Novels, Deep-Read · Britain & Ireland · No.20
Jane Austen · published January 1813 · drafted 1796–97 as First Impressions
A public ball in a small country town. The band is playing, the floor is loud with heels, and at the far end stands a newcomer said to have ten thousand a year. Someone pushes him to go and dance — there is a young woman sitting out for want of a partner.
He glances over. One glance. Then he says, in about a dozen words, that she will pass, but is not handsome enough to be worth the trouble.
She is sitting directly behind him and hears every syllable. What she does with it, immediately, is turn round and make it into a joke for her friends. The remaining three hundred pages are the interest on that one sentence.
A country gentleman has five daughters and an estate that by law can pass only to a male relative, so when he dies they must leave — which makes marriage not a romantic question but a question of survival. His second daughter, Elizabeth, is publicly slighted at a ball by a rich stranger and spends the next year proving to herself that she has seen through him, until a single letter turns every one of her proofs face-down. This is not a story about an arrogant man learning humility; it is a story about a clever woman discovering that her cleverness was the instrument of her error.
Jane Austen (1775–1817) was the daughter of a country clergyman in Hampshire. She never married and died at forty-one. She finished the first draft of this book at about twenty-one under the title First Impressions; her father offered it to a London publisher, who declined it without reading it. Fifteen years later she rewrote it, renamed it, and it appeared in three volumes from Thomas Egerton in January 1813, credited only to "the Author of Sense and Sensibility" — none of the four novels published in her lifetime carried her name on the title page. She sold the copyright of this one outright, for £110.
Its place in literary history is not really contested: this is the first English novel to make the forming and revising of a judgement its main plot. Before Austen, novels narrated what happened to people; from her on, they could narrate what people believed, and how wrongly. Her essential piece of craft — free indirect discourse, where a character's own tone and prejudice leak into the narrator's sentences — runs straight from here to Flaubert, to Joyce, and to everything cool and withholding since.
Longbourn, in Hertfordshire. Mr Bennet has about two thousand a year in rents — comfortable middling gentry — and five daughters and no son. The trouble is entirely in that last fact: Longbourn is held under an entail, a legal settlement made long ago that lets the property descend only through the male line. The day Mr Bennet dies, the house, the land and the income pass whole to a distant cousin none of them has met. The daughters will have only their mother's five thousand pounds divided five ways — a thousand each, yielding roughly forty pounds a year. Forty pounds dresses a gentlewoman. It does not keep her. Seed ①
So Mrs Bennet has exactly one idea in her head for life: get the girls married. She is the loudest and most embarrassing person in the book, and Austen gives her no mercy — but this silly woman is the only member of the household who has correctly assessed the situation.
Then the news: Netherfield Park is taken, by a Mr Bingley — young, rich, agreeable, four or five thousand a year. He brings two sisters and a friend: Mr Darcy, master of Pemberley in Derbyshire, ten thousand a year. At the public assembly at Meryton, Bingley dances everything; Darcy stands still. Bingley urges him to ask the girl sitting out, and Darcy looks across:
"She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me."— Darcy, Volume I, chapter 3 (quoted)
Elizabeth is directly behind him. Seed ②Her response is the best character introduction in the book: no tears, no sulk — she turns it into a story for her friends and gets a laugh out of it. That is her gift, and it is also her trap. Someone who can convert an injury into a joke rarely goes back to check whether the injury was correctly understood.
Bingley falls for the eldest, Jane — gentle, beautiful, twenty-two, disposed to think well of everyone. Jane is invited to dine at Netherfield and Mrs Bennet sends her on horseback rather than in the carriage, precisely so that rain will force her to stay. It rains; Jane catches cold and stays; Elizabeth walks three miles of mud to nurse her and arrives with her petticoat six inches deep in it. And in those same few days something goes wrong inside Darcy: talking to Miss Bingley, he admits he has lately been dwelling on how much pleasure a pair of fine eyes can give in the face of a woman who is not, strictly, a beauty. Payoff ② ↑The reader hears that line; Elizabeth does not — the one place in the book where we are given more than the heroine, so that every misjudgement afterwards itches.
There is also a conversation that sounds, at the time, like pure background noise. Elizabeth's friend Charlotte Lucas — twenty-seven, eldest daughter of a knighted neighbour, no fortune — states her theory of marriage: happiness in it is entirely a matter of chance, so it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person you will spend your life with. Seed ③Elizabeth laughs and says she would never do such a thing. Charlotte does not argue.
