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Sadie Stein on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Episode 3

The Case for Settling

Featuring Sadie Stein

Audio episode · 17 min

Sadie Stein on Pride and Prejudice

Would it be so terrible to settle? Sadie Stein asks it without the modern shudder, because chapters four, five, and six keep asking it: Jane gets her amiable rich man, Elizabeth is snubbed by a man who then can't look away, and Charlotte Lucas, twenty-seven and unsentimental, explains how the marriage market really works. Stein gives Charlotte the fairest hearing she may ever have gotten, then spends real sympathy on Caroline Bingley, of all people, caught in the same trap as everyone else. She saves her hardest question for Austen herself, at Mary Bennet's piano: why is this author so merciless to the characters she decides are stupid?

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