Thomas Langlois Lefroy
In 1796, Lefroy began a flirtation with English novelist Jane Austen, who was a friend of an older female relative. Jane Austen wrote two letters to her sister Cassandra mentioning "Tom Lefroy", and some have suggested that it may have been he whom Austen had in mind when she invented the character of Mr. Darcy in "Pride and Prejudice", as the courtship between Tom Lefroy and Jane Austen took place over the year or so that "Pride and Prejudice" was written. In his 2003 biography, "Becoming Jane Austen", Jon Spence suggests that Jane Austen actually used her and Tom LeFroy's personalities as the models for Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, but not in an expected way. Spence suggests that Jane Austen used Tom Lefroy's more gregarious personality as the model for the novel's heroine Elizabeth Bennet, and her own measured demeanor was used as the model for the male protagonist, Mr. Darcy. So while the exact influence of Tom Lefroy on "Pride and Prejudice" continues to be debated, it does seem certain that his presence in Austen's life is in some way reflected in the novel.
Styles and themes of Jane Austen
Austen's novels raise and explore a variety of issues relating to money and property and the power they convey. For example, in "Pride and Prejudice", the plot revolves around the problems caused by primogeniture, as the Bennet property is entailed away from the Bennet daughters, and "Sense and Sensibility" questions the arbitrariness of property inheritance when the elderly Mr. Dashwood disinherits one side of his nephew's family because of his affection for a baby on the other. As Copeland explains, "[f]rom the focus of "Sense and Sensibility", "Pride and Prejudice", and "Northanger Abbey", where the single most significant economic problem for women is the lack of a fortune, Austen's works steadily engage women in more and more complex relationships to the economy. "Mansfield Park", "Emma", and "Persuasion", each in turn, move through an examination of the economy as measure of social morality, as agent of social disruption, [and] as source of national identity".
The novels discuss social status and social position in terms of "rank", "station" and "degree", and not in terms of "class" in the modern sense. Where the more modern concept of "class" is determined principally by productivity and income, and connotes conflict, the term "rank" focused on lineage and connoted harmony, stability and order. Austen generally portrays characters in the professional classes, such as the clergy and armed forces, most positively. For example, in "Mansfield Park", the heroine marries a clergyman, while in "Persuasion", the model marriage is that of Admiral and Mrs. Croft. Although Austen's novels suggest that characters should be judged by moral standards and not simply by social status, she always specifies their social positions, often (as with the Gardiners in "Pride and Prejudice") making it part of the earliest descriptions of a character. Austen outlines characters' social connections in detail. In "Emma" the reader is exposed to a wide spectrum of hierarchical society: the gentry, the near-gentry, professionals, artisans, servants and the undeserving poor. While social contact between these groups is frequent in a small village, transition between groups was uncommon. For example, Emma, a member of the gentry, dines with the Coles, "rising" members of the near-gentry, but she marries Knightley, a member of the gentry, who feels free to dine with Robert Martin, one of his tenant farmers.