The cousin who will inherit the house arrives: Mr Collins, a clergyman who speaks as if reciting, whose patroness is Lady Catherine de Bourgh — a woman every one of whose domestic remarks he relays three times as revelation. He writes to announce a visit and to offer "amends" for the awkward fact that the estate will one day be his: the remedy is to marry one of the five cousins. The family reads the letter aloud and enjoys it enormously. Seed ④
He settles on Jane, is told Jane is nearly engaged, and switches to Elizabeth on the spot. The proposal is one of the funniest passages in English fiction: the reasons come numbered — a clergyman ought to set an example, it will gratify Lady Catherine, and marrying her reduces the loss to her sisters — and not one syllable of it concerns her as a person. She refuses; he does not believe her, being confident that refusal is the customary female manoeuvre. Payoff ① ↑The whole weight of that refusal rests on the entail from Act one: what she is pushing away is not a ridiculous man but the family's one legal lifeline — marry Collins and Longbourn stays theirs. The funniest scene in the book is simultaneously the one with the highest stakes.
Three days later Collins proposes to Charlotte, and Charlotte accepts. Payoff ③ ↑The marriage theory that sounded like a joke turns out to have been a blueprint: she said "know as little as possible" because she already knew she had no choosing to do. Elizabeth very nearly breaks with her over it, feeling personally betrayed. This is where Austen quietly records her heroine's first error: Elizabeth's moral standard is the standard of a woman who has not yet been backed against the wall by money.
Meanwhile the militia arrives in Meryton, and with it Wickham — young officer, handsome, the sort of talker who makes an evening feel warm. At their second meeting he hands Elizabeth a family scandal: his father was old Mr Darcy's steward, the old man's will left him a valuable clerical living, and on the old man's death the son withheld it out of jealousy and left him with nothing. He tells it with rich detail, controlled feeling, and repeated assurances that he has no wish to injure Darcy's name. Seed ⑤Elizabeth believes him — and not merely believes him: she believes him with relief. Here at last is evidence for the conclusion she already wanted.
At the Netherfield ball everything slides. Darcy asks her to dance and they fence through it; then her family disgraces itself in sequence — her mother announcing at volume that Jane will marry into the house, Mary seizing the piano and singing until her father stops her, Collins introducing himself to Darcy uninvited. Next morning the entire Bingley party leaves for London, with a note telling Jane they will not return this winter. Jane does not weep or complain. She swallows it and becomes quieter than before — Austen's way of writing heartbreak is to write someone becoming better behaved.
In spring Elizabeth visits Charlotte, now Mrs Collins, in Kent, and sees how her friend has arranged a life: the sitting room she uses daily is the plainer one at the back, because the front room faces the road and her husband is forever going to look out of it — so most of the day passes with the two of them apart. Charlotte has not lied to herself once. She has simply converted "endurance" into an executable daily schedule.
Next door is Rosings Park, Lady Catherine's domain. Her mode of conversation is interrogation: how many sisters, does your mother cook, do you mean you had no governess, how old are you? (Elizabeth declines to answer that one: not one-and-twenty.) Around Easter, Darcy arrives with his cousin Colonel Fitzwilliam. Darcy keeps turning up on the paths where Elizabeth walks and talking about nothing. It is the colonel who lets the pin drop: chatting, he mentions that Darcy lately congratulated himself on saving a friend from a most imprudent marriage. Elizabeth does the arithmetic instantly — the friend is Bingley, the marriage is Jane's. Her sister's whole ruined winter came out of this man's advice.
That evening she stays behind with a headache. Darcy walks in, paces the room, and produces the most famous opening in the book: he has struggled, it will not do, his feelings will not be repressed. Then he proposes — at length, cataloguing her low connections, her family's want of propriety, and the degradation the match represents for him, before concluding that he intends to marry her anyway. He finishes and stands waiting, with no apparent doubt of the answer. Elizabeth refuses and throws the charges back one by one: he destroyed her sister's happiness, he ruined Wickham's life, and the manner of the proposal is itself an insult — from the first day of their acquaintance his arrogance convinced her he was the last man in the world she could ever be prevailed on to marry.
