final ladies’ battle with Lady Catherine, she is unexceptionable. Then

too she is a perfectly natural girl. She does not disguise from herself

or anybody that she resents Darcy’s first ill-mannered personality with

as personal a feeling. (By the way, the reproach that the ill-manners of

this speech are overdone is certainly unjust; for things of the same

kind, expressed no doubt less stiltedly but more coarsely, might have

been heard in more than one ball-room during this very year from persons

who ought to have been no worse bred than Darcy.) And she lets the

injury done to Jane and the contempt shown to the rest of her family

aggravate this resentment in the healthiest way in the world.
Still, all this does not explain her charm, which, taking beauty as a

common form of all heroines, may perhaps consist in the addition to her

playfulness, her wit, her affectionate and natural disposition, of a

certain fearlessness very uncommon in heroines of her type and age.

Nearly all of them would have been in speechless awe of the magnificent

Darcy; nearly all of them would have palpitated and fluttered at the

idea of proposals, even naughty ones, from the fascinating Wickham.

Elizabeth, with nothing offensive, nothing viraginous, nothing of the

“New Woman” about her, has by nature what the best modern (not “new”)

women have by education and experience, a perfect freedom from the idea

that all men may bully her if they choose, and that most will{xxiii} away with

her if they can. Though not in the least “impudent and mannish grown,”

she has no mere sensibility, no nasty niceness about her. The form of

passion common and likely to seem natural in Miss Austen’s day was so

invariably connected with the display of one or the other, or both of

these qualities, that she has not made Elizabeth outwardly passionate.

But I, at least, have not the slightest doubt that she would have

married Darcy just as willingly without Pemberley as with it, and