In Praise of Mrs. Bennet

Why She's Pride and Prejudice's Unsung Heroine

Mrs. Bennet, portrayed by Alison Steadman in Pride and Prejudice (BBC, 1995)

I just had a daughter, and I feel like I’ve become a mother for the first time again, even though I already have a boy toddler. I think there’s something different about being a girl mum, knowing that my daughter may one day have the same experience of motherhood that I’m now having with her. Since the day I gave birth to her just last week, I’ve not been able to stop thinking about Pride and Prejudice’s Mrs. Bennet, possibly the most derided mother character in any of Jane Austen’s novels. Every single person I’ve discussed Austen with, in real life or online, seems to think that Mrs. Bennet is the silliest woman to ever exist. Indeed, even Austen - notably someone who never became a mother herself - seems to think so. At the end of the first chapter of Pride and Prejudice, Austen’s omniscient narrator describes Mrs. Bennet as ‘a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper’ who ‘fancied herself nervous’ when ‘she was discontented’, and whose life’s ‘business’ was ‘to get her daughters married’. Our view of Mrs. Bennet is set from that moment onwards, and does not change for the rest of the novel. Readers have interpreted her actions, especially her insistence on Lizzie marrying Mr. Collins, as opportunistic, even mercenary. In her approval of Mr. Wickham, even after the discovery of his wicked ways, she is seen as either willfully blind or inexcusably stupid.

Now, I’m not saying any of that is necessarily wrong. I also don’t actually think she’s the unsung heroine of Pride and Prejudice as my provocative subtitle suggests (sorry, I guess this is my first clickbait). She is silly, and she is ridiculous. But what I do want to do, is defend Mrs. Bennet from the view there there is no common sense in her, and that all her actions and thoughts are entirely irrational. Before getting married and having kids, I only understood Lizzie’s point of view. But now, as a mother, it seems entirely reasonable to me that Mrs. Bennet would dramatically fuss over her daughters’ marriage prospects, since, at the time, a suitable marriage would quite literally the deciding factor in whether a young woman would have long term financial stability or not. That may seem mercenary to young, careless, single people, which as readers of Austen we all are at one point in our lives. However, things change once you reread Austen as a parent. It’s easy for Mr. Bennet to laugh at his wife’s nervous disposition; by the time his wife and daughters are turned out of their house by Mr. Collins, he will have passed away. He won’t have to worry about their sustenance anymore. But imagine being a mother - you don’t have to if you’re already one, of course - and fearing that the children you bore and gave birth to, breastfed and raised, will end up utterly destitute at worst, or live on very diminished means at best. If that fear was a real possibility - and it is in Pride and Prejudice - you would probably also complain of your ‘poor nerves’ all the time.

Being a mother is beautiful, but it is also all-consuming. When I explain to my husband that I can’t think of my children as entirely separate people from me, but rather as a part of me, he only kind of understands what I mean. Because he wasn’t pregnant with them and didn’t birth them, he just doesn’t have the same visceral, physical experience of parenthood. And I can tell you, the thought of my children not being cared or provided for one day, is truly intolerable. So, I can confidently say something I never thought I would: I understand Mrs. Bennet, and in some ways I relate to her. If her business is getting her daughters married, it’s because she feels and thinks like a mother. Sure, she goes about it in an (often) ineffective way, but who among us is perfect as a mother? If she is crazy, it’s because having kids makes you so. If she makes mistakes, she’s no different from every other parent. So let’s not judge her too harshly: most of us would also act at least occasionally crazy if we had the happiness of five daughters to worry about.