth is able to manoeuvre within the male-dominated power structure of Regency England to assert her interests in a system that favours her father, Mr Darcy, and the other male characters.Gard, Roger "Questioning the Merit of Pride and Prejudice", pp. 111–117, in Readings on Pride and Prejudice ed. Clarice Swisher, San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. Gard noted that the novel hardly glorifies patriarchy since it is strongly implied that it was the financial irresponsibility of Mr Bennet that has placed his family in a precarious social position. Furthermore, it is Elizabeth who criticises her father for not doing more to teach her sisters Lydia and Catherine the value of a good character, which Mr Bennet disregards, leading to Lydia's eloping with Wickham.MacDonagh, Oliver "Minor Female Characters Depict Women's Roles", pp. 85–93 (89), in Readings on Pride and Prejudice, ed. Clarice Swisher, San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. Unlike the more superficial and/or selfish characters like Lydia, Wickham, Mr Collins, and Charlotte, who regard marriage as a simple matter of satisfying their own desires, for the more mature Elizabeth marriage is the cause of much reflection and serious thought on her part.Brown, Julia Prewit "The Narrator's Voice" from Readings on Pride and Prejudice, ed. Clarice Swisher, San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999, pp. 103–110 (109).
The British literacy critic Robert Irvine stated that the reference in the novel to the militia being mobilised and lacking sufficient barracks, requiring them to set up camps in the countryside dates the setting of the novel to the years 1793–1795 as the militia was mobilised in 1793 after France declared war on Great Britain and the last of the barracks for the militia were completed by 1796.Irvine, Robert Jane Austen, London: Routledge, 2005, pp. 56–57. Irvine argued that a central concern in Britain in the 1790s, when Austen wrote the first draft of Pride and Prejudice under the title First Impressions was the need for British elites, both national and regional to rally around the flag in face of the challenge from revolutionary France.Irvine, Robert Jane Austen, London: Routledge, 2005, p. 58. It is known that Austen was working on First Impressions by 1796 (it is not clear when she began working on the book) and finished off First Impressions in 1797.Irvine, Robert Jane Austen, London: Routledge, 2005, p. 56. Irvine states that the character of Elizabeth is clearly middle-class, while Mr Darcy is part of the aristocracy.Irvine, Robert Jane Austen, London: Routledge, 2005, pp. 57, 59. Irvine wrote "Elizabeth, in the end, is awed by Pemberly, and her story ends with her delighted submission to Darcy in marriage. It is gratitude that forms the foundation of Elizabeth Bennet's love for Fitzwilliam Darcy: caught in a reciprocal gaze with Darcy's portrait at Pemberly, impressed with the evidence of his social power that surrounds her, Elizabeth 'thought of his regard with a deeper sentiment of gratitude than it had ever raised before' ... Elizabeth's desire for Darcy does not happen despite the difference in their social situation: it is produced by that difference, and can be read as a vindication of the hierarchy which constructs that difference in the first place".Irvine, Robert Jane Austen, London: Routledge, 2005, p. 59. Irvine observes that Darcy spends about half his time in London while for people in Meryton London is a stylish place that is very far away, observing that a key difference is when one of the Bennet family is ill, they use the services of a local apothecary while Mr Darcy calls upon a surgeon from London.Irvine, Robert Jane Austen, London: Routledge, 2005, p. 60. In this regard, Irvine argued that the marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy stands for the union of local and national elites in Britain implicitly against the challenge to the status quo represented by the French Republic.Irvine, Robert Jane Austen, London: Routledge, 2005, pp. 60–61.
By contrast, the American scholar Rachel Brownstein argued that Elizabeth rejects two offers of marriage by the time she arrives at Pemberley, and notes in rejecting Mr Collins that the narrator of the novel paraphrases the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft that Elizabeth cannot love him because she is "a rational creature speaking the truth from her heart".Brownstein, Rachel "Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice", pp. 32–57 (53), in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Brownstein notes that it is reading Darcy's letter following her first rejection of him that leads her to say "Till this moment, I never knew myself".Brownstein, Rachel "Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice", pp. 32-57 (54), in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Brownstein further states that Austen has it both ways in depicting Elizabeth as she uses much irony. After Elizabeth rejects Darcy and then realises she loves him, she comments "no such happy marriage could now teach the admiring multitude what connubial felicity really was" as if she herself is aware that she is a character in a romance novel. Later, she tells Darcy in thanking him for paying off Wickham's debts and ensuring Lydia's marriage that they might be in the wrong, "for what become of the moral, if our comfort springs from a breach of promise, for I ought not to have mentioned the subject?".