Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy have a lot to answer for, as do Emma Woodhouse and Mr. Knightley, Fanny Price and Edmund Bertram and a host of minor couples who trip down the aisle at the end of Jane Austen’s novels. According to this charge, which started in the 1990s with Bridget Jones’s Diary, but was still going strong decades later with From Prada to Nada, a Latina reworking of Sense and Sensibility, Austen is responsible for spoiling the love lives of generations of her female readers.
These tragic bookworms, goes the theory, have made the mistake of taking Austen’s romantic plots as real-life road maps and ended up disappointed when the path leads nowhere. While holding out for a Darcy — handsome, devoted and seriously rich — they let scores of perfectly “good enough” partners fall by the wayside. Left on the shelf, they wither into tragic spinsterhood (think Miss Bates in Emma) with nothing more exciting than next month’s book club to look forward to.
