How Mr. Darcy Became One of Jane Austen’s Most Memorable Creations

Begun in the 1790s, Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813. Its context is both Gothic and Romantic.

Accepted ‘queen’ of Gothic fiction, in the 1790s Ann Radcliffe authored novels so sensational that they turned the heads of more sensible and mature people than Northanger Abbey’s young Catherine Morland. The Radcliffean heroine of learning and delicacy resembles the accomplished female imagined by Darcy, but, instead of attracting a husband in country-house drawing rooms, she’s deposited in mouldering monasteries and dilapidated palazzi around hot Catholic Europe. In such un-English lands, marauding, raping, thieving men repeatedly threaten her, but she never loses her powerful virginity or her composure. When menaces are at their most extreme, she faints and becomes surprisingly inviolate.

The embodiment of threatening evil is the Gothic villain: moody, mastering and—although Mrs. Radcliffe is at pains to prevent him being so—fascinating to the watching heroine and to the reading girl. Montoni, the villain of The Mysteries of Udolpho, is so magnetic that his victim gazes at him but is at a loss to know why she does so. Readers are disappointed when he’s shunted off in a sentence. Other authors will give him more latitude.

Lord Byron admired Mrs. Radcliffe. He confessed he saw Italy through her eyes when he first visited it—as she’d never done. Lacking Radcliffe’s diffidence, young Byron took her Montoni and other alluringly wicked villains and made them his own on paper and in life. He created the image of a new man, the dark Romantic hero, the Byronic hero (Byron quickly became an adjective), something similar to the Radcliffe villain but more intentionally sexy and more English in his classy arrogance. Jane Austen met the character in one of Byron’s phenomenally popular “Turkish tales.” She marked the occasion with the memorable line: “I have read the Corsair, mended my petticoat, & have nothing else to do.”

She might mock, but 10,000 copies of this swagger poem were sold on the morning of publication. Was she intentionally mocking? The tying of “The Corsair” to a petticoat is inconclusive: her letters all jump about and she may not have meant to belittle the haughty hero. Later she copied out Byron’s poem “Napoleon’s Farewell,” fascinated perhaps by the author and his imperious subject.

Byron admired Radcliffe and Burney, but apparently missed out on Austen—although the London publisher John Murray whom Lord Byron and Jane Austen shared sent Byron and his half-sister Augusta Leigh a copy of Emma: “Tell me if Mrs. Leigh & your Lordship admire Emma?” he asked. Byron probably didn’t read the novel. It arrived at an especially trying time for him when he was indeed being “mad, bad and dangerous to know”—at least for his newly married wife. Such behavior as he exhibited was time-consuming. But after Austen’s death Byron certainly knew of her, for he appreciated as “full of fun and ferocity” a skit written by Walter Scott’s son-in-law, in which as his moody alter ego Childe Harold he’s accosted by female characters from Emma and Mansfield Park chattering about his marital problems:

Perhaps her Ladyship was in the wrong after all—I am sure if I had married such a man, I would have borne with all his little eccentricities…Poor Lord Byron!

However mocked, the posturing Byronic hero stalked Britain and the Continent, buttressed by colorful tales of his creator, the dashing Lord who combined intellectual power with depravity. From him derives a whole line of stern, powerful, self-obsessed and wickedly alluring men, in whom I see something of the early Darcy—in potential.

With a little temporal leeway, mightn’t we find the potent fantasy-figure emerging from the interaction of Jane Austen’s imagination with her cultural moment? If so, it might not be too huge a leap to think of Darcy as well as Byron and Byron’s heroes as some of the ancestors of Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Brontë’s Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre?

Are you with me?

Let me take another jump to du Maurier’s Maxim de Winter (and, less plausibly, to Bram Stoker’s Dracula). These “men” share with Darcy the “implacability” of resentments and his “unforgiving temper.” There are differences: the arrogance of Austen’s hero isn’t as thoroughly assaulted and humbled as that of most of his successors—many ending up dead or mutilated. Also they have women who love their tyranny, and each, from Mr. Rochester to Maxim de Winter, is encouraged in his sadism by experience with a first angry, masochistic or “mad” wife. (I saw this when I read Millett’s enraged prose—and that most disconcerting of spinoffs, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which introduced us to the misery Mr. Rochester hides in his attic.)

