Pride and Prejudice — who's who

The novel's intelligence and its moral centre. Twenty years old, quick-witted, fond of laughing at absurdity including her own. Forms catastrophically wrong first impressions of both Darcy and Wickham and spends most of the novel revising them. Her self-recognition in Chapter 36, reading Darcy's letter, is one of the great moments of moral growth in the English novel.

The most beautiful and the most consistently charitable. Falls in love with Bingley at the first ball, endures his apparently inexplicable withdrawal, and is vindicated at the end. The emotional counterweight to Elizabeth — Jane suffers quietly where Elizabeth suffers combatively.

Sardonic, ironic, retreated from family life into his library and his wit. Fond of Elizabeth to the exclusion of his other daughters. The novel holds him quietly responsible for Lydia — his detachment from domestic management is part of what makes the Wickham elopement possible.

Fifteen, loud, reckless, entirely without self-regulation. Her elopement with Wickham is the novel's central crisis. She emerges from it married, cheerful, and entirely unchanged — which is the novel's unspoken comment on what happens when irresponsibility goes unchecked.

Ten thousand a year. Proud, reserved, and initially insufferable to everyone except the reader of the second half of the novel, who has access to his letter and his conduct at Pemberley. The second proposal in Chapter 58 is the measured reverse-image of the disaster in Chapter 34.

Opens charming, turns villain. His story of ill-treatment by Darcy is almost entirely false. The Lydia elopement is the second version of the same pattern — this time it succeeds. Darcy pays his debts to make the marriage happen.

Collins is the heir to the entailed estate, a pompous fool in Lady Catherine's living. Lady Catherine is Darcy's aunt, the novel's sharpest piece of class satire. Together they give the novel its comic backbone. Collins's proposal in Chapter 19 and Lady Catherine's visit in Chapter 56 are two of the great comic scenes in English fiction.