I don’t know if you’ve seen the new adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma that’s running on the BBC on Saturdays. For those of us with a vague, GCSE memory of Austen, this is the one about the snobbish, meddlesome matchmaker who behaves appallingly, messes up her friends’ lives, and ends up getting the man of her dreams, the dashing Mr Knightley, despite it all. Perhaps that’s why it’s always been my favourite.
This isn’t a recommendation for the BBC version, anyway – Jonny Lee Miller may be wonderful but he isn’t old enough for Knightley and everyone else has been told to count to five before saying their lines. But there’s a quote from the book I’ve always loved: “Men of sense, whatever you may choose to say, do not want silly wives.”
I have reached for that line on many occasions; it had a certain comforting power when I failed to win over the guys. Yes, I might value my own intelligence too highly, and my style of debate might be abrasive enough to strip nearby walls, but at some point the ‘men of sense’ were going to come running. My lack of the soft, feminine skills, my incorrigible inability to demur, the fact that I have never learned to gaze gently upwards through my eyelashes with the look of a new-born fawn – none of these, surely, mattered.
I was wrong. No, none of my male friends have married silly wives; but they have, all of them, chosen mates who can display the basics of female charm, who have qualities of softness and gentleness and who know, crucially, when to smile attractively rather than tell someone he’s a thicko. I thought of this on my most recent date, with a chap who had described himself online as ‘a plain speaker’ who was ‘seeking the same’. Turns out he wasn’t, exactly…