Few of Austen’s first readers noticed Darcy. They enthused over her heroine and the minor comic characters. An exception was Annabella Milbanke. She found the interest of the novel “very strong, especially for Mr. Darcy.” Like poor Isabella Linton, who, irresistibly attracted to the would-be abuser, becomes Mrs. Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Annabella paid for such “interest” when she married rather than fantasized about such a man. She lived out the rest of her life as the estranged Lady Byron.

The line of avatars has insinuated itself into cinematic history. Laurence Olivier, who played Darcy in the 1940 adaptation, was also Du Maurier’s Maxim de Winter in the same year; in the previous one, he played Heathcliff. In the 1952 BBC adaptation Darcy was Peter Cushing, best known for his roles in Hammer Horror vampire films. In the book Mr. Darcy startles Elizabeth by emerging from the stables just as she’s leaving his house, but the encounter with wet Colin Firth draws also from Heathcliff’s emergence from the shadows and of Jane Eyre’s first sight of Rochester, galloping into sight on his horse, his great white and black dog running with him. Firth’s Darcy is Austen out of the Brontës.

I was too old to enjoy “Darcymania” in 1995. I didn’t view Laurence Olivier’s Darcy at the right time either. Besides, for me the old ham was always Richard III, a portrayal I venerated from the moment I saw it aged seventeen. Josephine Tey’s Daughter of Time had already made Shakespeare’s hunchback villain a misunderstood “outsider;” Olivier added those magnetic eyes to the macabre mix. Had I read Pride and Prejudice then, it would have been tame fare beside this Grand Guignol.

The fantasy I’m struggling to describe is largely female. Darcy prompts desire in women. The American critic Lionel Trilling noted “man’s panic fear at a fictional world in which the masculine principle, although represented as admirable and necessary, is prescribed and controlled by a female mind.” Dated in expression—but some truth there. Austen’s novel has spawned a thousand romances read primarily by, answering the desires of and controlled by women. Two waves of modern feminism with their different emphases on gender fluidity and equality have made no dent in this established industry of desire. Think of E. L. James’s Christian Grey.

There is, though, an antidote: humor. In the 2008 mini-series Lost in Austen, Darcy was teased through time-traveling. Translated to twenty-first-century London, he became bewildered. How long could Darcy stay in a modern city before being diminished into modern man, the knitted-jumper-wearing protagonist of Bridget Jones’s Diary (also played by Colin Firth of course)?

Her death in 2022 interrupted Hilary Mantel’s proposed spinoff of Pride and Prejudice. She had surmised that, behind all that moody silence, Darcy was simply not very bright, whatever the narrator claims of his cleverness. The silence of Fitzwilliam Darcy was not, she believed, a sign of superior sense and deep thought but rather a symptom of his mental torpor:

A solemn countenance, a grave manner, a pre-occupied frown; these suggest to us a mastering of life’s perplexities born of a habit of deep reflection, and vigorous examination of every fact and circumstance. Yet, but what if the frown means nothing but ill humour? If the grave and pre-occupied air means nothing but insufficiency in the face of whatever circumstances present? What if the long silences, so intimidating to my sex, are merely the consequence of having nothing to say? What if that prevailing solemnity results from a simple failure to see the joke? Reader, to think it is to know it: Darcy was a more harmless soul than we had imagined, and replete with good intentions; his silence in company proceeded, not from a conviction of natural superiority, but from a solid, sterling stupidity, such as an English gentleman alone dares display.

Isn’t this delicious? With this man, poor Elizabeth in the gilded Pemberley cage will have a lifetime of giving witty answers to “witless questions.” She might have had an easier time in the Hunsford parsonage with Mr. Collins.

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Excerpted from Living with Jane Austen by Janet Todd. Copyright © Janet Todd 2025. Excerpted with permission of Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.