Unmarriageable(107)

Alys Binat – she’d chosen to keep her maiden name post marriage – and Valentine Darsee walked hand in hand in Jane Austen’s House Museum, in Chawton village, on their holiday in England. It was the cottage that Jane’s elder brother had given his widowed mother and two sisters, Jane and Cassandra, to live in, and where Jane had written and revised many of her novels.

Alys ran her hand over the outside walls, the main door, the guest book, which she signed. She would never forget that Darsee had arranged this surprise visit for her birthday. Next they were going to Bath, Lyme Regis, Steventon, Winchester, and other Austen stops. Alys made a mental note to pick up souvenirs from each place, for her and Sherry’s thriving bookstore.

Alys squeezed Darsee’s hand and he smiled at her as they moved from room to room. She thought of her favourite line in Pride and Prejudice: ‘For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?’ She thought of Jane’s mother and elder sister, both named Cassandra, outliving their beloved Jane, her father, George Austen, her brothers, James, George, Edward, Henry, Frank, and Charles, cousin Eliza, and of Martha and Mary Lloyd and Anne Sharp, Jane’s friends. Of Harris Bigg-Wither, whose claim to fame was to be Jane Austen’s fiancé of one night. She thought of Jane dead at forty-one and yet so very much alive in novel after novel.

Alys thought of the fictional Bennet daughters: Jane, Elizabeth, Kitty, Mary, and Lydia. She thought of Mrs Bennet and Mr Bennet. Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy. Mrs Lucas and Mr Lucas and Maria and – her favourite character – Charlotte. Mr Collins. Mrs and Mr Gardiner. Aunt Phillips. Of Charles Bingley. Caroline Bingley. Mrs Hurst and her husband. Catherine de Bourgh and Anne de Bourgh. Colonel Fitzwilliam. She thought of the servants: Mrs Hill and Mrs Jenkinson and Mrs Reynolds, the housekeeper at Pemberley, whose high praise of Mr Darcy had made all the difference.

Alys thought of Jane Austen in this living room, at this small round wooden table, her inkpot, her paper, the gliding of her fingers, her mind conjuring up lives, story after story, smiling, laughing even, at something Mrs Bennet said, something she’d made Mrs Bennet say. Mrs Bennet, the world’s worst mother but also perhaps the best mother because all she wanted was for her daughters to live happy, successful lives according to her times.

Alys looked up at Darsee and she wondered how this had happened, how he had got so lucky to have her marry him (oh, how lucky was she). Then they were in front of the cabinet displaying different editions of Jane Austen’s novels. Her gaze rested on the first page of the universally beloved novel Pride and Prejudice. Alys took Darsee’s hand and together their fingers traced over that most famous of first lines, the one she still assigned students in her literature classes to reimagine as they saw fit:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.





PRIDE AND PREJUDICE AND ME





I first immersed myself in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice when I was sixteen years old. As interesting as its marriage plot was, I was spellbound, rather, by Austen’s social criticism and how it was conveyed through her pithy wit. Here was a centuries-old English writer who may as well have been writing about contemporary Pakistani society. As a postcolonial child who grew up in the 1980s and was educated in Pakistan’s English medium system, I was well versed in classic English poets and novelists. For fun, I read Enid Blyton, and because I studied for some years in an international school in Saudi Arabia, American authors such as Judy Blume. While these storytellers spoke of boarding-school midnight feasts and bras and busts, it was Jane Austen’s wit and wisdom that first encouraged me to think critically about patriarchal society; a woman’s traditional role; the ties of family, friends, and frenemies; and the cost of keeping up appearances. As her stories skewered pretentious hypocrites, Austen’s sharp pen drew a map for what marriage and compromise, silence and speaking up, meant, and her satirical insights on how to acknowledge drawing-room duplicity while still finding a way to laugh afforded comfort and solace.

Mrs Bennet was like too many mothers I’d grown up around, those obsessed with getting their daughters married off because that was what ‘good mothers’ did. As for ‘good girls’, they obeyed their mothers, regardless of what they themselves wanted. But Elizabeth Bennet was a girl we wanted to be like, to arrive at a Netherfield Park in a muddy gown without a care for Pakistani society’s quintessential cry of Log kya kahenge?, ‘What will people say?’ In a country where marriages continue to be arranged on the basis of convenience, pedigrees, and bank balances, Elizabeth’s spurning of the self-righteous Mr Collins and the pompous Mr Darcy were defiant acts we could look up to. According to Pakistani society, both ‘boys’ would have made very suitable matches for Elizabeth, but – gasp – she said no, because she didn’t believe they were right for her. Yes, Austen’s novels end in the happily-ever-after of marriage, but these were marriages of the heroine’s own choosing, after the hero had earned her respect, and they were based on both bride and groom liking each other. The marriages in Austen’s novels gave me hope that there were good men to be found, and I wanted to pay tribute to that.

There were also other characters and situations in Pride and Prejudice that leapt out as mirroring Pakistani society. There was Lydia, who’d run off with Mr Wickham, and whose whole family was terrified that if he didn’t marry her, she’d be ruined and so would they. Was there any worry more Pakistani than the concern about what might bring a family honour or dishonour? There was sensible Charlotte Lucas, who made an expedient marriage for every reason but love. Was there anything more Pakistani than her calculated, ‘arranged’ marriage? And there was Caroline Bingley, a snob disdainful of anyone who was not landed gentry or who hadn’t inherited money – never mind that she herself was not landed gentry, since her wealth came via trade. Was there anything more apropos to Pakistan than class issues, snootiness, and double standards?