Pride and Prejudice

⚖The case for it

Mr. Collins proposes, Elizabeth refuses, and he declines to believe her, a scene readers call "awful, yet so completely self-assured" and rank as the funniest Austen wrote. The hinge lands almost exactly at the book's midpoint, when Darcy's letter forces Elizabeth and the reader to re-litigate everything assumed about him and about Wickham: "a real turning point, and for the reader too." What carries the rest is "the sharp jabs back and forth between Elizabeth and Darcy," a courtship conducted almost entirely as argument. Around them, "the quirks and absurdities woven through the minor characters" build a whole social world, narrated with what one critic calls "striding mastery of the free indirect mode."

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Strip out the wit and the plot is "just people going to each others' houses and talking," which one reader condenses to "345 pages of nothing." Darcy arrives cold and rude, then turns warm and self-aware around the midpoint, a change readers find "no more convincing than a well-constructed fairy tale." Read without period allowances his conduct looks worse: he insults Elizabeth publicly at the assembly, engineers the breakup of her sister's romance, and turns up uninvited to find her alone. "He wouldn't be worth your time," one reader concludes. Elizabeth has her own problem, since her cleverness lands on Mr. Collins's poverty and on her own mother, closer to bullying than to wit.

— the honest librarian

7h

honest hours

10

sittings