Baby, It's Cold Outside

Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife, Chapter Thirteen. So, What Happened?

While Darcy rides off to “see to things” as the last chapter described, Elizabeth has not been idle. After breakfast, she sits with the housekeeper Mrs. Reynolds to learn…something? It’s not clear what, but Mrs. Reynolds has a handbook about it:

At her ready was a red leather folio, in it well-worn sheets of vellum detailing the staggering number of duties that fell to Pemberley’s mistress.

Elizabeth is intimidated by all of whatever is in there, but she cheers up when Darcy returns from his morning of whatever it is he does, and suggests a picnic lunch, outside, in the north of England, during the little ice age, in the middle of winter. Elizabeth agrees, and they get down to it, and are about to get down to more when they’re interrupted by a poacher, who Darcy lets off with a glare, as apparently the family generally ignores poachers.

The poacher is further dispatched by Tom Reed, the nefarious footman we met in a previous chapter, who is also the latest man to find Elizabeth the most dazzling woman he’s ever seen, despite nobody in Pride and Prejudice ever having this reaction to her. Reed had followed Darcy and Elizabeth so he could watch them have sex outside, in the north of England, during the little ice age, in the middle of winter. It is there that we leave them.

What’s Obviously Wrong Here?

That folio. What’s in it?

It seems to be instructions? Advice? To-do lists? Left by Darcy’s mother. There’s enough there that Elizabeth is a bit overwhelmed, and enough that even the late Lady Anne either needed reminders or thought her successor might need them. But what advice is in there? What would Elizabeth, the new Mrs. Darcy, actually need to do? What are her duties?

We never find out in this book. The Elizabeth in this sequel will not do much of anything, apart from some Lady Bountiful-esque charity work that mostly consists of paying visits. She does not seem to involve herself much in hosting or planning social engagements - they will appear to happen on their own without her input, and she attends them like a guest rather than a hostess: one gets the impression she doesn’t learn most people’s names. She doesn’t go to any effort to get to know her neighbors, with only one real exception.

What did a woman like this do? Well, she didn’t do much, but she did some things, most of them the things I just mentioned Elizabeth not doing. She hosted. She paid calls. She did charity work for tenants - but probably in a fairly organized way, with the assistance of the housekeeper. She made sure the house was well-decorated and did not fall out of date. She kept up with family correspondence, sharing news of her own family and receiving news of other families. She would - and the end of Pride and Prejudice itself suggests Elizabeth took to this aspect of the role rather well - act as a kind of social lubricant for her husband, managing his family relationships and acting as an intermediary between him and others. All of that is real, and as we get further into this novel we won’t see Elizabeth do any of it.

But even if we did - even if Lady Anne’s big book of advice just had stuff about remembering to buy Christmas gifts for the servants and remembering to host a ball at the end of every harvest and what to serve there and who to invite, none of it ought to be a shock to Elizabeth. It would all be what her mother did, on a smaller scale, at Longbourn: hosting guests, managing a household, and managing a family’s relationships. We don’t see much evidence that Mrs. Bennet was very good at this, but that’s the thing - she didn’t really need to be. She had a housekeeper for the hard parts. Elizabeth will have even more help.

I can buy Elizabeth being a little overwhelmed regardless, of course. Going from single life to married life would have been a significant change for a young woman like her; observing your mother is not the same as doing the work yourself. But none of it should have been a shock to her; she knew what being married meant. Like the previous chapter, this strikes me as Berdoll feeling an Americanish ambivalence about her characters’ class positions, leading her to overstate the responsibilities of their lives, without wanting to give up the wish-fulfillment of letting the two main characters have nothing but free time for sex and self-indulgence. So we hear that they have so much to do, but we never really see them doing any of it, because if we did we might think - rightly - that it doesn’t sound so onerous at all.

That’s just some of what’s wrong with this chapter, though. The big thing is this:

So little did he like the weaving of tales, he abruptly altered the subject. "Pray, shall we picnic?"

Why would Darcy ever want to eat outside in the middle of winter?

And there simply isn’t a way it’s not the middle of winter. Previously in this space, I linked to a very thorough timeline of Pride and Prejudice, which places Elizabeth’s and Darcy’s engagement at, at the latest, the beginning of October. And as Elizabeth mentions inviting her Gardiner relatives to Pemberley for Christmas, they must be married before the end of December. Which would put us now in either November or December. You can see that timeline here.

In this very book, Berdoll describes the engagement as lasting two months. So it must be December now. And when we visited Wickham in Newcastle, it was explicitly stated to be the middle of a cold winter. And make no mistake, it would have been a cold one. Regardless of the exact year in which you place P&P, it can’t be any later than the early 19th century, and at that point the world was still in what is now called the Little Ice Age. Rivers in England froze during the winter. Harvest seasons were short. Derbyshire in December would have been likely snow covered. The winter of 1812-1813, when this is likely set, was particularly harsh. A picnic outside might have been possible, but Darcy would hardly remove his jacket and lie on the ground for it. It would have simply been too cold.

