Pride and Prejudice

At a country assembly, Mr. Darcy looks at Elizabeth Bennet across the room and pronounces her tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me, and she, overhearing, laughs and repeats it to her friends. From that small slight grows the most satisfying misjudgement in English fiction. Elizabeth is quick, certain, and delicious company, and she decides within an evening that she has Darcy entirely measured; Austen writes her so far inside free indirect discourse that the reader sits within that certainty and feels it shatter at the very moment she does. The book is really about the distance between being clever and being right, and the private mortification of discovering, too late, that you took the first for the second. That cost arrives as comedy, as blush, as something close to rescue: when these two finally see each other plainly, the relief is almost physical. Few novels make you ache this hard for two people to stop being fools and admit they are in love.