DO say yes proposals in literature
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Anne de Courcy examines the way marriage propositions are described by writers from Jane Austen to Jilly Cooper
‘He was beside himself with love. She took his hand and laid it on her heart. He felt the paper there, he stammered: “Then – you love me?” ‘She replied in a voice so low that it was no longer anything more than a barely audible breath: “Of course! You know I do!” … He fell upon the bench, and she beside him. They had no words more. The stars were beginning to gleam. ’ This is Cosette and Marius when they declare their love to each other in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables (1862) – a love that is clearly the first step towards marital bliss. Today, almost half of all couples
22 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
living together are not married (that is, to each other). Look into literature, though, and living together has hardly ever been an option. Marriage it is – and marriage almost invariably preceded by a proposal. Proposals fall into all sorts of categories – romantic, passionate, down-to-earth, half-hearted, desperate, faute de mieux, on bended knee or by letter. One of the most appealing of the epistolatory kind is from Frederick Wentworth to Anne Elliot in Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1817): ‘I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone forever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you … For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes?’ Who could resist? It has everything from passion to persistence. Compare it with the proposal that no one – and certainly not Elizabeth Bennet in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) – could accept while maintaining their amour-propre. It comes from the oily, snobbish and altogether odious Mr Collins: ‘My reasons for marrying are, first, that I think it a right thing for every clergyman in easy circumstances (like myself) to set the example of matrimony in his parish. Secondly, that I am convinced it will add
“Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you … For
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you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this?”
very greatly to my happiness; and thirdly – which perhaps I ought to have mentioned earlier, that it is the particular advice and recommendation of the very noble lady whom I have the honour of calling patroness.’ Ugh. The most flattering proposal is that where its author implies that without the beloved life simply is not worth living, a mere desert of empty days made wretched by blighted hopes. There is Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, listening transfixed to Mr Rochester. ‘You – you strange, almost unearthly thing! – I love you as my own flesh. You, Jane, I must have you for my own – entirely my own. Will you
