I would like to see Pride & Prejudice told from Mrs Bennett's perspective. Austen's determination to make the reader despise her has always bothered me.
Absolutely brilliant. Going to have to reread P&P. In the first clip, the proposal scene, seems there’s an inkling of that woundedness in the final seconds when he’s by himself.
P&P has always been my favorite novel and all the characters have had time in my thoughts as I've read and reread the book over the years. I believe I've had acquaintance with more than one Mr Collins and as a teenager was sought after by at least one. Because he was a "nice" boy and mannerly, not obsequious like Mr C, my mother rather hoped that I would like Kingsley and want to be with him. However, even in his milder form of Mr Cism he was hard to want to be with and made most of us girls behave like the Bennett sisters and become all giggly and roll our eyes skyward. I don't know how he turned out, but at no point ever could I imagine much time with him. I love this take on Mr C and am enjoying visualizing changes in the man, which is a good exercise for the mind. Due to her own upbringing and the company she was in most often I'm sure Jane saw a plethora of the characteristics that came together in the form of Mr Collins. I have always been disappointed that Charlotte had so little emotion and wondered if it had all spent out during her younger years leaving her emotional account such a little balance at this time.
Great post. Agree he must have been quite unloved from the beginning. I think it would take a seismic period of anguish and despair to realize that the status quo isn't working in any area of his life. If he were to recognize that dark hole, see how others react to him and not blame others and turn to the God he professes to believe, then he can surely be resurrected, since "where there is life there is hope." But I think it would be very hard to do that if you've never known love at any level. Yes, Collins is a very tragic figure - one that probably most of us recognize as having met in our lives, or recognized in ourselves to some degree. Lord, help us to see ourselves in truth!
This article is not just brilliant but also a true lesson in how to write an essay about a literary masterpiece. As someone in search of models myself, I must thank you for providing me with such an exemplary essay. Congratulations from the bottom of my heart!
I never thought I'd want to reread "Pride and Prejudice" for Mr. Collins, but now I do! You imagined a great crisis that would make him experience suffering at last, but I think he starts suffering even before his first appearance in the novel (from his "miserly and illiterate" father, as you point out) and continues suffering long after. He just doesn't seem to be, because he isn't in touch with it. A defense mechanism, perhaps, because if he admits to himself how miserable and humiliated he actually feels, would he even have the emotional and spiritual tools to help himself?
The character of Mr. Collins always seemed to me to be a brilliantly drawn caricature, someone I like to cringe about when remembering him. I am hard-pressed to imagine what would have redeemed him, but I like your attempt. My only thought along those lines is that people like Mr. Collins and Mrs. Bennett sometimes take to acting ridiculous when they know that people think them unattractive or stupid. And when you aren't valued and you don't have any money of your own, you try to do what Mr. Collins did so unctuously and associate yourself with someone like Mrs. Catherine De Bourg. He owed his job to her, and he was ridiculously excessively grateful. Mrs. Bennett was preoccupied with getting good husbands for her five daughters, who would be doomed to live a life of poverty if they didn't marry. And if one of them didn't marry there would be no support for her when widowed. She must have known her husband despised her, although there was no overt cruelty. That would unsettle a woman. His smirking was even more wrong because there must have been some spark between them since they had five daughters together.
Elizabeth's superior eye-rolling and smirking remind me of one of my relatives, who likes to make other people out to be fools. Granted that Elizabeth has many admirable qualities, she is so well depicted that her flaws are evident too. She is a favorite with her father, who because he despises her mother spends most of his time away from her the way Charlotte avoids Mr. Collins. I would like Elizabeth and her father better if they were merciful and lovingly respectful to the mother. And I would admire the father more if he did not allow his flighty younger daughters to run wild and risk their reputations and the family's shame.
The upper-class English at the time of Austen's novels were still living off the wealth from the lands obtained from the dissolution of the monasteries three hundred years earlier after the monastic lands were distributed to nobles and gentry who supported Henry VIII. The moderately prosperous Mr. Bennett has no social value, he doesn't do anything, and nobody
expects Mr. Bennett to work for a living. Mr. Collins has a "living" as a curate, which means he
lives off the tithes of those who live on the estate where he is the curate.
