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from want’, but it is ‘uncertain of giving happiness’ (I, xxii). Elizabeth, in contrast, strongly believes in marriage as a test of personal moral integrity and in individual happiness as a legitimate goal, and that idealism is one of her most attractive traits. She is shocked when Charlotte sacrifices ‘every better feeling to worldly advantage’ (I, xxii); and, against the advice of her milder and more conventionally passive sister Jane, she condemns the ‘want of proper resolution’ which almost leads Bingley to ‘sacrifice his own happiness’ (and Jane’s) to the whim of others (II, i). Elizabeth’s ‘prepossession and ignorance’ may need some corrective redirection, but her idealism and readiness to judge responsibly remain intact. And when she acknowledges Darcy as her true object of desire, the plot tells us, that idealism finds its proper fulfilment. Elizabeth’s lively individuality – her ‘shining talent’, to use More’s terminology – is provided with an appropriate ‘stage’ when she marries Darcy and becomes mistress of the ‘comfort and elegance of their family party at Pemberley’ (III, xviii).
    Unlike More, then,
Pride and Prejudice
makes a very clear connection between a (slightly chastened) ‘independence of mind’ and women’s individual happiness. Unlike Wollstonecraft, however, it finds women’s ‘independence of mind’, their opportunities for rational self-improvement, entirely compatible with marrying ‘advantageously’. From their very different political standpoints, both More and Wollstonecraft condemned romance fiction for diverting women’s energies from more appropriate objects: for More, romantic fantasies deflect women from their duty as the moral centre of the nation; for Wollstonecraft, they reduce women to ‘abject wooers and fondslaves’. A preoccupation with novels, she argues, tends to ‘make women the creatures of sensation’; it ‘relaxes the other powers of the mind’. 20 Begun in the 1790s but completed in the later, post-revolutionary, period, Austen’s novel has assimilated both positions and moved on. It dares to close the gap between ‘splendid romance’ and ‘true history’. Unlike More, for whom happiness was a state of necessary constraint, or Wollstonecraft, for whom it was deferred until some revolutionary future, Austen’s romantic comedy makes fulfilment seem both legitimate and attainable in the present. Rather than condemning the pleasures of fantasy,
Pride and Prejudice
directs those energies to a carefully redefined fantasy object: through the ideal of ‘rational happiness’, it persuades women of their active role in a revitalized version of Burke’s ‘little platoon’.
    So far, in exploring
Pride and Prejudice
as a post-revolutionary romance, I have focused on gender: on Elizabeth as an early-nineteenth-century equivalent of the ‘post-feminist’ heroine. I want now to consider the wider social meaning, the class allegiance and the literary precedents implicit in the alliance between Elizabeth’s new femininity and Darcy’s ancient family. In spite of her independence of mind, Elizabeth’s marriage is in some ways strikingly conventional – so much so that it thrills Mrs Bennet much more than the marriages of either Lydia or Jane: ‘“Jane’s is nothing to it – nothing at all”’ (III, xvii). Like a good daughter, Elizabeth marries above her, and secures upward social mobility, as well as financial advantage, for herself and her family.
    Marriage to Darcy represents a particularly impressive example of this standard female route to social improvement. Indeed, Elizabeth could be said to repeat the spectacular success of Pamela, the serving-girl who marries the master of the house in Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel
Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded
, published in 1740. Pamela withstands physical assaults, abduction and attempted rape from Mr B. for so long and with such moral firmness that he eventually