Re: Fun Questions! May I play a round?

Quote
"You know of course that Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Lady Anne Darcy were sisters; consequently that she is aunt to the present Mr. Darcy……Her daughter, Miss de Bourgh, will have a very large fortune, and it is believed that she and her cousin will unite the two estates.”

Wickham's comment on the de Bourgh-Darcy match (or Rosings-Pemberley merger) occurs in one of the first few conversations he has with Elizabeth, when he's testing the waters to see if she will believe his sob story. I've always assumed that he used it (and exagerated whatever facts he did know) for the shock value-- to see if Elizabeth would react (suggesting that she had a romantic or matrimonial ambitions toward Darcy, as so many women apparently did) and thus less likely to (a) buy Wickham's story; and/or (b) report it to Darcy, trying to score points with FD and potentially bringing down the wrath of Darcy on Wickham, when all GW wanted to do was start a whisper campaign.

I also thought that it's a bit of a hint from Austen that Wickham isn't quite truthful and Elizabeth is being a little gullible: surely as intimate as the families are, Miss Bingley would know (or Charles would know and tell his sister) if Darcy was bound in some way to marry his cousin. I can't imagine Caroline would expend so much time and energy on an unavailable man. And no matter how private Darcy likes to be, that's the kind of thing close friends (such as Darcy & Bingley) would know about one another, isn't it? Some night when they're knocking back a few glasses of port after surviving another endless ball with intolerable ladies dangling after him... I can just smell the cigar smoke.

-Jean