A calling to be a curate was not looked on as a religious calling, just as a job that was usually
taken by a son of a wealthy family who did not inherit the estate. So, men like Mr. Collins did lip service to their jobs and cultivated hobbies like gardening instead of living as priests, praying the liturgical hours, and taking care of the people under his charge. His character is formed by the society around him, which was post-Catholic, and therefore, without the sacraments and graces obtained from the Church, men like him were not Christian. Come to think of it, being a committed Christian is what would have saved him.
My wife and my three daughters love Jane Austin, but I have not ever read her books. In May 2008 we visited her tomb in Winchester Cathedral and took a bus and a long walk in the rain to visit her home. Be that as it may, this essay is brilliant.
Hilary, very coincidental that you are writing about Mr. Collins, because I was just having a discussion about him with a friend and I collected a bunch of references. Specifically, I was talking about how the adaptations of Pride & Prejudice turn Mr. Collins and also Mr. Darcy into shallow tropes which weaken the other characters.
The adaptations of Pride & Prejudice, mostly the 1998 BBC miniseries and the 2005 movie, make Mr. Collins far older and more physically repugnant than what is in the book. Mr. Collins was actually 25, younger than Darcy (27), Charlotte (27), and only 5 years older than Lizzie (20). Mr. Collins was also tall in the books, though he is portrayed as very short in the 2005 movie.
“I really dislike the way most adaptations have presented Mr. Collins. It seems like they want to lean into the Gross Older Relation I Must Marry trope but that is NOT what is happening in the novel and I think it’s more significant to recognize the truth: Mr. Collins is not gross, ugly, or old! Elizabeth did not turn him down based on his appearance but because they were intellectually incompatible. […]
However, Elizabeth understands that without intellectual compatibility, she will be unhappy. She wants a husband she can respect. This is what makes her a heroine. By making Collins old, ugly, creepy, or kind of gross, the adaptations actually erase a lot of Elizabeth’s motivations and strength. The reaction to Collins becomes more visceral than intellectual, and that’s a problem.”
The ruining of Mr. Collins also weakens the characters of Elizabeth, Mrs. Bennett, Charlotte, and makes marriage look bad in general. In the adaptations, Mr. Collins comes off as obviously unsuitable, and Lizzie’s rejection looks like a slam dunk. Mrs. Bennett looks like a scheming monster for trying to set her daughter up with him. Charlotte looks like a loser for having to submit to a marriage of convenience with an abominable older man. Any kind of marriage based on convenience or pragmatism—aka most real-world marriages—look bad, a relic of the dark ages.
The reality is that Mr. Collins was not unsuitable as a match for Lizzie. He was a good match, Mrs. Bennett was being a good mother in trying to encourage it, and Lizzie was taking a real risk by rejecting the marriage over personality incompatibility. Charlotte was getting a good deal, and while she studiously avoided her husband due his excesses, she was “cheerful” and not miserable in the marriage.
In reality, many people, if they are to marry, will need to make compromises. Many married people can find the other spouses’ habits and favorite topics annoying, yet these marriages can still be successful without the spouses being soulmates. Yet today is an age where romantic love is the ideal, and average age of marriage is getting later and later. These adaptations are just encouraging young people to hold out for ideal romantic partners that may not exist instead of being realistic that they may have to marry a person with flaws.
The caricature of Mr. Collins is compounded by the caricature of Mr. Darcy. A team of experts did a reconstruction of Mr. Darcy, and it’s nothing like actors Colin Firth or Matthew Macfadyen. Here were their conclusions:
“The experts, including the academic John Sutherland and the historian and author Amanda Vickery, commissioned by the Drama Channel to come up with the Darcy Austen might have envisaged, conclude that a tanned complexion, broad shoulders and muscular chest would not have been seen as attractive by Austen’s Georgians, signifying a hardworking outdoor labourer, not a gentleman of leisure. They do permit him strong muscular legs, toned by horse riding and fencing, as a desirable attribute.
The ideal for gentlemanly good looks in Austen’s day, they believe, was a smooth youthful complexion, with a small pointy chin and small mouth, under hair worn long but tied back and powdered white, as seen in many aristocratic portraits.”
Another article has more background:
“"Darcy's character has been sexed up for the modern day audience with a turbo-charged injection of testosterone and steamy romance," said Amanda Vickery, a history professor at Queen Mary University of London.
"Men sported powdered hair, had narrow jaws, and muscular, defined legs were considered very attractive, a stark contrast to the chiselled, dark, brooding Colin Firth portrayal we associate the character with today.””
