Such a treat this week! My daughter Darcy is joining me to talk about one of her favorite novels, Pride and Prejudice. For me, after several weeks of dense reading, returning to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice felt like revisiting an old friend—but this time, the experience was unexpectedly conflicted. While I still admire the novel’s perfectly engineered rom-com plot and its web of misunderstandings and romances, I found my patience thinner for the Regency language and social codes. What once felt transporting now felt distant and even claustrophobic. The novel’s narrow social world, sparse physical description, and elastic sense of time made the setting feel oddly unreal to a modern reader.
What was really fun, and unexpected, was how Darcy helped me reclaim my love of this book. I was just getting over my skis!
While I struggled more with the characters than I remembered, Darcy loved Jane in particular. I found that Mrs. Bennet, often dismissed as ridiculous, now struck me as pragmatically rational in a world where marriage determines survival. And the tidy “happily ever after” ending left me missing the moral and emotional complexity I’ve grown used to elsewhere. But for Darcy, it felt like the way the book should end, especially for Jane and Bingley.
I hope you enjoy this conversation half as much as I did!
LINK
Ted Gioia/The Honest Broker’s 12-Month Immersive Humanities Course (paywalled!)
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The complete list of Crack the Book Episodes: https://cheryldrury.substack.com/p/crack-the-book-start-here?r=u3t2r
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