Lizzy's and Darcy's marriage

[sciencefan]

Interesting! Are you writing from a perspective of a TV soap opera or a Hollywood melodrama? That you might have Jane Austen's prose in mind seems rather far fetched.
You wrote of Mr Collins and Charlotte marriage as based purely on money. A clergyman's living was about 200 -300 pounds per annum. Let's suppose Lady Catherine was very generous, five hundred would still be but one quarter of the Bennet's income which was barely adequate to keep a comfortable home. I do not think that Mr. Collins and Charlotte fall in the love/fortune formula.
Mr.Bennet's marriage was based on love, mistakenly according to Elizabeth, but the example is minor, outside of Austen's main theme.
To characterize Lydia's and Wickham's marriage as “based purely on sexual attraction or lust”, is in my opinion, much too modern an interpretation. Austen was surely aware of sexual attraction but in the barnyard not in the courtship of either the merchant, nor of the country squires, not of the aristocracy. Had you suggested such to Austen, I suspect she would have been astonished and wondered who had invited such a rustic to the drawing room. Informed that you represented the view two centuries hence, I could imagine that she would have wished for a second Norman conquest: the French to teach manners to the modern Britons. According to her letter, Lydia marries for love and it is your job to differentiate how love differs, but lust was foreign to Austen's style.
To suggests that Elizabeth's happiness depends on the potpourri of love, fortune and sex, is a juvenile misreading of Pride and Prejudice, in my opinion.
I am willing to be shown mistaken in this view, debate is the best function of a forum.

You make some excellent points that seem to refute the characterizations made by the other post.
On the surface they made sense to me, but your bringing forward of finer details show that the characterizations may have been too general.
I am interested to see further discussion on this topic.

I tended to see Charlotte and Mr. Collins' arrangement to be based on finances. Charlotte wasn't looking for "love" she was only looking for a "comfortable home". If one can't say it was a marriage based on money,
one can at least say, I believe, it was based on logic.

There is a synopsis on this website which states that Charlotte's and Mr. Collins' marriage was based on finances.
"The marriage between Mr. Collins and Charlotte is based on economics rather than on love or appearance."
http://www.online-literature.com/austen/prideprejudice/

Perhaps the difference is between comfort and riches.

[Newcomer]

I am interested to see further discussion on this topic.
I tended to see Charlotte and Mr. Collins' arrangement to be based on finances. Charlotte wasn't looking for "love" she was only looking for a "comfortable home". If one can't say it was a marriage based on money,
one can at least say, I believe, it was based on logic.

What is it that you wish to extract on the subject? As they are secondary characters, there is just so much information in the text and conjecture that can not be referenced to the text, is not very useful in my opinion.
Charlotte and Collins may have been motivated by emotions other than love and very probably they were not congruent.

[Newcomer]

Austen's men who marry ill seem to suffer more than the women who marry ill. Charlotte Lucas doesn't suffer the way Mr. Bennett and Mr. Palmer suffer. As Austen tells us in <i>Pride and Prejudice</i>, Charlotte "wisely does not see" when her husband acts like a fool. Marriage, for Charlotte, is her pleasantest preserve from want. She has an incentive to ignore her husband's foolishness. The men do not generally increase their wealth (unless they are unscrupulous), so they get nothing but the misery of living with their own bad judgment.<br><br>This does not mean that Austen proposes women marry for financial gain, regardless of the husband's sense. She creates character like Elinor and Marianne Dashwood (and Elizabeth Bennett) for whom it would be impossible to knowingly wed a fool. Austen's women are more aware than her men. The closest we come to a women being blinded by "youth and beauty" is Marianne. She almost dies from her mistake, but she lives to marry with sense and sensation.

an interesting post by Dea in Sense and Sensibility (Marriage- the pleasantest preserve from want), has some observations that might be interesting.