The Regency period in Britain had many skilled portrait artists, and we have plenty of pictorial evidence of what Regency men looked like and what was idealized. Here are some of my favorite portraitists from that period:
The adaptations of Pride and Prejudice threw British Regency portraiture in the trash in order to make Mr. Darcy a hunk from the cover of a cheap modern romance novel, hence the square jaw, excessive musculature for a gentleman, the wet shirt, and the plunging male neckline.
It’s the same trope, just slightly different amounts of chest hair.
There are many good things about the adaptations, and I am not saying that they lack merit. But Mr. Darcy and Mr. Collins were both miscast and caricatured in opposite directions: Mr. Darcy was sexed up to modern romance novel standards, and Mr. Collins was turned into a gross old man. These are very polar and portrayals, which rob respect from several other female characters, while trashing historical marriages, the Regency period, and British portraiture for purely prurient reasons.
I’ve never really thought about Mr Collins in depth before. Although I knew he was tall in the book, I don’t know that Mr Bamber’s portrayal was a total distraction from Elizabeth’s wisdom—it can be helpful in the visual arts to represent something of the internal character through the outward appearance. But perhaps I, too, am biased by the sheer delight I take in that performance. Certainly, I can see how it could be played differently for a greater emphasis on Elizabeth’s preference for love over financial security. However, I do enjoy the emphasis on Mr Collins as a rather distasteful individual.
I always want to think a book should be written about poor Mary Bennet, the bookish and tactless middle sister of the brood. I feel everyone is very unfair to her, and that what she needed was to be freed from her family and have a good university education!!! She is constantly being put down, never receives any praise, let alone understanding or kindness; so she is forced to live in her own mind and in her books, isolated as she is in the household…
This is an excellent reflection. I know an actual in the flesh Mr. Collins type, and can understand entirely how he got this way.
Picture the youngest (by a good span) son of a large wealthy family, with a fashionable, attractive, social-climbing, scheming, overbearing, controlling, and manipulative mother. His older brothers (all taller and more athletic than he) and sisters all married into more wealth, or else achieved wealth through savvy, talent, and hard work. Our Mr. Collins lacks the ambition and drive of his older siblings, and lacks the physical stature to boot (being about 5ft 5" tall), but must constantly act as though he has it. Surrounded in his youth by a family that constantly boasted of its varied successes, yet choosing a path in the humanities at a less reputable college, he constantly had to defend his own lack of worldly success by a silly boastfulness if he wanted to feel superior, or an oily unctuous servility and name dropping if he wanted to impress his economic betters.
Our own Mr. Collins, however, has more of a spine than you might think, and did not try to marry for social mobility, putting himself eventually at a distance from his family. He married quite honestly for love, and I don't think his mother ever really approved. But old behavioral ticks die hard, and even 25 years after I first met him still has the same quirks.
When I reread P&P, I think that Mr. Collins probably had an overbearing and dominating mother, and was probably the younger son who inherited little, lacked his siblings' good looks or social talents, and was reminded frequently of his "failings" by their standards, developing thereby a propensity to puff himself up and overcorrect. I thought that in time, he could probably soften. Maybe. Regardless, he does deserve some compassion.
I enjoyed this invitation to consider Mr Collins as a soul rather than a mere character for our entertainment and enlightenment. My impression is so heavily influenced by the delightful Bamber performance that I think I need to return to the book to consider it in a new light.
I’ve always found it interesting that he didn’t take an interest in Mary Bennett. They seemed so alike, at least in the miniseries. Was it because she was too plain? Or was he repulsed by a mirror image? I need to reread the book.
I would like to see Pride & Prejudice told from Mrs Bennett's perspective. Austen's determination to make the reader despise her has always bothered me.
What a magnificent, insightful essay.
Absolutely brilliant. Going to have to reread P&P. In the first clip, the proposal scene, seems there’s an inkling of that woundedness in the final seconds when he’s by himself.
P&P has always been my favorite novel and all the characters have had time in my thoughts as I've read and reread the book over the years. I believe I've had acquaintance with more than one Mr Collins and as a teenager was sought after by at least one. Because he was a "nice" boy and mannerly, not obsequious like Mr C, my mother rather hoped that I would like Kingsley and want to be with him. However, even in his milder form of Mr Cism he was hard to want to be with and made most of us girls behave like the Bennett sisters and become all giggly and roll our eyes skyward. I don't know how he turned out, but at no point ever could I imagine much time with him. I love this take on Mr C and am enjoying visualizing changes in the man, which is a good exercise for the mind. Due to her own upbringing and the company she was in most often I'm sure Jane saw a plethora of the characteristics that came together in the form of Mr Collins. I have always been disappointed that Charlotte had so little emotion and wondered if it had all spent out during her younger years leaving her emotional account such a little balance at this time.
