Do say yes: proposals in literature

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 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 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

be mine? Say yes, quickly. ’ In strict contrast is the Proposal Matter-of-Fact. Here peace of mind has clearly not gone missing for a second, as in this example from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938). It is made by Max de Winter to the anonymous heroine just before she is carted off elsewhere by her employer.

‘ “So that’s settled, isn’t it?” he said, going on with his toast and marmalade. “Instead of being companion to Mrs van Hopper you become mine, and your duties will be almost the same. I also like new library books, and flowers in the drawing room, and bézique after dinner. The only difference is that I don’t take Taxol, I prefer Eno’s, and you must never let me run out of my particular brand of toothpaste.” ’

Although our girl is overwhelmed, many others might have thrown the toast rack at him.

A subcategory here is the concealed emotion or Rhett Butler school, which relies on out-arguing the indecisive female into a state of submission. Rhett, the rich, glamorous speculator hero of Margaret Mitchell’s epic American Civil War novel Gone With the Wind (1936), has always taken a cynical approach to Scarlett O’Hara, a fascinating young woman used to being treated with the chivalric, deferential politeness of Southern gentlemen. Rhett, by contrast, tells it like it is – and Scarlett doesn’t always like it. ‘I always intended having you, Scarlett, since that first day I saw you at Twelve Oaks where you threw that vase and swore and proved that you weren’t a lady. I always intended having you one way or another, but as you and Frank have made a little money, I know you’ll never be driven to me again with any interesting propositions of loans and collateral. So I see I’ll have to marry you. ’

‘Rhett Butler, is this one of your vile jokes?’

As usual, Rhett has the last word – and marries her. Rhett, incidentally, is modelled on a real-life Civil War speculator named Richard Wilson, whose various progeny made such successfully upwardly mobile marriages that the clan became known as the Marrying Wilsons. They appear in my latest book, The Husband Hunters: Social Climbing in London and New York (2017), which describes the army of rich American girls who married into members of the British peerage – many of whom were at their wits’ end financially – at the end of the nineteenth century.

One of these girls, the focus of what could be called the Proposal Lucrative, was in fact Wilson’s granddaughter, May Goelet. Conscious that her money and looks deserved nothing but the best, she held out for a duke, turning down numerous lesser titles until the Duke of Roxburghe came along. ‘Unfortunately, the dear man has no title, though a very good position, ’ she wrote of one suitor, ‘and I am sure he would make a very good husband’ . To someone else, was the unspoken corollary.

Proposals can even be accidental, as poor Bertie Wooster found in P.G. Wodehouse’s Right Ho! Jeeves (1934). Bertie, while trying to tell Madeline Bassett that his friend Gussie Fink-Nottle is in love with her (‘Can’t eat, can’t sleep – all for love of you. And what makes it all so particularly rotten is that it – this aching heart – can’t bring itself up to the scratch and tell you the position of affairs ’), has given her the impression he has proposed to her himself, a prospect that horrifies him. ‘The thought of being engaged to a girl who talked openly about fairies being born because stars blew their noses, or whatever it was, frankly appalled me. ’

Madeline turns Bertie down at the time but later changes her mind and writes to tell him so. He opens the letter when staying with his formidable Aunt Dahlia: ‘A sharp howl broke from my lips, causing Aunt Dahlia to shy like a startled mustang.

‘“Dash it!” I cried. “Do you know what’s happened? Madeline Bassett says she’s going to marry me!”

‘“I hope it keeps fine for you,” said the relative, and passed from the room looking like something out of an Edgar Allan Poe story. ’

Sex, naturally, ranks pretty high as a launch pad for those four important words, ‘Will you marry me?’ Here is Jilly Cooper’s version of the Bed and Breakfast proposal in Emily (1975). Her eponymous heroine meets the fascinating Rory at a party on Friday evening, goes to bed with him the same night and, on Sunday, after a particularly golden moment in their 48- hour relationship, he proposes to her.

‘“I’m bored with living in sin,” he said a couple of hours later. “Let’s get married.”

‘I looked at him incredulously, reeling from the shock. “Did you say you wanted to marry me?” I whispered. “You can’t – I mean, what about all those other girls after you? You could marry anyone. Why me?”

‘“I’m kinky that way,” he said. “I’ll try anything once.” ’

As a justification for the two-night stand this glimpse of a busy weekend in Fulham could hardly be bettered.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the proposal where desire is unwelcome.