SOURCE: Stovel, Bruce. “‘A Contrariety of Emotion’: Jane Austen's Ambivalent Lovers in Pride and Prejudice.” The International Fiction Review 14, no. 1 (winter 1987): 27-33.

In the following essay, Stovel asserts that Austen's novel allows for the interpretation that Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy's relationship is an example of ideal love, as well as the view that it is an “immediate and magnetic attraction.”

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “ambivalence” as “the coexistence in one person of the emotional attitudes of love and hate, or other opposite feelings, towards the same object or situation,” and this concept would seem to apply precisely to Pride and Prejudice. During the first half of the novel, the central couple, Elizabeth and Darcy, are held together by just such contradictory feelings. Like Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, each is the one the other loves to hate—and hates to love. And, like Beatrice...