Great post. Agree he must have been quite unloved from the beginning. I think it would take a seismic period of anguish and despair to realize that the status quo isn't working in any area of his life. If he were to recognize that dark hole, see how others react to him and not blame others and turn to the God he professes to believe, then he can surely be resurrected, since "where there is life there is hope." But I think it would be very hard to do that if you've never known love at any level. Yes, Collins is a very tragic figure - one that probably most of us recognize as having met in our lives, or recognized in ourselves to some degree. Lord, help us to see ourselves in truth!
I see a lot of Mr. Collins in myself. Pray for me!
I cringed at the title but I was won over by your compassionate discussion. Mr. Collins is so uncomfortable because we relate to him at some level.
This article is not just brilliant but also a true lesson in how to write an essay about a literary masterpiece. As someone in search of models myself, I must thank you for providing me with such an exemplary essay. Congratulations from the bottom of my heart!
Very kind, thank you.
I never thought I'd want to reread "Pride and Prejudice" for Mr. Collins, but now I do! You imagined a great crisis that would make him experience suffering at last, but I think he starts suffering even before his first appearance in the novel (from his "miserly and illiterate" father, as you point out) and continues suffering long after. He just doesn't seem to be, because he isn't in touch with it. A defense mechanism, perhaps, because if he admits to himself how miserable and humiliated he actually feels, would he even have the emotional and spiritual tools to help himself?
The character of Mr. Collins always seemed to me to be a brilliantly drawn caricature, someone I like to cringe about when remembering him. I am hard-pressed to imagine what would have redeemed him, but I like your attempt. My only thought along those lines is that people like Mr. Collins and Mrs. Bennett sometimes take to acting ridiculous when they know that people think them unattractive or stupid. And when you aren't valued and you don't have any money of your own, you try to do what Mr. Collins did so unctuously and associate yourself with someone like Mrs. Catherine De Bourg. He owed his job to her, and he was ridiculously excessively grateful. Mrs. Bennett was preoccupied with getting good husbands for her five daughters, who would be doomed to live a life of poverty if they didn't marry. And if one of them didn't marry there would be no support for her when widowed. She must have known her husband despised her, although there was no overt cruelty. That would unsettle a woman. His smirking was even more wrong because there must have been some spark between them since they had five daughters together.
Elizabeth's superior eye-rolling and smirking remind me of one of my relatives, who likes to make other people out to be fools. Granted that Elizabeth has many admirable qualities, she is so well depicted that her flaws are evident too. She is a favorite with her father, who because he despises her mother spends most of his time away from her the way Charlotte avoids Mr. Collins. I would like Elizabeth and her father better if they were merciful and lovingly respectful to the mother. And I would admire the father more if he did not allow his flighty younger daughters to run wild and risk their reputations and the family's shame.
The upper-class English at the time of Austen's novels were still living off the wealth from the lands obtained from the dissolution of the monasteries three hundred years earlier after the monastic lands were distributed to nobles and gentry who supported Henry VIII. The moderately prosperous Mr. Bennett has no social value, he doesn't do anything, and nobody
expects Mr. Bennett to work for a living. Mr. Collins has a "living" as a curate, which means he
lives off the tithes of those who live on the estate where he is the curate.
A calling to be a curate was not looked on as a religious calling, just as a job that was usually
taken by a son of a wealthy family who did not inherit the estate. So, men like Mr. Collins did lip service to their jobs and cultivated hobbies like gardening instead of living as priests, praying the liturgical hours, and taking care of the people under his charge. His character is formed by the society around him, which was post-Catholic, and therefore, without the sacraments and graces obtained from the Church, men like him were not Christian. Come to think of it, being a committed Christian is what would have saved him.
My wife and my three daughters love Jane Austin, but I have not ever read her books. In May 2008 we visited her tomb in Winchester Cathedral and took a bus and a long walk in the rain to visit her home. Be that as it may, this essay is brilliant.
