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Jane Austen is thus a mistress of much deeper emotion than appears upon the surface. She stimulates us to supply what is not there. What she offers is, apparently, a trifle, yet is composed of something that expands in the reader’s mind and endows with the most enduring form of life scenes which are outwardly trivial.
—Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader
JANE AUSTEN’S NOVELS AND HEROINES ARE COMMONLY ASSOCIATED with witty, sparkling dialogue. Her most popular creation, Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Darcy, however, is quite the opposite: he is repeatedly described as gloomy and reserved, and at one point Elizabeth even accuses him of being “‘unsocial, taciturn,’” and “‘unwilling to speak, unless [he expects] to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the eclat of a proverb’” (103). This description of Darcy is reflected in characteristics typical of Austen’s novels: she is also famous for her lack of physical description and her preference of indirect over direct speech.
In the past twenty or so years, however, a downright cult has developed around Mr. Darcy: “Darcymania.” Because there are so few descriptions of Mr. Darcy in the novel, and although most of what he says and does, even what he looks like, is left rather vague, this phenomenon is based primarily on those aspects of Darcy that are not part of Austen’s original descriptions. Both popular culture and scholarly reception have put a strong emphasis on Colin Firth’s iconic dive into the pond at Pemberley in the1995 BBC adaptation, a moment that has since been identified as marking Darcy’s “escape into iconicity” (Cardwell, “Escape” 243) 1. The scene that supposedly turned Firth into an iconic figure, however, is not part of the novel. As Devoney Looser phrases it, “Ever since Colin Firth’s dashing Mr. Darcy emerged from a lake in a wet shirt, we can almost forgive first-time readers for mistakenly believing they’ll find such a hero in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.”
Various scholars have tried to explain the continuing popularity of Colin Firth’s Darcy by analyzing the visual techniques of the 1995 Pride and Prejudice. This adaptation uses a number of additional scenes focusing on Darcy, a phenomenon that Monika Seidl has termed “extra-Darcy”...