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Sadie Stein on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

Episode 7

The Nicest Guy Anyone's Ever Met

Featuring Sadie Stein

Audio episode · 18 min

Sadie Stein on Pride and Prejudice

A new officer arrives in Meryton: handsome, warm, instantly confiding, the nicest man anyone in Pride and Prejudice has ever met. Within a day he has told Elizabeth Bennet the story of how Mr. Darcy destroyed his life. Sadie Stein declines to be charmed, and takes the performance apart the way you would take apart a con: the manufactured intimacy, the sad story with an exact income figure planted in it, the enemy so conveniently shared. She also answers a question this book is rarely asked out loud, about where desire lives in a novel where nobody kisses. And she never blames Elizabeth, because Stein has met this man, and so, probably, have you.

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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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Why Darcy Falls for Elizabeth in Spite of Himself

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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Stein reads Charlotte Lucas's marriage as clear-eyed and defensible: in Austen's marriage market, Elizabeth's freedom to refuse was the exception, not the rule.

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