Neurodivergent (Headcanon) Alley: Fitzwilliam Darcy (Pride and Prejudice)

*Darcy-related spoilers.*

Let’s be real. It was only a matter of time until I came around to this one. My Jane Austen journey started with the series of Masterpiece TV movies in 2007 (shoutout to Felicity Jones and Catherine Morland!), which led to all the books and then every single adaptation I could get my hands on. Hello, special interest! I’ve always loved Mr. Darcy as a character, for his complexity and fantastic interactions with Lizzy. I used to hedge a little, feeling a hipsterish need to point out that he wasn’t necessarily my favorite Austen leading man, but let’s put that aside, shall we? It’s Darcy. Over the years, I’ve only grown more attached to the character, in all sorts of incarnations (looking at you, Fire Island!) I’ve long appreciated his introverted characterization, but I’ve more recently come to view him through an autistic lens as well.

As I’ve gone deeper into my own neurodivergent journey, hearing about other folks’ autistic headcanons has really helped me expand my view of what autism can look like, and I now recognize that kinship with plenty of characters that it never would’ve occurred to me to read as autistic. But when I first saw Darcy’s name pop up on someone’s headcanon list, my immediate thought wasn’t, “Whoa, really? Well, now that I think about it….” It was, “Well, that makes total sense.”

Let’s start with Darcy in his own words, shall we? “I certainly have not the talent which some people possess, of conversing easily with those I have never seen before. I cannot catch their tone of conversation, or appear interested in their concerns, as I often see done.” Originally, I read this line as a Big Introverted Mood, but this is also a very autistic framing. Darcy isn’t merely shy or withdrawn. He has difficulty following people’s tone or playing along with social niceties, and despite having observed other people do this successfully, he can’t figure out how to do it himself.

I don’t want to say Darcy isn’t proud, because he definitely can be. But when he’s stiff and awkward at a ball, when he refuses to dance because he doesn’t want to, when he responds flatly to Bingley’s rose-colored impression of the evening, other people take all of that as further proofness of his standoffishness. Most everyone in Meryton thinks Darcy is a snobby dud compared to Bingley, and they take his behavior purely as slights against them, not recognizing that a big portion of it stems from his social discomfort.

However, people who know Darcy well have a very different opinion of him. Bingley is maybe a bit impervious to his friend’s moods, but Darcy is the friend he brings along to Netherfield. They spend a great deal of time together, and as amiable as Bingley is, I don’t think he’d keep dragging Darcy to balls he doesn’t want to go to if they didn’t genuinely get along. And when Lizzy visits Pemberley, Darcy’s housekeeper is full of warm remarks about him and specifically notes that a lot of people have the wrong impression. I’m a person who can struggle in social situations until I really get to know someone (and even then, I’m better one-on-one or in very small groups,) and I know what it’s like to have people assume I’m stuck-up.

Darcy is bluntly honest to his own detriment—especially in this sort of drawing-room polite society, where it’s all about saying things in the “correct” or expected manner. His first proposal to Lizzy is a disaster, and not just because she’s totally blindsided by the fact that she’s into him. No, he bursts in, declaring, “You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you,” and then he proceeds to tell Lizzy about how hard he’s tried not to love her, due to her undesirable family connections. And the thing is, he thinks he’s nailing it. Yes, on a class level, it’d be unthinkable for a woman in Lizzy’s position to turn down a man of Darcy’s standing. But from his perspective, he’s also 1) being honest, which is good and 2) telling Lizzy that his love for her is strong enough to overcome his numerous misgivings about her family and status, which he thinks is flattering to her. When Lizzy flatly turns him down, he doesn’t know what to think.

(Side note: much of Darcy’s reluctance toward Lizzy is down to the Bennets’ “inferior” class, and some of it is about the boorish behavior of characters like Mrs. Bennet and Lydia. But it’s also worth mentioning that Mrs. Bennet and Lydia are like a walking sensory overload.)

Fortunately for Darcy, Lizzy clarifies her reasons, and once he understands, he writes her a long letter to add context to everything she’s heard about him. As their relationship continues to shift and deepen, he thinks he can feel that shift but remains wary. The next time he broaches the topic of love, it’s to quietly share, “My affections and wishes are unchanged, but one word from you will silence me on this subject forever,” putting the ball in Lizzy’s court. First of all, thank you, gentleman, for respecting a woman’s boundaries. But also, we see how he wants to wait for explicit confirmation that Lizzy feels the same way before he tries proposing again, having misread the situation before.

So yeah, one of the most popular romantic leads of all time can be easily read as autistic, which is pretty cool. Unfortunately, Darcy’s literary swoonworthiness doesn’t really translate to people with those traits in real life, but I still appreciate watching this heartthrob character deal with his socializing struggles and bad first impressions on the way to finding true love.

Favorite Characters: Fitzwilliam Darcy (Pride and Prejudice)

In terms of the ever-important swoonworthiness factor for Austen heroes, Mr. Darcy is solidly in the middle of the pack for me, after Mr. Tilney and Mr. Knightley and roughly on par with Capt. Wentworth (however, since I’m an aromantic asexual, make of that what you will.)  No – for me, where Darcy really succeeds is his complexity as a character.  He wouldn’t wouldn’t be my top pick to doodle hearts around his picture, but his fascinating, richly-flawed character is a treat to read or see onscreen (Darcy-related spoilers.)

