• DOI:10.1086/390617
• Corpus ID: 162238146

Intelligence in "Pride and Prejudice"

@article{Morgan1975IntelligenceI,
  title={Intelligence in "Pride and Prejudice"},
  author={Susan J. Morgan},
  journal={Modern Philology},
  year={1975},
  volume={73},
  pages={54 - 68}
}

• Susan J. Morgan
• Published 1 August 1975
• Art
• Modern Philology

Pride and Prejudice has a charmed place as the most popular of Jane Austen's novels. Its heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, witty, self-confident, with those dancing eyes, and not quite beautiful face, depicts for us all that is flawed and irresistible about real people. Lionel Trilling has observed about Emma that we like Mr. Knightley "because we perceive that he cherishes Emma not merely in spite of her subversive self-assertion but because of it."' This applies to Mr. Darcy as well, and Elizabeth, perfectly aware of it, cannot resist inquiring when she demands an account of his having fallen in love with her: "Did you admire me for my impertinence?"'2 Her impertinence, of course, is why generations of readers have admired her and why we recognize that the major concern of the book is with the possibilities and responsibility of free and lively thought. Pride and Prejudice explores the special question of the meaning of freedom, given the premise which Jane Austen assumes throughout her fiction, that the relation between a character and public reality is at once problematic and necessary. We watch Elizabeth as she moves from a belief in her own logic to a more fluid interpretation of knowing and of intelligence in terms of the backgrounds, contexts, and particulars which inform truth. And we learn to acknowledge that the pressing importance of such a movement rests not in our hopes for being right but in our hopes for being free.