with commentary by Sadie Stein
In the house I grew up in, the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice played on what my memory insists was a permanent loop. My mother and sister fell in love with it together; we owned the full VHS set, and by the time I entered puberty I had functionally memorized half the dialogue, not on purpose, the way you memorize the hum of a refrigerator. I did not like it.
That's not true. As children are wont to do, I took a stance against it, because my sister loved it, and siblings build their identities out of oppositions. The truth, which I've never told anyone and will deny if you repeat it to my sister, is that I loved it. I loved it enough to secretly read the novel. And when Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) was assigned in high school, peer pressure required me to pretend, a second time, that I didn't like a book I'd already read voluntarily, in private, with the door closed. I'm 42 years old, and this is my first confession.
I'm telling you this because the person who finally made the confession possible is Sadie Stein, whose Rebind commentary on the novel I've spent the past weeks editing into its audio series, and because the story I just told is, embarrassingly, the plot of the novel. A first impression formed for self-flattering reasons. A judgment defended for decades against all evidence, including the evidence of my own secret reading. Pride, in other words, and prejudice.
Stein points out that the book's working title made this even plainer: "you have probably heard that the first working title was First Impressions. And in a way that is more accurate, that's really what it's about." And she names the moral economy underneath it: "so much of this book, at the end of the day, is, as the title implies, about learning to admit you're wrong. And that is something that not every character is capable of doing. And you are really rewarded for being able to do that."
Stein is the right reader for this book because she is constitutionally incapable of being misty about it. "I'm not ever going to say I love the smell of books," she announces early, a writer from a family of writers, raised partly by her Grandpa Mo, a book hoarder who built six A-frame sheds in Monterey County to house his collection and left ten books a night on her bed, everything from Giovanni Boccaccio to Richard Feynman to a random cookbook, quizzing her the next day. She read, as she puts it, "widely, promiscuously," and never passed through a phase of reading only happy endings. So when she tells you this novel is "probably the most famous love story and the most adapted love story ever written," the original romantic comedy, "certainly the original enemies-to-lovers story," she isn't swooning. She's testifying.
She first read it as a kid, straight through, curled on a radiator, a couple of years before the 1995 BBC adaptation arrived, the one she calls "formative and I think definitive, if I may say so, despite some of the casting." The series my sister wore out on VHS turns out to be Stein's canon too. Somewhere in that fact is the whole comedy of my childhood stance: the thing I was too proud to love was the thing the sharpest readers loved without apology.
What her commentary does, episode after episode, is take the book back from its own merchandise. She calls one episode Tote-Bag Austen, because the famous sentences have been lifted out of context and sold as romance: "yes, to put this on a tote bag and it means one thing. You put it in the context of this first page, it's completely different." The most universally acknowledged truth in English fiction is, on its own first page, a joke about a whole town keeping score. And underneath the joke, a ledger.
Stein's way into the stakes is an anecdote about her four-year-old asking what the book was about: "I started to say, well, it was a time when women couldn't really work, or a lot of them didn't work. And then I realized, wait, nobody in this book has a job, or almost nobody." Five daughters, an estate entailed away from the female line, a mother whose vulgarity is also arithmetic: if the girls don't marry, they will have nowhere to live. Stein prices everything. She gives Charlotte Lucas the fairest hearing I've encountered, prosecutes Mr. Wickham as the book's one true villain, and reads Lydia's elopement as the moment the comedy shows its teeth: "it's a real kind of guard your daughters moment, because the world will prey on them." Her Austen is a writer for whom "the happy marriages are very much the exception in her world," which is precisely why the two that end the book feel earned.
What stayed with me across all those years of pretending, and what Stein both practices and pulls out of the text, is how this novel forces you to confront truth in ways almost no other book does. Humor is the instrument. I've come to think of humor as something like sunglasses: it lets you look directly at things too bright to face bare-eyed. Elizabeth states the creed herself, in a line Stein circles: "Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can."