The next morning, in the park, he puts a letter into her hand and walks away. This letter is the hinge of the novel and Austen's boldest structural risk — she stops the book and inserts a large block of unfiltered primary material, so that reader and heroine review the file together. It has two halves. On Jane: he admits he separated them, but not on grounds of rank — he watched her all evening and concluded she felt no deep attachment; he does not deny the charge, and half of it is true. On Wickham: the living was never withheld. Wickham declared he did not intend the church and meant to study law, resigned his claim, and took three thousand pounds in cash for it; when the money was gone he came back to demand the living and was refused. And there is worse, from last summer: at Ramsgate he attached himself to Darcy's fifteen-year-old sister Georgiana and persuaded her to agree to an elopement — she has thirty thousand pounds. Darcy arrived a day early, his sister told him the truth, and it did not happen. Seed ⑥He never exposed Wickham publicly, to protect her name.
Elizabeth reads it once and is furious. She reads it again and goes cold. She remembers how Wickham told his story: a total stranger, at a card party, unloading his benefactor's family history onto her. Payoff ⑤ ↑Every detail that struck her as candour now reads as evidence against him — a genuinely wronged man does not tell everyone he meets, and nobody in Meryton could have said where this officer came from. She thought she had been reading people. She had been collecting material that supported a conclusion reached on her first evening. Which produces the sentence that has been quoted for two hundred years:
"Till this moment I never knew myself."— Elizabeth, Volume II (quoted)
In summer Elizabeth travels with her aunt and uncle Gardiner. The Lakes are dropped because of her uncle's business, and Derbyshire substituted; her aunt grew up nearby and proposes a look at Pemberley, a great house open to paying visitors. Elizabeth agrees only after establishing that the family is away.
When the house appears across the valley, a thought crosses her mind that Austen refuses to tidy away: to be mistress of this place might be something. Then comes the housekeeper, Mrs Reynolds, who has worked there for decades and speaks of her master in a register Elizabeth has never heard applied to Darcy: he has not given her a cross word since he was four years old; he is the best landlord and the best master; not a tenant or servant on the estate will say otherwise. She also mentions in passing that the steward's son who grew up alongside him has turned out very badly. Elizabeth understands for the first time that she has known the drawing-room Darcy, and that most of this man's life happens outside drawing rooms — where several hundred people's livelihoods depend on him.
Then he walks round from the stables, home a day early. For the next two days Darcy does the single most effective thing available to him: he says nothing whatever about the proposal and simply behaves differently. He asks to be introduced to her aunt and uncle — London relations who live by trade, exactly the connections he sneered at when proposing — invites her uncle to fish the stream whenever he likes, and brings his sister to meet her. He does not argue his case. He stands in front of her and lives out the man she read about in the letter.
At exactly that moment two letters from Jane catch up with her in Derbyshire: Lydia, the youngest, has run off with Wickham. She is sixteen, was taken to Brighton by the colonel's wife, and left a note saying they were going to Scotland to marry (no questions asked there, no formalities). They never went north. They are somewhere in London and cannot be found. In that era this is not a scandal; it is a death sentence for the household — one daughter unmarried and ruined and the other four are finished. Payoff ⑥ ↑Same man, same method, twice within a year — and the reason the first attempt never became public is that Darcy chose silence to protect his sister. He says so himself afterwards: he rated exposing a scoundrel below the dignity of his own family, and the bill was delivered to someone else's house. This is the cruellest piece of causation in the book: Darcy's pride never injured Elizabeth. It travelled all the way round and landed on her youngest sister.
She tells Darcy the news on the spot and goes home overnight. The house is chaos: her mother in bed calling for smelling salts, her father in London searching blindly, and a letter from Collins arriving to console Mr Bennet with the observation that the death of his daughter would have been a blessing by comparison. Payoff ④ ↑The courtship letter the family laughed over in Act one has come round as this one. The heir has not changed a particle; only the reader has — a man for whom "propriety" is the only available language can talk about a living girl's death without a stammer.
The break, when it comes, makes no sense: Mr Gardiner writes that they are found and Wickham will marry her, on terms suspiciously cheap. Mr Bennet does the sum himself — nobody makes such a man agree for less than ten thousand pounds, and his brother-in-law does not have it. The truth escapes from Lydia herself, who at a family dinner mentions gaily that Mr Darcy was at the wedding, then claps a hand over her mouth and says it was a secret. Mrs Gardiner's reply to Elizabeth is explicit: Darcy found them. He first traced the woman who had managed the Ramsgate business, got the address out of her, then went alone to Wickham, paid off more than a thousand pounds of his debts, purchased him a commission in the regulars, settled another thousand, and made him complete the marriage. He required everyone to keep silent, on the ground that the disaster was the fault of his own silence in the first place.
