Mr. Darcy Elizabeth's love. Morgan wrote that the gratitude that Austen meant for Elizabeth to feel for Darcy "...is a gratitude that, despite all the obstacles which realism can provide, despite time, conventions, and misunderstanding, despite her wrongs and his own limitations, Mr. Darcy can see Elizabeth honestly and can love her as well." One critic, Wilbur Cross, wrote at first Darcy displays outrageous arrogance to Elizabeth, but the novel ends with an "almost pitiable humiliation of Darcy", which was a testament to the power of women to tame men. The character of Fitzwilliam Darcy has appeared in and inspired numerous works.
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