Welcome to our epistolary retelling of Pride & Prejudice! Jane Austen’s original version of the story, First Impression, was told entirely in letters, so it seemed like a great group project. We’ll be posting a new letter every Wednesday.
Mr Charles Bingley to Miss Jane Bennet
Never sent. Never finished. Never burnt, though it ought to have been.
London, 10 June 1812
Dear Miss Bennet,
Dearest Dear Miss Bennet,
I have begun this letter no fewer than four times this week and destroyed every attempt before the ink was properly dry. I am beginning to suspect this attempt will suffer the same fate, which frees me considerably to write whatever I please, as I shall never send it and you will never read it and I may therefore be honest in a way I have never quite managed to be in my entire cowardly life.
I hope you are well. I hope Longbourn is as pleasant in summer as it seemed in autumn, and that your family are all in good health, and that you have not entirely forgotten me, though you would have every right to that the neighbourhood continues to offer its usual society.
There. That is exactly the sort of thing I would write if I were actually going to send this. I am not. So I shall try again.
I owe you an apology that I do not know how to make, for the simple reason that there is no form of apology adequate to the offence, and I know it, and so I have been silent when silence is probably the very worst thing I could have chosen. I quit Netherfield in November, and I did not come back, and you received no explanation, no farewell, and no indication whatsoever that the man who had danced with you twice at the Netherfield ball and spoken to you of love of his great admiration and regard — that this man had any regard for you at all, in the end. That is what my silence must have said to you. I think about it rather more than is comfortable.
I wonder if you think of me at all, or if you are wiser than I am and have put the whole wretched business entirely out of your mind.
The truth is this, and I am writing it because no one will ever see it, and I am tired of thinking it without saying it anywhere, even to a piece of paper:
I fell in love with you at the Meryton assembly.
That is not quite right. At the assembly I merely thought you the most beautiful woman in the room, which is a fine beginning but not yet love. It was perhaps three days later, when you came with your sisters to see Miss Bennet — yourself — I mean yourself, in your illness, when you were unwell at Netherfield. That was when I knew when I saw how easy you were with everyone around you, and how you laughed without calculation, and how you listened — you really listen, Miss Bennet, with your whole attention, as though whoever is speaking is saying the most interesting thing in the world. I am not accustomed to being listened to. My sisters listen only to determine whether there is anything in what I say that can be of use to their own purposes, and Darcy listens to find the flaws in my reasoning, which he invariably does, and he is usually right, which is the most infuriating thing about him a quality I greatly respect in my oldest friend.
But you listened as if what I said mattered to you.
I have since been told, by more than one person whose judgment I generally trust, that you were merely pleasant to everyone and that it signified nothing particular. That your manners were open and engaging by general nature and not by design, and certainly not by any special partiality for me. I have been told that a woman of real feeling would have shown more. That equanimity such as yours is the equanimity of indifference, and that I was deceived by my own wishes into imagining a preference that did not exist.
I do not believe it.
I believe you cared for me. I think I saw it and I know what I saw, and I should like very much to tell certain people what I think of their
I have been persuaded to think otherwise, and I have tried very hard to be persuaded, because it was easier than the alternative, which was to acknowledge that I had left a woman who cared for me, and who I had every reason to love, on the advice of people who could not have her happiness at heart the way I did do.
I should have come back in December. I nearly did. I had my valet half pack my things before Caroline came in and said something I cannot now remember, and I unpacked them again and told myself she was right.
She is not right. She has never been right about anything that matters.
I have tried to imagine what you must have thought of me. I do not mean what you must have thought in a general sense, but specifically — what you thought on the evening of the Netherfield ball, when you danced with me, and I was so thoroughly happy that I could not conceive of ever being otherwise; and then I left, and days became weeks, and there was no word and no return. I imagine you waiting, perhaps, at first. Then not waiting. Then thinking whatever it is a sensible and dignified woman thinks when she has understood that a man who seemed to admire her was not equal to his own admiration.
I hope you were angry rather than hurt. Anger seems cleaner.
I hope you were a little hurt. Only a little. Only enough to mean that I was not entirely wrong about what I thought I saw.
Egad, I am a dreadful person.
I hope you were a little hurt.
I do not know how to earn your forgiveness because I do not know how I could ever put myself in the way of asking for it. The situation is such that Darcy means to go to Pemberley this summer and I could go to Hertfordshire, there is nothing stopping me except my sisters and my own want of courage, which is really no obstacle at all if I would only act like a man for five consecutive minutes
The situation is such that I cannot see my way clearly to any action that would not embarrass us both enormously and perhaps make everything worse. You deserve better than to have me arrive on your doorstep having caused you pain and then ask you to relieve me of the guilt of having caused it. That would be very selfish. I am trying, in this letter, not to be selfish, though I notice I have mostly written about my own feelings and what I hope you felt about me, which suggests I have not entirely succeeded.
I think about the evening you played at the pianoforte, after dinner at Lucas Lodge. The candlelight was behind you and you did not know I was watching. You claimed to be the poorest player among your sisters, but I confess, I never heard any deficiency. You played a little wrong note in the second line of whatever you were playing and you caught it and smiled to yourself, just to yourself, as though it privately amused you, and then you went on. I do not think anyone else saw it. I know I am making too much of a very small thing, but it is the sort of small thing I have thought about a great deal since November, and since I am writing to no one, I may as well confess it.
You are, I think, the finest person I have ever known. I am aware that this is a very large thing to say about someone I danced with and sat next to at dinner and called upon half a dozen times. I am aware I may be romanticising. But I have met a great many people in my life, including a great many young women who are beautiful and well-mannered and accomplished, and not one of them has made me feel, when sitting in a room with them, that the room itself was better for their being in it.
Yours does.
I will not send this. I will probably burn it in the morning, though I have said that before and clearly, I mean it very little, since I have now accumulated four drafts of this letter in my writing desk and destroyed none of them. Perhaps I keep them because it is the only way left to me to tell you the truth, which I should have told you at Netherfield, in October, in September, at the first assembly, at any point before I allowed myself to be guided by every consideration except the most important one, which was simply that I loved you and I should have said so.
I am sorry, Miss Bennet. I am more sorry than I know how to say, even to a letter I will never send, which is really saying something.
Yours, entirely and hopelessly,
Yours, as I suspect I always will be whether I like it or not,
Yours most sincerely,
C. Bingley
Charles Bingley
(The letter was folded, sealed, and placed in the locked drawer of his writing desk, where it would remain for six weeks, until certain events that autumn rendered it unnecessary — though he kept it regardless.)
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