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Sadie Stein on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Episode 16

Nothing Is Funny Anymore

Featuring Sadie Stein

Audio episode · 21 min

Sadie Stein on Pride and Prejudice

What kind of Austen comedy needs an episode called Nothing Is Funny Anymore? Six chapters of road, Kent to London to Longbourn, with Elizabeth carrying the letter home and no one left to be angry at except herself. Sadie Stein, with an assist from the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, names the trap that self-criticism sets for honest people. Then a confession of her own, about a grudge she carried for twenty years against a rock band and an entire American town, on no evidence at all, and what it taught her about being wrong. Mr. Bennet, meanwhile, gets one decision that truly matters and makes it without leaving his library.

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I Couldn't Have Given You Up to Anyone Less

Sadie Stein weeps at Mr. Bennet's half-sentence goodbye. Garth Greenwell reads a whole novel about a father who can't say it, so the daughter must.

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Darcy falls for Elizabeth because she alone does not perform for him, Stein argues — her wit is character, not strategy, and he falls in spite of himself.

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