Pride and Prejudice
Mr. Bennet
The Bennet girls' father
The dry-witted master of Longbourn, who prefers his library to his family's troubles. He is fondest of Elizabeth and finds the rest of the house amusing.
Mr. Bennet is the master of Longbourn, a bookish man of about fifty with a sardonic sense of humor. He retreats to his library whenever the house gets noisy, and he enjoys teasing his excitable wife, for instance by letting her believe he will not call on Mr. Bingley when he has already done it. Among his five daughters, Elizabeth is clearly his favorite.
He is clever, affectionate and a little lazy. His estate is entailed to his cousin Mr. Collins, which means his daughters will have little if he dies, yet he rarely acts on that worry. People who know him find him funny, and the story gradually shows the cost of laughing at problems instead of fixing them.
“Lydia will never be easy until she has exposed herself in some public place, and we can get off at so little expense. Let her go.”
In the story
Contains spoilers.
Mr. Bennet delights in his cousin Mr. Collins as a comic gift, but when Collins proposes to Elizabeth he backs her up, telling her that her mother will never see her again if she refuses and he will never see her again if she accepts. When Lydia is invited to Brighton, Elizabeth begs him to forbid it, and he lets her go anyway.
That choice comes back on him when Lydia elopes with Wickham. He goes to London to search, comes back with no result, and is rescued by Uncle Gardiner, whom he assumes paid Wickham ten thousand pounds. At the end, Elizabeth tells him in the library that she is to marry Darcy. He first thinks she has lost her senses, then weeps with joy when he understands how much she loves him.
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
