Charlotte's Bargain

Mr. Collins came for a wife, and a week is all he needs; the wife just isn't the one anyone in Pride and Prejudice expected. Chapters twenty-one through twenty-three, and Sadie Stein declines the sneer most readings reach for. First comes a letter, Caroline Bingley at her sweetest and most lethal, which Jane reads one way and Elizabeth the other; Stein reads it both ways and prices what each reading costs. Then Charlotte Lucas, twenty-seven, plain, entirely clear about what she is doing, makes the most defensible bad decision in the book. Elizabeth calls it a betrayal. Stein starts counting the betrayals, and the number keeps rising.