I am sorry you feel your story was despised (I don't remember it being so at the time), but, as one who did post against the Bingley-Elizabeth pairing, I would like clarify something: I
liked your story and I thought the idea of Elizabeth marrying Bingley was a perfectly plausible thing to happen, especially under those circumstances (Jane dying before she could marry Bingley, Bennet family in distress).
What I did dislike was
the person Elizabeth had become in that story, and I mean "dislike" not as in "I don't like what you did with my favorite character", but as in "If I met this woman in real life I would be tempted to bean her with something". And it wasn't really a change in that you altered her personality, but in that you took Austen's Elizabeth at the beginning of P&P and took her in a different direction than Austen did. And it was, in my opinion a very realistic direction, something that may well have happened to Elizabeth under many circumstances, but it made that end result disturbing. Because at the end of I was confronted with a woman I would have been delighted to slap, while at the end of P&P I like Elizabeth much more that I did at the beginning.
However, and I think that may not have been clear at the time, it wasn't merely marriage to Bingley that caused the change in direction. Elizabeth in P&P is forced to take a good look at her faults and try to mend them. In your story she is not confronted with her mistakes untill such time as they have become largely irrelevant and she has bigger problems than worrying about her misjudgement of Darcy, who has now behaved very badly in reality, instead of just Wickham's and Elizabeth's imaginations. So, instead of becoming a better person, her mistakes are swept under the carpet and her main flaw, vanity about her cleverness, remains unchecked. And then she marries a man who offers her unconditional admiration and in no way challenges the validity of her opinions. And the result is the woman I would go out of my way to avoid in real life, so that I wouldn't be driven to physical violence.
In any case, all this has little to do with a) whether Elizabeth would accept Bingley and b) whether she would be happy with him. Frankly, I see no sane reason why Elizabeth would refuse to marry a handsome, rich, sensible young man. By the way, it should be pointed out that Bingley would not do as Collins did and blurt out a proposal because his patroness said so, he would court her beforehand; he courts Jane for months before deciding to propose. And, unlike Darcy, who seems to think intellectual sparring quallifies as flirtation, he would court her in such a way that she would realise what was going on. She would have time to get used to the idea, to learn to like him before she accepted him. And I see no reason at all why they would not be happy. But I cannot help but feel she would be diminished as a person in such a marriage.
