I WAS PURSUED BY A POMPOUS MR COLLINS

FOR me, one of elizabeth Bennet’s most admirable moments in Pride and Prejudice is when she’s faced with the wonderfully pompous Mr Collins.

he attaches himself to Lizzy, and will not be discouraged. her father’s cousin — and heir — cloying Mr Collins considers himself quite the catch. Completely oblivious to Lizzy’s aversion to him, he proposes — and refuses to accept it when she turns him down.

Few of us are lucky enough to have met a Darcy. But most of us know a Collins or two; men who, when rejected, refuse to believe that the woman might prefer another man — or indeed, no man at all — rather than accept their advances.

Men like this invariably think of themselves as nice Guys.

Women, they think, are unable to appreciate their qualities.

These men believe, as Collins does, that ‘elegant females’ play hard to get, that being ‘just friends’ is a mythical waiting-room, where persistence may lead to promotion to the status of sexual partner.

My Mr Collins was a librarian when I was in my late teens: a married man three times my age, to whom I had chatted once or twice when I was looking up books for research.

he was friendly; I was polite. Before I knew it, he was lying in wait for me as I came to use the library; talking to me (or at me) for hours. But it was only when he started calling at my house, wanting to talk, or go for walks, that I realised he was besotted.

I really have no idea why this was. I didn’t find him attractive. I’d already met my husband. My Mr Collins didn’t care.

he was at least as impervious as Jane austen’s Mr Collins, and his proposals veered alarmingly between promises to leave his wife and accusations of rudeness, for which (unlike Lizzy Bennet) I was completely unprepared.

This man was an adult. I was supposed to defer to adults.

So, from a fear of being rude, I allowed him to believe we could be friends, although I made it equally clear that we could never be anything more.

If only I’d read Pride and Prejudice at school, instead of Jane eyre, then I might have found the words to let him down politely — although, for that, he would have had to have been capable of understanding them.

Instead, I spent the next couple of years refusing to answer the doorbell, until he finally gave up the chase — no doubt deploring the fickleness of young females, and their inability to recognise a nice Guy when they meet one.

Different Class by Joanne Harris, published by Doubleday, is out now, £18.99.