Mr. Bennet consoled himself with her loss and subsequent domestic tranquility by spending as much time as possible with Elizabeth, his second daughter and long his favourite, and, occasionally, with Jane, his eldest and most beautiful. Jane, whose beauty and gentle, engaging manners had captivated even her censuring father, now lived with her husband, the rich and amiable Mr. Bingley, and four young children on a creditable estate in the county of Yorkshire. About a year after their marriage, the Bingleys removed from Netherfield in Hertfordshire to Holtham Hall, a low, modern-built house with requisite parallel wings and colonnaded, pedimented front, terraces and gardens, and parkland reaching to the banks of the Don. Elizabeth was now mistress of Pemberley and the wife of Mr. Darcy—though untitled—a man of vast fortune and great consequence, whose seat was not far from Holtham, across the border in Derbyshire. There, she lived with pleasure amidst the best of life’s blessings with her husband and his younger sister, Georgiana.

Always fond of his library and ever-vigilant over its seclusion from the noise necessarily attending a family of “all silly and ignorant” girls (as he had described them, much to the vexation of his wife), at the time when four of his five daughters were married and removed from Longbourn, Mr. Bennet must now be supposed content, and possibly even happy. As a pleasure wished is often a finer thing than a pleasure gained, instead of rejoicing in his solitude, Mr. Bennet found that he did not relish domestic felicity in so unusual a form, and was, as a consequence, often making a visit to some one or other of his married daughters.

The business of Mrs. Bennet’s life—of getting her five daughters well-married—was, at the time of her death, nearly accomplished. Her occupation had been regarded by her family as meddlesome at best, and frequently a positive evil to her two eldest and most rational daughters. A more practical view would have acknowledged the reasonableness of her concerns—if not their form—as, at the event of Mr. Bennet’s decease, his house—indeed his entire estate—was entailed away from his own family on a distant cousin, Mr. Collins; this relation was a clergyman in Kent, currently enjoying the living at Hunsford and its comfortable parsonage. The success of Mrs. Bennet’s stratagems for marrying her daughters well was, therefore, their surest preservative from want and the ennui that must attend a very contracted stile of living; if left to exist on their own unhappily small portions, they were destined to lose not only their home, but their comforts as well.