This Week, Dave is Reading...
Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, again
This week, welcome to guest poster David Nash. Last fall, he wrote about Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, and he’s back today to talk about his mission to read every novel written by Jane Austen—and why it took him so long. This guest post is longer than usual—but stick with it, because amazingly enough, Dave has something fresh to say about Austen! When you’re finished, you can read more from him on his Substack.
Pride, Prejudice, and Second Chances:
My Twenty-Five Year Journey Back to Pemberley
I once abandoned Jane after one sentence.
We've all heard of Jane Austen and surely we have an opinion, whether we've read her recently, long ago, or never at all. But what pride and prejudice do we carry as readers?
Are we too prideful to meet Jane on her terms? Her morals, manners, and Regency-era marriage plots?
Are we too prejudiced based on what others have said, our own perspectives, or those big-budget movie trailers marketed at twenty-something women?
I'll admit it: I've been prideful and prejudiced in all those ways. Maybe you have too.
Why I Ghosted Jane at 19
I first "read" Pride and Prejudice as a college freshman. It was the second-to-last book in a mandatory year-long seminar that began with Homer's Iliad and ended with Woolf's To the Lighthouse.
I got about as far as that famous opening line:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
It was spring in New York, my first year away from home, and my life's possibilities seemed endless. Spending a week reading an archaic rom-com sounded like a non-starter to me. I knew I was a single man, but I didn't appreciate the good fortune I possessed or know what I wanted.
I thought I was so far from coming to terms with Jane...but really I was closer than I imagined.
Now the Connection Seems Obvious
For me, 1999 was the greatest year in film; and one of those films would unknowingly prepare me for my eventual return to Jane. 10 Things I Hate About You. Loosely based on Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, it shares surprising parallels with Pride and Prejudice. Heath Ledger would have made a dashing Mr. Darcy, and Julia Stiles was so relatable. Coincidentally, Julia and I went to the same school, which meant she also was supposed to read Pride and Prejudice at the end of the same course.
Jane’s novel and Julia’s movie share similar features:
Sharp heroines who refuse to conform. Lizzy rejects two marriage proposals that would lift her out of financial uncertainty. Julia laughs sarcastically about attending prom.
Wrong first impressions fuel the conflict. Lizzy initially finds Darcy arrogant and condescending. Julia sees Heath as a stupid boy headed for jail.
Money motivates the male leads. Darcy boasts of breaking up Jane's (Lizzy’s sister) budding romance with Mr. Bingley because Jane has no financial future. Heath takes Julia out because the local bros pay him to do so.
Class and reputation create barriers. Darcy emanates moneyed snobbery. Heath cultivates a reputation as a troublemaker.
Family dynamics complicate everything. The five Bennet sisters navigate their relationships differently than the two sisters in 10 Things. Both stories feature fathers who set their daughters up for failure through neglect or ridiculous rules.
Love transforms characters. Awww.
Our foils often bring out the things we hate about ourselves. Sometimes we project them onto our foils or shadows with impotent rage; other times they transform us toward love instead.
As a result of Julia reading her poem "10 Things I Hate About You," she realizes she loves Heath. It turns out I like a good rom-com, as long as it has some hate. When I realized rom-coms are acceptable, I remembered Lizzy’s father asking: "Lizzy... what are you doing? Are you out of your senses, to be accepting this man? Have you not always hated him?" It’s been said there’s a thin line between love and hate. I’ve always imagined it going from love to hate and not the other way.
The Right Time and Place
I've found in my reading life that I have to be in the right place to read a book. Like a true love, a great book will wait for you to be ready. Now, twenty-five years later, I came back to Pride and Prejudice, not out of nostalgia, but in hopes of solving a problem. The problem was my writing. Over the last nine months, I've been struggling.
I found that while the first person allows me to dive into the inciting incident and write with a distinct voice, my writing lacks tension and the distance required for readers to develop empathy and engagement. I needed a change.
Free Indirect Discourse’s Redemption
Years ago, I put aside James Wood's How Fiction Works because Wood all but crucifies himself on the hill of free indirect discourse and I only wrote in the first person at the time. Recently, I reread Wood for clues and decided it was time for me to pick up the cross of the third person and bear the nuances of free indirect speech versus free indirect thought. Along the via del Austen, I repeated my mantra: read like a writer, read like a writer.
Serendipitously, I came across a paper exploring how Jane’s novel formed the link from the flat 18th-century novels, the ones that Jane’s Northanger Abbey rawly satirizes, to 20th-century modernism like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. I decided that in order to understand the paper, I had to read all six of Jane’s novels. And there was no better year to do that than the year of her 250th birthday.
First, I read Emma, and I loved it. I loved how Emma's future husband causes her character transformation by deftly communicating how Emma's poor manners wounded an innocent party. I loved how Emma came to realize the shortcomings in her own perceptions.
Pride and Prejudice was my last and my favorite in this quest. Immediately I could tell this was Austen's most polished novel. Each paragraph popped. Each chapter took a breath at its start and took my breath away at its end.
