The endings

Four unions

Austen’s plot is a marriage market, but her argument is about what kind of marriage is fit to live in. Esteem, sweetness, prudence, scandal — four ways a culture that must marry actually does.

A match of esteem · Esteem

Elizabeth & Darcy

The marriage the book is for

They begin as a mutual misreading: her liveliness reads as impertinence; his silence reads as pride. The first proposal is an inventory of her inferior connections. The second is an inventory of his own faults. Austen’s happiest ending is not that fortune finds a wife, but that two people become fit to live with each other.

“I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.”
Darcy, on falling in love

A match of esteem · Sweetness

Jane & Bingley

The match the neighbourhood applauds

Equal temper, equal goodness, a comfortable income. It is almost too easy — which is why it almost fails. Jane’s composure looks like indifference; Bingley’s amiability looks like weakness. Their marriage restores the comic plot the opening line promised, without answering the harder questions Elizabeth has to.

“Jane could have no reserves, no doubts, that she did not love him.”
The narrator

A match of provision · Prudence

Charlotte & Collins

The comfortable home

Not a love match and not a tragedy. Charlotte manages Collins the way a clever woman manages weather: she gardens, she visits, she arranges her hours so as not to hear him. Austen’s point is not that Charlotte is cold. It is that the culture offered her almost no other weather.

“Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.”
Charlotte Lucas

A match of necessity · Scandal

Lydia & Wickham

The ruin that has to be paid for

The youngest Bennet elopes. In this culture that is not an adventure; it is a stain that can close every sister’s chance. Darcy pays Wickham to marry her — the fortune doing, in secret, what the opening line said it would do in public. Austen is unsparing: charm without principle is a debt someone else will settle.

“How little of permanent happiness could belong to a couple who were only brought together because their passions were stronger than their virtue.”
The narrator