Hilary, very coincidental that you are writing about Mr. Collins, because I was just having a discussion about him with a friend and I collected a bunch of references. Specifically, I was talking about how the adaptations of Pride & Prejudice turn Mr. Collins and also Mr. Darcy into shallow tropes which weaken the other characters.
The adaptations of Pride & Prejudice, mostly the 1998 BBC miniseries and the 2005 movie, make Mr. Collins far older and more physically repugnant than what is in the book. Mr. Collins was actually 25, younger than Darcy (27), Charlotte (27), and only 5 years older than Lizzie (20). Mr. Collins was also tall in the books, though he is portrayed as very short in the 2005 movie.
I found an excellent article confirming my suspicions: https://alwaysausten.com/2023/08/02/the-problem-with-portrayals-of-mr-collins/
“I really dislike the way most adaptations have presented Mr. Collins. It seems like they want to lean into the Gross Older Relation I Must Marry trope but that is NOT what is happening in the novel and I think it’s more significant to recognize the truth: Mr. Collins is not gross, ugly, or old! Elizabeth did not turn him down based on his appearance but because they were intellectually incompatible. […]
However, Elizabeth understands that without intellectual compatibility, she will be unhappy. She wants a husband she can respect. This is what makes her a heroine. By making Collins old, ugly, creepy, or kind of gross, the adaptations actually erase a lot of Elizabeth’s motivations and strength. The reaction to Collins becomes more visceral than intellectual, and that’s a problem.”
The ruining of Mr. Collins also weakens the characters of Elizabeth, Mrs. Bennett, Charlotte, and makes marriage look bad in general. In the adaptations, Mr. Collins comes off as obviously unsuitable, and Lizzie’s rejection looks like a slam dunk. Mrs. Bennett looks like a scheming monster for trying to set her daughter up with him. Charlotte looks like a loser for having to submit to a marriage of convenience with an abominable older man. Any kind of marriage based on convenience or pragmatism—aka most real-world marriages—look bad, a relic of the dark ages.
The reality is that Mr. Collins was not unsuitable as a match for Lizzie. He was a good match, Mrs. Bennett was being a good mother in trying to encourage it, and Lizzie was taking a real risk by rejecting the marriage over personality incompatibility. Charlotte was getting a good deal, and while she studiously avoided her husband due his excesses, she was “cheerful” and not miserable in the marriage.
In reality, many people, if they are to marry, will need to make compromises. Many married people can find the other spouses’ habits and favorite topics annoying, yet these marriages can still be successful without the spouses being soulmates. Yet today is an age where romantic love is the ideal, and average age of marriage is getting later and later. These adaptations are just encouraging young people to hold out for ideal romantic partners that may not exist instead of being realistic that they may have to marry a person with flaws.
The caricature of Mr. Collins is compounded by the caricature of Mr. Darcy. A team of experts did a reconstruction of Mr. Darcy, and it’s nothing like actors Colin Firth or Matthew Macfadyen. Here were their conclusions:
“The experts, including the academic John Sutherland and the historian and author Amanda Vickery, commissioned by the Drama Channel to come up with the Darcy Austen might have envisaged, conclude that a tanned complexion, broad shoulders and muscular chest would not have been seen as attractive by Austen’s Georgians, signifying a hardworking outdoor labourer, not a gentleman of leisure. They do permit him strong muscular legs, toned by horse riding and fencing, as a desirable attribute.
The ideal for gentlemanly good looks in Austen’s day, they believe, was a smooth youthful complexion, with a small pointy chin and small mouth, under hair worn long but tied back and powdered white, as seen in many aristocratic portraits.”
Another article has more background:
“"Darcy's character has been sexed up for the modern day audience with a turbo-charged injection of testosterone and steamy romance," said Amanda Vickery, a history professor at Queen Mary University of London.
"Men sported powdered hair, had narrow jaws, and muscular, defined legs were considered very attractive, a stark contrast to the chiselled, dark, brooding Colin Firth portrayal we associate the character with today.””