After that the book moves fast. Bingley returns to Netherfield and proposes to Jane; accepted. Lady Catherine hears a rumour, drives to Longbourn, takes Elizabeth into the garden and demands a promise never to enter into an engagement with Darcy. Elizabeth refuses to promise — she does not claim to be engaged; she simply declines to sign the undertaking. Her ladyship departs in a rage and goes straight to her nephew to complain. And that complaint is the only encouragement Darcy ever receives: a woman with no interest in him would have denied it outright rather than merely refuse to promise. The funniest structural joke in the novel is that the person most determined to separate them personally carries the message.
The second proposal happens on a country lane. No speech, no conditions, one sentence: his affections and wishes are unchanged, but one word from her will silence him on the subject for ever.
"My affections and wishes are unchanged."— Darcy, Volume III (quoted)
She speaks. Austen takes the rest at a sprint: her father calls her into the library and asks not about money but whether this man can make her happy; her mother, who detested Darcy a minute earlier, begins organizing; and Elizabeth tells her sister, straight-faced, that she thinks her love probably dates from first seeing the grounds at Pemberley.
Read the five acts together and there is almost nothing accidental in this book: everything hangs on one fuse — a settlement drawn up who knows how long ago, entailing Longbourn on the male line. Because of it, five daughters must marry. Because they must marry, a mother uses a sick daughter as a stake and lets the youngest chase officers; Charlotte takes a fool inside three days; and Elizabeth's two refusals become genuine gambling. The line at the assembly — not handsome enough to tempt him — is only the spark. What made the house combustible was the deed.
The most famous opening in English fiction:
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."— Volume I, chapter 1 (quoted)
Every component is misbehaving. "A truth universally acknowledged" is the diction of mathematics and theology, thrown over a piece of village gossip. "Must be in want of" states a stranger's private business as a law of nature. And the fact is the reverse: the person in want is not the rich single man but every household within reach that has daughters. Austen offers no gloss and no verdict — she simply gives you the Bennets' conversation, and you work out for yourself that the universe doing the acknowledging is four drawing rooms near Meryton.
That is the whole secret of free indirect discourse: the narrator does not speak in her own voice, she borrows the character's, so a single sentence carries the character's confidence and the author's derision at once. The reader is placed close in and half a head above: you hear what they think and see what they cannot. Every laugh in the book is powered off that one switch.
The technical achievement here is that the point of view is locked to Elizabeth: you hear exactly what Darcy says and not one word of why he says it. So his long "I have struggled" declaration reaches the reader precisely as it reaches her — a man spending ten minutes offering "I cannot believe I want you" as a love speech. You are furious alongside her; you make her mistake with her.
The pacing is just as good. In the first half he talks and she says nothing, and the silence functions as a pressure gauge; in the second she opens and delivers all three charges in one breath, like someone handing in a paper they have been holding too long. And Austen's cruellest stroke is to have both of them operating at the top of their powers in this scene — his honesty (he tells the truth, including the disparagements he could easily have omitted) and her wit (every retort lands) — and then, two hundred pages later, to let the reader see that those two strengths are exactly what ruined them: his honesty is undefended pride, her wit is prejudice with no room left in it.
Darcy could have cleared himself; the author could have vouched for him. Austen takes neither route and hands the job to an old woman in a corridor — because what she wants is not "the reader is persuaded" but "the reader sees the grade of evidence change". Everything Elizabeth has had until now came from interested parties: a man who insulted her in public, an officer courting her, a set of sisters flattering him. Mrs Reynolds is the first witness with nothing at stake: she does not know who her visitors are, she is not praising him to please anyone, and her testimony carries a time span — since he was four years old. It is the first piece of long observation in the book, and every judgement Elizabeth has made until now rests on a handful of evening parties.
And note where the recognition is placed: in a house, not in a conversation. She learns Darcy for the first time not through language but through things he has done — a person responsible for several hundred lives leaves traces. Austen even declines to erase "to be mistress of this place might be something", a piece of honesty still used to attack the novel today, and still the least hypocritical line in it.
It was called First Impressions to begin with. After the retitling, "pride" and "prejudice" tend to get assigned one apiece — Darcy proud, Elizabeth prejudiced. The more accurate reading is that both people carry both: Darcy's prejudice is that a small country neighbourhood cannot contain anyone worth taking seriously; Elizabeth's pride is "I read people accurately, and that is the whole of my self-respect". What hurts her at the end is not learning she was wrong. It is learning that the faculty she was proudest of was the source of the error.
