Colonel Fitzwilliam (William Collins, Collins)

Colonel Fitzwilliam Darcy (Darcy) is a gentleman officer whose principal charm lies in his genuine sociability and well-informed mind. As a relation of Fitzwilliam Darcy (Darcy) through family ties, he frequents Rosings Park and the Hunsford Parsonage during the season, where he becomes a welcome companion to those in the neighborhood. His manners are notably pleasant and unaffected—he speaks readily, listens attentively, and treats all he meets with a consideration that marks him as a man of good breeding and natural courtesy. Though his military commission provides respectability and a comfortable income, he possesses no great independent fortune and holds no valuable church preferment through patronage. His ready admiration and easy conversation make him an agreeable acquaintance, and his evident enjoyment of intellectual discourse suggests a mind more thoroughly informed than Mary Bennet (many, marry, Bennets, mark, bonnet, vary) of his social standing. Yet Colonel Fitzwilliam Darcy (Darcy) remains ultimately a secondary figure in the larger affairs that occupy those around him, his pleasant company and evident regard unable to alter the deeper currents of feeling and circumstance that govern the principal figures at Rosings.