In Ang Lee’s adaptation of Sense and Sensibility (1995), the handsome cad Willoughby (played by Greg Wise) rescues Marianne (Kate Winslet) on horseback in the middle of a raging storm. Pathetic fallacy has rarely looked so good.
Marianne locks eyes with him and falls passionately in love. In Austen’s version, though, it is Marianne’s mother and sister who first register his attractions. “The eyes of both were fixed on him with an evident wonder and a secret admiration … his person, which was uncommonly handsome, received additional charms from his voice and expression.”
Willoughby has “exterior attractions” that the two women quickly notice. Once Marianne can master her own confusion, she rapidly constructs him in her mind as the ideal romantic protagonist.
“His person and air were equal to what her fancy had ever drawn for the hero of a favourite story … Her imagination was busy, her reflections were pleasant, and the pain of a sprained ankle was disregarded.”
Yet despite such auspicious beginnings, by the end of the novel Willoughby has proved to be feckless, shallow and passively cruel. The actual leading man turns out to be the respectable, yet taciturn, Colonel Brandon (played in the film by Alan Rickman).
This article is part of a series commemorating the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. Despite having published only six books, she is one of the best-known authors in history. These articles explore the legacy and life of this incredible writer.
In his introduction to the 1895 edition of Sense and Sensibility, the poet and essayist Henry Austin Dobson remarked upon the shrewd realism at work in Austen’s ending: “Every one does not get a Bingley, or a Darcy (with a park); but a good many sensible girls like Elinor pair off contentedly with poor creatures like Edward Ferrars, while not a few enthusiasts like Marianne decline at last upon middle-aged colonels with flannel waistcoats.”
For many modern readers, Brandon remains a disappointing compromise when compared with Willoughby’s flagrant virility.
Austen’s heartthrobs
All of Austen’s leading men are rich, which certainly helps to intensify their charms. Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pride and Prejudice is the wealthiest man of Austen’s fiction.
Initially he draws local attention for his “fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien, and the report, which was in general circulation within five minutes after his entrance, of his having ten thousand a year”, until he is quickly “discovered to be proud”.
One of the key debates of Pride and Prejudice (1813) concerns marriage for love versus convenience and financial security. Elizabeth Bennet’s pragmatic best friend Charlotte Lucas argues that the phrase “violently in love” is “so hackneyed, so doubtful, so indefinite” and “often applied to feelings which arise only from a half hour’s acquaintance”.
She eloquently expresses the problematic nature of infatuation and the fictional construction of the heroic ideal so prevalent in Regency culture.
The phrase recurs right at the end of the novel, at the moment Elizabeth discloses her feelings for Darcy, producing a happiness in him that he “had probably never felt before; and he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do”.
The repeated phrase is a lovely touch, hesitating as it does between endorsing Darcy as a swoon-worthy leading man, burning with passion, and holding back from such excesses through the suggestion of a faint ridiculousness.
The 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice gave visual language to this conjunction of intrepid yet hesitant masculinity. Darcy (played memorably by Colin Firth) emerged from water like an Adonis in a wet shirt, only to face an embarrassed encounter with Elizabeth (Jennifer Ehle). Though usually handsome and always relatively rich, Austen’s leading men are also unconventional in that they can be awkward, mistaken, tongue-tied – even a bit dull.
When Darcy’s housekeeper at Pemberley describes him as “handsome”, this adjective, as Austen expert Janet Todd has noted, “extends over physical, social and moral qualities”. This conjunction of qualities shapes the leading men of Austen’s fiction not so much as suitors as familiar figures who come to be transformed by love.
Uncomfortable matches
Some aspects of this heroism might strike modern readers as odd, and they alert us to changing perceptions of the romantic hero since Austen’s time.
The age difference in Emma between Emma Woodhouse (21) and George Knightley (37) was not uncommon in the Regency era, when marriage was often predicated on women’s reproductive value and men’s financial security.
It can be uncomfortable for some readers when Knightley emphasises the fact that he was 16 years old when Emma was born (as he is cradling his baby niece). And when he jokes about having been in love with her since she was “13 at least”. Rather than suggesting anything dubious, this was intended to draw attention to the incremental steps the couple make from brother and sister-in-law to friends and then lovers.
Recent adaptations of Emma seem uncomfortable with this age gap. Despite the fact that both Jeremy Northam and Johnny Flynn were in their mid-30s, and of similar age to Knightley in their respective versions (1996 and 2020), Flynn gives off a younger, more virile energy. He punches the air in joy when he realises Emma will marry him, in contrast to Northam’s emotional restraint.
Maria Edgeworth, a contemporary novelist and important influence on Austen, was struck by the way Austen’s leading men were supportive in private as much as in public.
In a letter, Edgeworth referenced the moment in Persuasion (1817) where Captain Wentworth shows his feelings for Anne by submitting to domestic chores: “The love and lover [are] admirably well drawn: don’t you see Captain Wentworth, or rather don’t you in her place feel him taking the boisterous child off her back as she kneels by the sick boy on the sofa?”
In figures such as Emma’s Mr Knightley, who represents the landed English class, and Persuasion’s Frederick Wentworth, a naval hero of the Napoleonic wars, Austen put emphasis on a new kind of domestic masculinity as a source of female desire and national pride.
Like Austen’s heroines, her leading men are not superlatively good. Their enduring appeal lies more in their capacity for self development and their acceptance of change and adaptation. Austen depicts love as the awakening of mutual esteem. It’s something to be worked on rather than something that magically arrives.
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Louise Curran does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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