Reading Austen at Every Age

Some books stay the same and you outgrow them. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, in Sadie Stein's Rebind Classics reading, does something rarer: it changes as you change, handing back a different novel at thirteen than at thirty than at fifty. Stein's whole approach to the book is built on a lifetime of rereading, and her central insight is that the novel meets each reader exactly where they are. The question it keeps asking, in her account, is which character you are becoming.

Stein's history with the book is personal and specific. She found it by accident on a flood-proof plate rail in her parents' dining room, "crawled up on my radiator and read it straight through," and became, in her word, "a rereader." Rereading, for her, is not about plot. "I like the comfort of rereading when you don't have to worry about comprehension and you can find the new layers of meaning and pleasure in the work." The first time through, "the plot is propulsive and fun." After that, the book opens up: "you start to see the nuance of the other characters" and "come to appreciate her skill as a stylist."

The Elizabeth Bennet Fantasy at Thirteen

At thirteen, the book gave Stein a theory about herself, and she is honest about how seductive and how distorting it was. "I read it over and over again and I was just really sure that if I could meet a good enough boy, he'd really appreciate my wit and impertinence." Her father, she recalls, "did very little to disabuse me of this." The result was a lasting attachment to a particular idea: "that being interesting can trump everything and that at the end of the day nothing is more devastatingly attractive." That is the Elizabeth Bennet fantasy, and Stein names its pull without pretending she was immune to it.

The deepest version of that fantasy, Stein argues, is the wish to be loved for exactly who you are. The appeal of Mr. Darcy falling "in love with her in spite of himself" is "the idea of being so smart, so cute, so kind of impudent, that a man of quality just can't resist you even when you don't like him." Stein is clear that this is "a little bit of a fantasy," not a life plan. "I don't think most people can go on that little encouragement." But she also understands why it imprints so deeply on a young reader: it promises that your sharpest, least conventional self is the very thing that will be most desired.

From Lizzie Bennet to Mrs. Gardiner

What changes with age, Stein finds, is which character you trust. "Everyone wants to be a Lizzie Bennet when they're young," she says, recalling that her younger cousins watched the 1995 adaptation and told her she was the Elizabeth of the family, which "probably affected some of my self-presentation in a not great way." But rereading shifted her loyalties. "Now I really like Mrs. Gardiner as a character. She is like the one consistent character... You trust her judgment. And she's the one model of a good marriage." The move from identifying with Lizzie to valuing Mrs. Gardiner is the move from youth to maturity, and the book is built to register it.

The Mirror Austen Built at Twenty-One

Stein also reads Austen's youth into the texture of the book, which deepens rather than diminishes it. Austen was "totally untaught" and around twenty-one when she wrote it, and Stein thinks you eventually "think about how young she was," to notice "a certain vagueness" around marriage and sex and the social issues later critics faulted her for missing. But Stein's verdict is that the limitation is the strength: Austen "wasn't hurt by her small scope. In fact, that's where the richness lies." A narrow world, observed with total precision, turns out to contain everything.

The result is a book that functions almost as a mirror at every stage of life. The plate rail, the radiator, the thirteen-year-old with a theory about wit, all of it stays "in the room" when Stein reads the first sentence now. Her argument across the series is that the novel does not deliver a fixed meaning but catches each reader where they stand and asks, again, which character are you becoming. That is why people return to it for a lifetime. It is not the same book twice, because you are not the same reader twice.