LIKE LIZZY, I WAS HUMILIATED AT A DANCE

‘She is tolerable,’ said Mr Darcy of elizabeth Bennet at the assembly Rooms, ‘but not handsome enough to tempt me.’ She overheard him. and then Mr Darcy heaped contempt on insult by saying he gave no consequence to girls ‘who have been slighted by other men’.

I reckon something like this actually happened to Jane austen when she went to her first country ball and found herself rebuffed and humiliated. a plain and overlooked girl, she went home to lick her wounds and by the age of 21 had written a draft of First Impressions (later to become Pride and Prejudice), in which Lizzy, a plain but lively girl, nabs the most eligible man on the dance floor and goes on to marry him.

It is wildly fantastical. In real life posh Mr Darcy would have married someone equally as posh, and dumped Lizzy. But how timelessly agreeable and popular is the fantasy of plain-but-feisty-girl nabs rich man!

If we could only all be ‘lively’ like Lizzy, leaving looks for her beautiful sister Jane to worry about.

a similar trauma happened to me in 1949 when I was 17. I was plump (fat, frankly), very shy, neither lovely nor lively, and had never had a boyfriend.

at last out of school uniform, I went up to university at St andrews and dared to hope: but at my first college ‘hop’ it wasn’t the handsome Prince but a horrible, plain, spotty boy who asked me to dance.

he squeezed up against me so disconcertingly close I got scared. When he asked me to go walking with him in the moonlight I said no.

I was probably wise. ‘Who’d want a dumpling like you anyway?’ he said, waddling off, ‘I can get better than that!’

I licked my wounds for some ten years before writing a series of novels — as I now realise — largely about the effect of looks on female lives. In the latest of them, Before The War, my heroine Vivvie, who is wealthy but vast and ungainly, feels obliged to buy herself a husband.

They end up happy, and in love: fantasy, no doubt, like Lizzy and her Mr Darcy, and wishful thinking on my part.

But the enduring charm of Lizzy is that while not being the prettiest girl in the class, she still manages to enchant and marry Mr Darcy by virtue of charm and wit, while her merely beautiful big sister Jane has to put up with second-prize Mr Bingley. There is a little sister in all of us. BEFORE The War by fay Weldon is published by Head of Zeus at £18.99.