Of the five Bennet sisters, Mary, the middle sister, had the greatest and most unexpected change of state and fortune. Mr. Collins’s first wife, Charlotte Lucas, was the eldest daughter of Sir William and Lady Lucas, the Bennets’ neighbours in Hertfordshire. Sir William had been a successful country tradesman, and upon receiving a knighthood, retired with his wife and large family to Lucas Lodge on a modest income, and a newly acquired distaste for his business. Charlotte had been Elizabeth’s particular friend and companion before Charlotte’s marriage, when at the desperate age of seven-and-twenty, she had accepted Mr. Collins not for love, but for the security of an home and comfortable establishment. Charlotte had died the following year in child-bed, leaving Mr. Collins the legacy of an infant daughter.

Charlotte’s marriage to Mr. Collins, for all of the differences in their reason and understanding—his obsequious flatterings and pompous absurdities, and her good sense and strength of mind—(and contrary to the general expectation) had been an happy one. Charlotte’s intelligence, taste, and method had promoted Mr. Collins’s respectability as well as his happiness, adding method and œconomy to his way of living. He had been attached to his steady and capable wife, and felt the loss of his companion and benefactress of everything that resembled domestic comfort and companionship, with a genuine grief. While absurdity is no armour against proportionate pain, few of Mr. Collins’s acquaintance could appreciate the form of his sorrow—insupportable as was his usual conduct—now made infinitely worse with his grave retrospections and dolorous countenance. His heavy features and unfashionable dress, rendered even more unflattering with the addition of mourning bands, and lugubriousness occasioned by a self-pity unmitigated by reason or reflection, unfortunately united to make empathy less likely than ridicule.