Pride and Prejudice is a classic “bad first impression” romance, but the beauty of Darcy is that he’s not really a case of “he’s a total jerk who rehabilitates himself for love” or “she completely gets the wrong idea of him and doesn’t recognize him for the sweetheart he really is.”  Instead, he’s kind of both.  He has that devastatingly-perfect-on-paper air about him, what with the fabulous wealth and tremendous looks, but then he opens his mouth.  And yeah, “good breeding” doesn’t go as far as it used to.  Because he is imperious.  He looks down his nose at the country folks of Hertfordshire, and when he doesn’t find the company up to his standards, he’s super standoffish.  He also has a “thinks he knows best” thing going on and values directness over tact even when he really shouldn’t.

But at the same time, that’s not the whole story.  When he becomes familiar enough with someone to reassess his initial opinion of them, he’s the first to admit if he realizes he was too harsh.  When he then puts his mind to it, he can be wholly welcoming to people of any standing, and not just in a “make nice for appearances” way.  Furthermore, when he falls for Lizzy despite his valiant efforts not to love her (Darcy will be Darcy,) he ultimately places his regard for her over the opinions he knows the snobbier members of his friends and family will have of her.  But in a way, I kind of like it that their difference in situation does bother him and he does “try not to love her” before deciding he cares more about Lizzy than the likes of Lady Catherine.  As a romantic hero, “I love you despite your embarrassing family connections,” is so not the way to Lizzy’s heart, and she rightfully takes him to task for it.  But as a character, it’s more interesting that this is something he wrestles and comes to terms with rather than instantly tossing aside class and custom.  It means his love is more hard-won within himself, not something that came easy.

Also, I like that, while he can be quick to judge those he deems his social inferiors, his rudeness is also informed by his shyness and discomfort among strangers.  It’s something of an Achilles heel for him, and he admits as much to Lizzy.  And here, as with so many things relating to these characters, they’re both right and wrong.  Lizzy laughs at this admission because she can’t really understand it – she herself is enormously winning and almost luminously personable, and so she can’t quite realize how honestly hard it is for Darcy to be at a ball surrounded by people he doesn’t know.  And yet, she definitely has his number when it comes to the simple fact that his feelings don’t excuse his actions.  Being shy isn’t a license for acting above-it-all, and she points out that no skill – from piano-playing to small talk – can be mastered without practice.  (I gravitate more toward “awkward” than “haughty,” Darcy, but still, I’ve been there.)

Relationship Spotlight: Fitzwilliam Darcy & Elizabeth Bennet (Pride and Prejudice)

Lizzy and Darcy aren’t my immediate be-all end-all of Jane Austen couples.  I love so many of Austen’s pairs – the beautiful, wistful romance of Anne and Wentworth, the fun and cuteness of Catherine and Tilney, the lovely history behind Emma and Knightley – that, while I love Lizzy and Darcy too, they’re not my guaranteed number one.  Like I said, though, there’s still plenty to love about them, and Pride and Prejudice is certainly Austen’s most beloved book for a reason (some spoilers.)

In some ways, Lizzy and Darcy can seem at first blush to be a Regency-era version of the archetypal love-hate match (which, was that even a thing before Pride and Prejudice?  Did Austen invent this trope?)  I mean, they instantly get on one another’s bad sides, with Darcy snubbing Lizzy rather scornfully and she assuming she has his number as an insufferable snob.  Soon, though, he finds himself taken by her spirit, a turn of events that flabbergasts her, but slowly, gradually, she begins to fall for him as well.  That’s all true, and it makes them sound really simplistic, but for me, it doesn’t begin to approach the richness of this pairing.

Because it’s this richness in the writing that really makes Lizzy and Darcy come alive, I think.  I love that they’re not just a simple love-hate match, or an opposites-attract match, or a Cinderella-story match.  It’s much more than all of that.  With the title, there can be a tendency to separate the two by pride (Darcy) and prejudice (Lizzy,) but the truth is, both of them are proud and both of them are prejudiced.  Both are wrong, both are misunderstood, and both go through a quite a shift in their estimation of the other.

When Darcy snubs Lizzy at the ball that night, she takes it as evidence of his pride; she’d already found him overly haughty, and this encounter cements it.  That’s her impression of him going forward, and it’s what allows her to so easily believe the worst of him when Wickham comes along spinning his tales.  As he starts to fall in love with her, she can’t conceive it, and when she makes any sense of his behavior toward her, it’s usually operating under the assumption that he’s just trying to set her up to knock her down.  However, she’s not seeing the whole story.  It’s true that he can be proud, but it’s also true that he’s uneasy with strangers and that influences how he acts at the ball.  And her swiftness to determine his character based on that encounter means she can’t see how quickly he changes his mind about her and is working to prove that, in part because of how her own pride is wounded by his early dismissal of her.

Just as Lizzy’s first assessment of Darcy is incomplete, his pursuit of her is hampered by external noise that gets in his way.  His first proposal to her is a disaster, in no small part because he tells her how hard he’s tried not love her due to her less-than-stellar connections.  For Darcy, any potential relationship with Lizzy is tied up with her abrasive mother, her wild younger sisters, and her middle-class relations on her mother’s side (she has an uncle who’s in trade, for god’s sake, who lives in Cheapside – the horrors!)  In order to have any opportunity to be with her, he has to step outside his comfort zone, to make more of an effort with people that wouldn’t normally enter his sphere.

Both have to change.  They have to reexamine the previous judgments they’ve made and the reasons they made them.  They have to see one another in new ways and look more closely at themselves.  It makes for a tremendous story, and that’s why I love them.