Darcy's Ten Thousand

Mr. Darcy has ten thousand pounds a year, a fortune that makes him the most eligible man in any room he enters. Then he proposes to Elizabeth by listing all the reasons her family is beneath him. She refuses. Choosing self-respect over security like that was genuinely radical for a woman in 1813, and Austen knew it.

But Austen is too honest to pretend money does not matter. Elizabeth's feelings clearly soften after she walks the grounds of Pemberley, Darcy's grand estate, and pictures the life it could offer. Austen understood that comfort is genuinely attractive. Pretending otherwise would have been its own kind of lie, and she never lies to her reader.