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need to grasp what the surprise ending means.

The Romance Formula That Is Philosophical
    The Austen books have a formula with which you may be familiar: Boy meets girl, adversity separates boy and girl (parents and family, differences in station, etc.), and boy and girl overcome adversity for storybook ending. The engines of the triumph over the obstacles put before love are devotion, emotion, and passion, more or less. Austen plays with the formula, mocks it really, by showing the disastrous results of these passionate first encounters and mistaken first impressions. Again and again, they lead to unhappy marriages and failed relationships. Just consider:
    • Edward Ferrars and Lucy Steele in Sense and Sensibility
    • Willoughby and Colonel Brandon’s foster daughter in Sense and Sensibility
    • Marianne’s feelings for Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility
    • Elizabeth’s feelings for Mr. Wickham in Pride and Prejudice
    • Wickham’s usage of Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice
    • Emma Woodhouse’s fascination with Frank Churchill in Emma
    All the “happy endings” and positive courtships, in contrast, are the fruit of hard work to overcome the mistakes made on first sight and the characters’ deeply held prejudices or convictions.
    • Emma Woodhouse and George Knightley in Emma
    • Harriet and Robert Martin in Emma
    • Edward Ferrars and Elinor in Sense and Sensibility
    • Colonel Brandon and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility
    • Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy in Pride and Prejudice
    • Jane Bennet and Bingley in Pride and Prejudice
    Austen, in this consistent depiction of hurried judgment from first impressions as bad and of penetrating understanding born of reflection and experience as good, is writing a philosophical argument against David Hume’s empiricist position within her comic novels (and Rowling, in the tradition of English letters, is doing the same thing). Let’s take a look at what Hume said and how Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is a response.
    Hume’s position was, ultimately, that nothing could be known certainly (except, of course, the fact that “nothing could be known certainly,” which was certain). The first principle and consequence of what is even on the surface a contradiction is that only sensorial knowledge is even dependable because all of our ideas Hume assumed to be derived from sense impressions. The distance between this belief and the materialism of our times, in which only quantities of matter and energy are thought of as real, is a short walk; the breach made thereby with the Romantic and Platonic vision predominant in literature is correspondingly vast. Not very surprisingly, Austen and Rowling side with Coleridge and Wordsworth against Hume.
    Jane Austen, the very widely read Parson’s daughter, takes aim at Hume’s dependence on sense impressions in the language and meaning of her Pride and Prejudice , the first title of which was First Impressions. 3 Pride and Prejudice , as an example, is an argument against trusting cold and sensorial “first impressions” versus sympathetic judgment based on experience and character. The former, as the story unfolds, are relatively worthless because first impressions are so malleable to the ideas we have from our personal pride and prejudice.
    Darcy seems the worst of self-important snobs to Elizabeth Bennet, and the Bennets seem to Darcy to be beneath his attention. Wickham seems the long-suffering innocent to Elizabeth—and Darcy to be Wickham’s persecutor. His pride and her prejudice combine to blind them to their real characters, which, of course, circumstances and their ability both to rise above their sensorial impressions and trust their greater judgment beyond pride and prejudice reveal in time. Their nuptials (and sister Jane’s with Bingley) are a testament of love’s greater perception of truth and goodness than sense, subject as perceived ephemera are to human failings like conceit, class, and