Sources: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/09/portrait-of-real-mr-darcy-unlikely-to-set-21st-century-hearts-aflutter
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-entertainment-darcy-idUSKBN15O00A/
We can see the contrast between the reconstruction vs Colin Firth and Matthew Macfayden here: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/ace/standard/976/cpsprodpb/106DD/production/_94239276_darcyx3.gif.webp
Darcy is also given a wet T-shirt scene in the BBC adaption, copied by the 2005 movie. This is completely ahistorical and would have been scandalous for a gentleman in the Christian society of the Regency. The movie also gives him a plunging neckline showing half his chest: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/ace/standard/976/cpsprodpb/154FD/production/_94239278_darcymatthewmacfayden_shutterstock_editorial_.jpg.webp
The Regency period in Britain had many skilled portrait artists, and we have plenty of pictorial evidence of what Regency men looked like and what was idealized. Here are some of my favorite portraitists from that period:
Thomas Lawrence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Lawrence#/media/File:Codrington_Edmund_Carrington_Lawrence.jpg
Henry Raeburn: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/358106607869681898/
The adaptations of Pride and Prejudice threw British Regency portraiture in the trash in order to make Mr. Darcy a hunk from the cover of a cheap modern romance novel, hence the square jaw, excessive musculature for a gentleman, the wet shirt, and the plunging male neckline.
Matthew Macfayden in 2005 movie: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/ace/standard/976/cpsprodpb/154FD/production/_94239278_darcymatthewmacfayden_shutterstock_editorial_.jpg.webp
Romance novel cover: https://img.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_1484w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2016/02/22/BookWorld/Images/9781492621331.jpg?uuid=EX6MtNmMEeWJGk7QT0IT6A
It’s the same trope, just slightly different amounts of chest hair.
There are many good things about the adaptations, and I am not saying that they lack merit. But Mr. Darcy and Mr. Collins were both miscast and caricatured in opposite directions: Mr. Darcy was sexed up to modern romance novel standards, and Mr. Collins was turned into a gross old man. These are very polar and portrayals, which rob respect from several other female characters, while trashing historical marriages, the Regency period, and British portraiture for purely prurient reasons.
I’ve never really thought about Mr Collins in depth before. Although I knew he was tall in the book, I don’t know that Mr Bamber’s portrayal was a total distraction from Elizabeth’s wisdom—it can be helpful in the visual arts to represent something of the internal character through the outward appearance. But perhaps I, too, am biased by the sheer delight I take in that performance. Certainly, I can see how it could be played differently for a greater emphasis on Elizabeth’s preference for love over financial security. However, I do enjoy the emphasis on Mr Collins as a rather distasteful individual.
I always want to think a book should be written about poor Mary Bennet, the bookish and tactless middle sister of the brood. I feel everyone is very unfair to her, and that what she needed was to be freed from her family and have a good university education!!! She is constantly being put down, never receives any praise, let alone understanding or kindness; so she is forced to live in her own mind and in her books, isolated as she is in the household…
This is an excellent reflection. I know an actual in the flesh Mr. Collins type, and can understand entirely how he got this way.
Picture the youngest (by a good span) son of a large wealthy family, with a fashionable, attractive, social-climbing, scheming, overbearing, controlling, and manipulative mother. His older brothers (all taller and more athletic than he) and sisters all married into more wealth, or else achieved wealth through savvy, talent, and hard work. Our Mr. Collins lacks the ambition and drive of his older siblings, and lacks the physical stature to boot (being about 5ft 5" tall), but must constantly act as though he has it. Surrounded in his youth by a family that constantly boasted of its varied successes, yet choosing a path in the humanities at a less reputable college, he constantly had to defend his own lack of worldly success by a silly boastfulness if he wanted to feel superior, or an oily unctuous servility and name dropping if he wanted to impress his economic betters.
Our own Mr. Collins, however, has more of a spine than you might think, and did not try to marry for social mobility, putting himself eventually at a distance from his family. He married quite honestly for love, and I don't think his mother ever really approved. But old behavioral ticks die hard, and even 25 years after I first met him still has the same quirks.
When I reread P&P, I think that Mr. Collins probably had an overbearing and dominating mother, and was probably the younger son who inherited little, lacked his siblings' good looks or social talents, and was reminded frequently of his "failings" by their standards, developing thereby a propensity to puff himself up and overcorrect. I thought that in time, he could probably soften. Maybe. Regardless, he does deserve some compassion.
Excellent! Thank you.
I enjoyed this invitation to consider Mr Collins as a soul rather than a mere character for our entertainment and enlightenment. My impression is so heavily influenced by the delightful Bamber performance that I think I need to return to the book to consider it in a new light.
I’ve always found it interesting that he didn’t take an interest in Mary Bennett. They seemed so alike, at least in the miniseries. Was it because she was too plain? Or was he repulsed by a mirror image? I need to reread the book.