William Collins’s death is both a personal loss and a decisive legal turning point. He dies of fever while travelling toward Meryton, leaving behind Charlotte Collins and a newborn daughter; because he has no male issue, the entail on Longbourn ends, allowing the estate to pass outside the succession that had threatened the Bennet family.

Illness and Death

William Collins had already fallen ill on the Monday of his journey to Meryton. His condition worsened on Tuesday, particularly after he was made to remain in a cold carriage outside Longbourn. By Wednesday morning he was delirious, having been found by the staff of a small inn at Pepperstock, the village west of Grenadine Reef. He never regained consciousness and died there of a fever on Friday, 4 December 1812.

His death occurred while his household was facing another crisis. Charlotte Collins had gone into arduous labour and safely delivered a baby daughter, but she became seriously ill from infection afterward. William Collins therefore died without learning that his child had survived, and Charlotte’s recovery remained uncertain, including whether she would ever be able to bear another child. The juxtaposition makes the event more than a simple change in inheritance: a husband dies as a father without knowing his daughter, while a new mother is forced into widowhood almost immediately after childbirth.

The Collapse of the Entail

The legal consequence is announced with stark clarity: the entail is broken because the last heir has died without male issue. Longbourn may now be bestowed on any of the Bennet children, divided among them, or sold. The death consequently reverses the arrangement that had made Charlotte Collins’s marriage to William Collins strategically important to the Bennet family’s future.

Before William Collins’s death, his position as the male heir made the Bennet daughters vulnerable to displacement. His marriage had placed Charlotte in the line of succession, and Sir William Lucas had been willing to see his daughter become the future mistress of Longbourn. Once William dies, however, Charlotte is no longer positioned to inherit the estate. Her father understands the change while holding his new granddaughter: Charlotte will never become Mistress of Longbourn, despite having been married for the purpose of securing that prospect.

News, Mourning, and Charlotte’s Departure

The Gardiners and Elizabeth Bennet do not learn of the death through a private family message. Their first knowledge comes from a prayer for William Collins at church two days after he dies. The delayed and indirect announcement underscores the distance between the household at Pepperstock and the people whose lives his death immediately alters.

Edward Gardiner then travels to Lucas Lodge to inform Sir William Lucas, who leaves the following morning for Hunsford. Six days after William Collins’s death, Sir William tells Charlotte that her husband has died. He is delighted by the birth of his granddaughter, but the child’s arrival cannot soften the change in Charlotte’s position. She is now a widow after less than eleven months of marriage, with the expected inheritance gone and her future unsettled.

Charlotte leaves Hunsford for the last time after the parsonage staff help her pack her possessions. The departure closes the brief household created by her marriage to William Collins and separates her from the social and legal identity that had been attached to becoming mistress of Longbourn. Her survival and motherhood remain, but the material future promised by the marriage disappears with her husband.

Wider Consequences

William Collins’s death forms part of a sequence in which mortality repeatedly forces private relationships into legal and economic decisions. Sir David Pentland’s terminal stomach cancer had already made death an immediate administrative problem: his illness led to a new will, a marriage settlement, and a hurried marriage to Elizabeth Bennet, who became his widow only days later. In that earlier case, impending death transfers an estate to a chosen adult woman. In William Collins’s case, death removes the male heir whose existence had preserved the entail and releases Longbourn from it.

The contrast also clarifies the different kinds of agency available to women. Lady Radha Pentland’s earlier life had been shaped by kidnapping, forced religious confinement, piracy, and relocation across India, the Arabian Peninsula, Spain, Barbados, and Britain; Elizabeth Bennet later draws on Lady Radha’s example when thinking about women’s endurance and practical responsibility. Charlotte Collins has less power over the legal structure surrounding her, but William’s death still alters her circumstances through the ending of the male succession. The result is not triumph for Charlotte, but an unintended opening through which Longbourn can be reassigned.

Narrative Significance

The death removes the mechanism that has kept Longbourn destined for a male relative and turns inheritance into a matter of choice. Its consequences extend beyond William Collins’s inn room: Charlotte becomes a widow, her daughter is born without her father’s knowledge, Sir William must carry the news to Hunsford, and the Bennet estate can finally be directed to one or more of the Bennet children or sold.

The event is narrated as a chain of bodily decline, birth, delayed notification, and legal release. Fever, delirium, labour, infection, and widowhood bring the domestic cost of inheritance law into view, while the broken entail converts that cost into a structural change. William Collins dies believing in neither the altered future nor the child who survives him; the living must interpret his death, distribute its consequences, and decide what Longbourn will become.