Pride and Prejudice Park, the imposing home of Lady Catherine de Bourgh, patroness of Mr. Collins and Mr. Darcy's extremely wealthy aunt. She expects Mr. Darcy to marry her daughter. Mr. Darcy and his cousin, Colonel Fitzwilliam, are also visiting at Rosings Park. Colonel Fitzwilliam tells Elizabeth how Mr. Darcy managed to save a friend from a bad match. Elizabeth realises the story must refer to Jane and is horrified that Darcy has interfered and caused her sister so much pain. Mr. Darcy, meanwhile, has fallen in love with Elizabeth and proposes to her. She rejects him angrily, stating that she could not
Pride and Prejudice and reviewer George Henry Lewes declared that he "would rather have written "Pride and Prejudice", or "Tom Jones", than any of the Waverley Novels". Charlotte Brontë, however, in a letter to Lewes, wrote that "Pride and Prejudice" was a disappointment, "a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but ... no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck". Austen for her part thought the "playfulness and epigrammaticism" of "Pride and Prejudice" was excessive, complaining in a letter to her sister Cassandra in 1813 that the novel lacked "shade" and should have had