As a machine it has three working parts:
| Person | Money (annual income, or capital) | What it determines |
|---|---|---|
| Darcy | c. £10,000 a year, plus Pemberley | He can marry entirely as he pleases — and settle a scandal with ten thousand pounds |
| Bingley | £4,000–5,000 a year, fortune made in trade | Rich but with no land behind him, so he minds what his friend and sisters think |
| Mr Bennet | £2,000 a year, estate entailed away | Respectable alive, catastrophe dead — the novel's timer |
| The five sisters | Their mother's £5,000 split five ways: £1,000 each, c. £40 a year | Not marrying means no living at all, which is why two refusals are real gambling |
| Georgiana Darcy | £30,000 portion | Prey at fifteen; that number is what Wickham was after |
| Wickham | £1,000 legacy plus £3,000 taken for resigning the living | Once spent, his remaining trades are marrying and defrauding |
Take Elizabeth's side first, at full strength. Charlotte has just watched this man propose to another woman, fail, and turn round and recite the same speech to her. She knows his intelligence, his fawning, his tedium exactly. She is trading every remaining day, every meal, every night of her life for a house and the title of "Mrs". A person can sell many things, but selling every minute of the rest of their life is a price no arithmetic covers.
Now take Charlotte's side, and make it more persuasive than she makes it herself. She is twenty-seven, plain, and her family cannot produce a portion for her. She has two options: marry Collins, or spend thirty years on her brothers' charity as the woman who lives in other people's houses, minds other people's children, and is referred to as poor Aunt Charlotte. She took the first — and, note this, she has not told herself a single lie about it. She does not call it love; she calls it an establishment. She does not expect happiness; she arranges the days so that they can be borne. She is the least self-deceiving person in the novel. Elizabeth's verdict that she "cannot possibly be happy" is delivered with a ruler only women with a portion — or with luck — can afford to own.
Austen's own position hides in the structure: she does not punish Charlotte and does not reward her. She lets her go on living, which is colder than any judgement. And the question is standing in front of everyone today in a different costume: the stable job that bores you, the suitable relationship that does not move you, the city you can afford a flat in and cannot stand. "I won't settle" is a sentence that only means anything when you have another option. The hard part is not evaluating Charlotte. It is saying honestly why you think your own choice was the nobler one.
Start with the case against first impressions, which is the novel's surface position. Elizabeth gets it comprehensively wrong: she trusts the man who least deserves it and writes off the man who most needed a second look. Her error is not stupidity — it is intelligence. Clever people are good at supplying their intuitions with a full set of arguments, so each new piece of information gets fitted into the existing conclusion rather than tested against it. That is the most modern insight in the book: prejudice is not sustained by stupidity, it is sustained by intelligence.
Now make the case for first impressions, at full strength. One: Darcy did say the thing. Her judgement was not a fantasy; it was a reasonable inference from real evidence. Two: her conclusion about Bingley being separated from Jane was entirely correct. Three: fast judgement mostly works — a person has to decide within seconds whether to follow a stranger down an alley, and cannot gather six months of data on everyone. Demanding that someone form no first judgement is demanding paralysis. Charlotte's line about knowing as little as possible is vicious precisely because half of it is true: knowing more does not reliably make the judgement better; it mostly makes it easier to justify.
So the real line is not between judging and not judging. It is whether you still accept evidence after judging. What is admirable in Elizabeth was never that she avoided error; it is that on receiving the letter she dismantled her own conclusion to the foundations. Today the problem is sharper than in 1813: a recommendation system records every "not interested" and stops showing you the counter-evidence; one interview, one bad review, one clipped video can fix a person's reputation, and the information needed to revise it vastly exceeds the information that formed it. In Austen's world, changing your mind took one letter. In ours it takes fighting the entire feed.
The generous reading first, and it is strong. What he does costs him: he has to seek out the man he most despises, pay his debts, buy his commission, hand him money, and formally acquire, as a future brother-in-law, the man who tried to abduct his sister. And he requires everyone to keep it secret — a good deed done so that its beneficiary will never know is hard to describe as a transaction. His motive is stated plainly in the book: he holds himself responsible, because he protected his family's dignity instead of exposing Wickham. That is a man settling an account, not a man courting.