And see, it’s not that I don’t think Berdoll thought about any of this. That’s the frustrating thing about this book; there’s obviously a certain amount of research done into all kinds of things, but it’s all stuck in a blender and everything comes out not making much sense. If you want them to picnic outside, don’t set it in the winter. Or at least write it well enough so that I don’t notice. If the book is good enough, you don’t notice stuff like this.

Purple Prose: What’s the Worst Written Line in the Chapter?

The line I want to discuss isn’t flowery; it isn’t even especially memorable. In fact, I mentioned it above, and will again here:

"Pray, shall we picnic?"

This isn’t quite right, and that’s the unifying theme of this chapter and maybe the book as a whole. Things are almost, but not quite right. “Pray” as an interjection while asking a question seems kind of old-fashioned, kind of 19th century, and that’s pretty clearly why Berdoll is using it. But she’s using it wrong. “Pray,” as an interjection, was meant for requests, usually ones that were made with some humility. In Pride and Prejudice itself, it’s just about always used as a shortened form of “pray tell,” meaning that a person is asking for information. That’s what the word is for: when you’re asking someone to do something for you, like tell you something. The closest synonym would be “please.”

Darcy is making a request here, kind of, but he’s not actually asking Elizabeth to tell him something or do something for him, and he’s definitely not asking as a supplicant - Berdoll even tells us that he had every expectation of Elizabeth agreeing because he assumes everyone will agree to everything he says. He’s not asking “pray tell, shall we picnic” because that doesn’t make any sense, he’s not asking Elizabeth what’s going to happen but suggesting something to her that she hadn’t thought of. The meaning Darcy seems to be going for is something like an interjection used as a conversation smoother, something like “hey” or “oh,” or somebody’s name. “Darling, shall we picnic” is what he means.

This is what comes of using words because you think they sound like something someone would say, rather than because you know what the word means and want to convey that meaning and not another one. It’s small, but it’s indicative of a larger problem with the text.

Asshole Award: Who Acts the Most Like a Jerk, or the Least Like Themselves?

It’s got to be Darcy, though there’s not much to say about it. He merely continues to be extremely high-handed, which is annoying even if it’s not entirely out of character. I can buy a Darcy who makes decisions without consulting anyone about them, even his wife. But the Darcy we see at the end of P&P is solicitous of Elizabeth’s opinion almost to a fault; he’s been burned before by his tendency to assume he knew what she wanted. He doesn’t want to do it again. He’s not all the way there, maybe, but he’s learning, and she loves him for that. That Darcy, the one who’s learned and developed, is nowhere in this book.

Hey Look, a Plot: How Class Differences are Portrayed in this Chapter?

I’m going to give Linda credit for something probably accidental: she’s good, in a Julian Fellowes kind of way, at portraying how the very rich keep their hands clean and let lower class people do their dirty work.

In the case of both Linda Berdoll and Julian Fellowes, I suspect it has more to do with loving their upper class characters too much to allow them dirty hands. But if you’re inclined to look there’s something a little sordid about it; the way that Darcy can look menacingly at a poacher on his property and no more, feeling good about both his power and his mercy, and then forget it ever happened while his footman beats the shit out of the guy. The problem gets taken care by a grunting, lustful, barely literate sadist, and Darcy gets to have sex outside without being bothered. He doesn't look like a good landlord here; he looks spoiled and soft-handed, somebody too fine to do the hard parts of ownership himself. Which, hey: most (all) of the men of his class were in fact just like that. But that doesn't seem to be what Berdoll was going for.

Related to this, I don’t believe the nonsense about the Darcy family generally ignoring poachers on their property. I mean, I don’t think Darcy himself would ever be out looking for them, but the estate would have employed gamekeepers and groundskeepers whose job it was to account for the animals on the property and make sure they were only hunted by the owner and his guests. An estate’s value lay in what was within it, not just the farmland but everything: that’s what enclosure means, and that’s why the historical process of enclosure was so disruptive.

Only a very, very desperate, hungry or stupid man would have ventured onto Pemberley land to hunt without permission, and Darcy would have known that. If the man was a tenant, the conscientious landlord that Austen wrote would have felt some responsibility for that hunger or desperation. There’s none of that here, as in general there’s no sense of Darcy as a member of a vast social ecosystem that largely depends on his whims. Once again, Berdoll’s conception of Darcy’s power seems to be located entirely within Darcy’s person; his power emanates from his individual character and stature rather than from his social position. This is, as the kids say, what no material analysis does to a motherfucker.

Hey Look, a Plot: Does Anything in This Chapter Move the Story Forward?

Once again, the plot of this book is Elizabeth and Darcy Do It All Over Pemberley, so there’s more of that, but more importantly here we get the first glimpse of Reed’s attraction to Elizabeth, which will come up again in various dramatic ways, as will the trend of every man in England being immediately smitten with Elizabeth.