Tension: Internal and External
Pride and Prejudice uses free indirect discourse in the way I was searching for: to create tension.
One place tension comes from is the conflict between emotion and rationality. Darcy's direct speech (emotion) and his indirect speech (reason) conflict. His direct speech exclaims his ardent love; his indirect speech reveals his pretension and condescension toward Lizzy’s social and financial inferiority.
Darcy shows how enlightened and just people can internalize social hierarchies, which undermine their capacity for authentic interpersonal connection. This is the cross Darcy must bear on his quest for Lizzy’s love.
As his foil, Lizzy’s direct speech aligns with her indirect speech. Austen uses this technique in both Darcy and Lizzy to align the reader with Lizzy’s perspective and outrage; and to critique Regency-era class structures and hollow display of manners.
Through this conflict, Austen exposes how class prejudices corrupt morals and reason. Austen uses free indirect style to bring to life the novel's central conflict: love versus social expectations.
Finding Ourselves in the Mirror
Given how Austen uses free indirect discourse, it's easy to empathize with Lizzy. But are we not more like Darcy?
For our own sakes or those of others, do we not say the opposite of what we're thinking?
At work and at family gatherings, I've had to withhold the full truth about some people and my true thoughts (Darcy does with Wickham) for the sake of tranquility. For the sake of money, I’ve bitten my tongue many times.
Maybe you've been there too. Maybe you've caught yourself being polite when you wanted to be honest, or reserved when you wanted to reach out. Or maybe, like Darcy, you’ve spilled your guts in a conflicted, un-gentlemanlike manner and regretted it ever since.
Why Great Books Now
Great books don't just wait for us, they offer a space for us to find ourselves. Great books show characters not unlike ourselves confronting universal truths and the limitations of their human capabilities. They teach us about the human condition and build our empathy in an era where empathy has become a four-letter word.
In Pride and Prejudice, I found more than just free indirect discourse. Yes, I learned how to create tension through the gap between what characters say and what they think. I learned how to give readers both intimacy and distance through zooming in and out of character minds and that the narrator can float in between them all. I learned how to make internal conflict visible on the page through the natural inclination to internalize self-doubt. But most importantly, I learned that sometimes the books we reject are the books that have the most to teach us.
What book did you abandon too early? What made you give it a second chance? We'd love to hear your story in the comments. And scroll on down for some bonus links!
Want to dive deeper? Here are some sources from Dave that helped him understand Austen's technique:
How Fiction Works by James Wood
Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose
Free Indirect Speech in The Work of Jane Austen by Hatsuyo Shimazaki.
Austen Said: Patterns of Dictation in Jane Austen’s Major Novels by the University of Nebraska at Lincoln
Hi, David,
Thank you for this insightful piece. I found myself wanting to highlight many parts, but this one had special resonance for me: “I've found in my reading life that I have to be in the right place to read a book. Like a true love, a great book will wait for you to be ready.”
I could not agree more. Since I was a latecomer to so many works that have become important to me, much of what I write riffs on the concept that it’s never too late to fall in love with a great author.
Further, as you demonstrate, I’ve often found that my thoughts about a particular work have evolved over the years as I have. In my books I write imaginary and sometimes real letters to the men and women writers who mark me. It doesn’t matter if they are technically still here. They are always with me.
With respect to Austen, I was glad to have read William Deresiewicz’s book, A Jane Austen Education, which shows the appeal of Austen to men as well as women. Maybe you know it? Like him, I was a late appreciator of Austen, and I am so grateful to finally be in her company.
Do you know Rachel Cohen’s “Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels”? In my Letters to Men and Women of Letters I wrote to thank her for writing a phrase that I am never going to forget:
“Grief runs through the whole of life and leaves nothing untouched.”
But under what category do I file this? I am tempted to add it to “Condolences,” a part of my Notes to which I have had to refer with increasing frequency. This is what happens when you’re lucky to have made it this far, and when you write a book that has put you in intense touch with your own past and uncertain future.
I will continue to think about where I might place that so-true and so-elegantly expressed observation about grief.
But for now, I am thanking Rachel Cohen for writing it. And I’m thanking you, David, for reminding me of Jane Austen’s power.
When is the right time in life to read a classic like Austen? Any time!
I remember starting Pride and Prejudice when I was maybe 15 and, inspired by my English teacher, wanting to read the renowned classic novels. In today’s language, I wanted to be a book Nerd. I did not finish Pride and Prejudice. With no teacher guiding me, my lack of life and romance experiences and my undeveloped skill at understanding more than plot were no match for Austen’s sometimes intricate language, layers of characterization, and social commentary.
This past year I picked it up again because my high school granddaughter was reading it in school. I’m 73 now, a long way from 15, with a library of life and reading experiences. That library plus using an annotated edition with sidebars of historical cultural information gave me an entirely different experience and a good conversation with my granddaughter. It was a right time for this book. Now your insights here make me want to read it again plus at least some of Austen’s other work.