Now the cold reading, at full strength. First, he can do it only because he has ten thousand a year; the identical moral insight, installed in Mr Bennet, is worth nothing, because he cannot pay. The novel's moral crisis is ultimately resolved by purchasing power, and that has to be conceded however reluctantly. Second, who exactly is rescued? A sixteen-year-old girl, at the cost of being fixed permanently inside a marriage to a man who does not love her and will not be faithful; the couple soon run short of money, the feeling cools fast, and they spend years applying to her sisters for help. What is really being salvaged is the other four sisters' standing in the market, and a family name; Lydia herself is the line item written off. Third, the secrecy is admirable and it also keeps the whole thing at the level of private favour: not one structural thing changes, and the next Wickham can use the identical method on the next sixteen-year-old who has no rich suitor in the wings.
The dilemma is everywhere now: a wealthy man funds a hospital, a company rescues a collapsing community project. The generosity is real, and it is also an analgesic for a structural failure — and the awkward side effect of analgesia is that nobody investigates the cause. Austen's stance is double: she lets Darcy's good act stand solidly, and she lets the reader total up the ten thousand pounds. She refuses to merge the two for you.
The defence can be made hard. What she sees at Pemberley is not a price but evidence: how a man discharges responsibility for hundreds of people, what his servants say after decades, how his sister has been brought up. Those happen to be the only physical traces character leaves in the real world. Besides, her actual turning point was the letter; Pemberley only brings a conclusion off the page and onto the ground. And she has already pushed away Longbourn's one legal lifeline — somebody who has refused money before is unlikely to be bought by the next lot.
But the other side stands too, and Austen deliberately blocks the exit: she sets the recognition inside a great house, and she prints "to be mistress of this place might be something" without softening it. Property is not the opposite of love; it is love's climate. A person who never has to worry about next month finds it much easier to appear gracious, generous and well-bred. When we say we don't care about circumstances, we usually just haven't noticed that circumstances already did the first round of filtering for us. Charlotte's honesty was forced out of her by poverty; Elizabeth's was permitted by luck — and the distance between the two kinds of honesty is exactly ten thousand a year.
Line up her six novels and the same subject keeps returning: how a woman with no property, no profession and no legal standing can convert judgement alone into a life she can live in. The only capital her heroines can deploy is their reading of other people, and Austen spent her career asking whether that capital is sound.
Emma is almost this book in a mirror — another young woman certain she reads people accurately, matching every person around her incorrectly, the difference being that Emma is rich, so her misjudgements damage others rather than herself. Northanger Abbey gives us a girl whose head has been spoiled by Gothic novels and who reads ordinary life as conspiracy. Mansfield Park supplies her least ingratiating heroine and makes the subject morality rather than wit. And in the last of them, Persuasion, a woman who was talked out of an engagement gets a second chance eight years later — young, Austen wrote about judgement; older, she wrote about regret.
One more obsession runs the whole way through: parents who fail at the job. Mr Bennet is the most affectionate and most damning portrait in the book — witty, fond of his daughters, the only person who understands Elizabeth, and a man who watched his wife and youngest daughters as free entertainment for twenty years and disciplined nothing, until Lydia's disaster makes him admit the account is his. Austen lets him say it, and then writes him back to normal within pages. She believes people can change, and she knows coolly that most do not — they just feel bad for a while.
Without flattery: this novel has several points that get attacked repeatedly, and most of the attacks have weight.
1 · Not a story about a proud man learning humility — a story about a clever woman finding that her cleverness was the instrument of her error.
2 · The fuse is not the insult at the ball; it is a settlement entailing a house on the male line.
3 · Mrs Bennet is the most embarrassing person in the book and the only one who has correctly assessed the situation.
4 · Austen tells you in chapter six that Darcy is watching her eyes, then lets you watch the heroine walk the other way for two hundred pages.
5 · The letter contains no reversal, only completion: the truth is not a different story, it is the same story, complete.
6 · Elizabeth's worst moment is not discovering that Darcy is good; it is discovering that she never knew herself.
7 · The hero is cleared by a housekeeper rather than by himself, because the subject here is grades of evidence, not declarations.
8 · Charlotte is the least self-deceiving person in the novel; the ruler used to declare her unhappy can only be afforded by women with a portion.
9 · The moral crisis is finally settled with ten thousand pounds — Austen neither hides this nor resolves it for you.
10 · The person most determined to separate them carries the message that brings them together: Lady Catherine's carriage is the book's perfect joke.