It was nice to have a happy ending.

Jane and Darcy lose their pride and their prejudice, and are happy because of each other. Truly loving another is the only way anyone overcomes the obstacles of society at that time. Mr. Bennet loves Elizabeth, and he is happy when he is with her and away from his dreadful wife. His wife might not be capable of true love. She is perfectly content with money and a high social status, but she probably will never be happy like Elizabeth and Jane.

Austen continues to mock the flawed characters of the novel. Mr. Bennet advises Collins to "stand by the nephew. He has more to give" (287). Collins' "parading and obsequious civility" after receiving this letter shows he took the advice. After an entire novel of his grovelling at Lady Catherine's feet, he switches in a second to give all his praise to another person of higher rank, as soon as he has the chance. Despite his excessive sucking-up, everyone hates him. Elizabeth, who was honest and defied the social hierarchy, ended up happier than anyone. I think Austen wants to make a point that social class should not matter. Pride, however is necessarily not a bad thing. Look at Lydia and Wickham. They are about as far from living in a situation that anyone would remotely desire as Charlotte Lucas.

Charlotte Lucas's character confuses me. She accepted Mr. Collins solely because of his money and connections, so it is not surprising that she did end up happily. The reason her character is interesting to me though is that while her acceptance of Collins seems stupid, she probably did not have any better options. I think Charlotte represents the most pessimistic side to an otherwise very optimistic novel. No one better than Mr. Collins would probably have ever proposed to Charlotte, so what should she have done? Elizabeth turned down Collins, but she was not as desperate as Charlotte. However, Elizabeth would not have known that there would be a man like Darcy who would look beyond her social class and love her for her personality, so maybe she was in a similar situation to Charlotte's.

I think another interesting aspect of Pride and Prejudice is the importance of family. Mrs. Bennet wants only to marry her daughters off so she might rise in social class. Mr. Bennet loves Elizabeth because she is "has something more of quickness than her sisters," but he does not especially love anyone else in his family (2). Lady Catherine only has a strong relationship with Darcy because he is in a high social class. She wants Darcy to marry her daughter so that her social class can improve. It seems that the only way to have a strong family is to have parents that love each other, but I am not sure of that because no one who actually loved each other in the story had kids.

I liked this book.