Stein's gloss: "That's clearly what Lizzie does, that's clearly what Austen does. And it's also very clearly what Mr. Bennet does." But she doesn't let the laughter stay charming. For Mr. Bennet, laughing at other people "quietly, with himself or maybe with Elizabeth" is also an evasion, a way of not acting on the entail, on Lydia, on any of it; his method, she says, is "to ensure tranquility at all costs," which is, in her lethal understatement, "not necessarily great parenting." The same joke, worn long enough, becomes a hiding place. Austen knew the difference. Stein makes you feel it.
Here is where the book caught me off guard this time: at 42, watching my own kids grow toward a social world that rhymes with mine without repeating it, I found I was reading about the parents. I had never once, in three decades with this story, thought seriously about the parents. Stein has. She keeps returning to the question the last chapters ask outright: what happened in the Bennet family?
"Think about the criteria we might use today for determining whether or not to go on a date with someone. We might have a bad evening, go on a bad date; you could end up 23 years later married to Mrs. Bennet, or Mr. Bennet, for that matter. In fact, the daughters use them as a cautionary tale." — Sadie Stein
A pretty face, a rash decision, and a marriage that curdles into performance and remove: Stein reads the Bennets as the dark data against which Elizabeth and Darcy's slow burn gets measured.
She even defends Mrs. Bennet where the text invites us to laugh, noting that her refusal to accept the entail, played as silliness, "to the modern reader... seems completely reasonable." And then, having audited the family without mercy, she hands you the scene she calls "for my money... the most moving scene in the entire novel," which has no kiss in it at all: Elizabeth telling her father the truth about Darcy, and Mr. Bennet answering, in Stein's telling, that he could not have given her up to anyone less. The love story I'd watched on loop as a child had always contained this other love story. I needed the parents' vantage, and Stein's, to see it.
That, it turns out, is the book's real trick: it grows up with you. Stein read it young and loved the rules of its world ("I was the kind of kid who liked that... I liked the rules. I craved that"); as an adult she's "struck by the wisdom of it, by the intelligence of it, and frankly, by how funny and enjoyable a read it is." She's a confessed rereader, and in the interviews she compares the practice to her piano teacher's rule that "by the fifth time you play a piece through, there's enough comfort that you can begin to enjoy it," rereading as the state where "you can find the new layers of meaning and pleasure in the work."
My own layers, for the record: a prepubescent enamored of adulthood and of silly people being silly; a teenager beginning to see the social constructs he lived inside, acknowledging some, questioning others; a middle-aged father reading over Mr. Bennet's shoulder and flinching. Same book every time. Different reader.
The moment in the commentary I now think of as its center comes when Stein turns Elizabeth's humiliation over Wickham into a confession of her own. She once realized she'd carried a prejudice against Boulder, Colorado, and a genuine loathing of The Who, for more than twenty years, because a college boyfriend once had a high-school girlfriend from there who liked them. A rivalry with a person she had never met had hardened into "a central tenet of certainly my collegiate identity." Then the line I've been circling since I first heard the tape:
"As I've gotten older, I've come to realize that being wrong about people is one of the primary pleasures of adult life." — Sadie Stein
"There's more power in liking and loving than in reflexive dislike," she adds, a lesson "that is hard to learn and that one does need to learn. Maybe not Jane." I sat with that a long time, headphones on, editing a commentary about a book I'd spent thirty years claiming not to love because someone I shared a hallway with loved it first.
That is what Stein's commentary is, across its twenty-one episodes: a reader with no sentimentality and total affection walking the novel chapter by chapter, pricing every marriage, auditing every parent, defending the characters everyone sneers at and prosecuting the one everyone forgives, laughing exactly where Austen wants you to laugh and then telling you what the laughter costs. She confesses her own grudges alongside Elizabeth's. And she ends the series with what everyone in the novel is actually doing: getting through. "Mrs. Bennet does it through gossip. Mr. Bennet does it through remove, through burying himself in books. Elizabeth does it through finding the humor in things. Jane does it by finding the good in people... This is about making the best of your life, whatever that means, and managing to find pleasure in days that are essentially unvaried. And who can't learn from that?"
So, at 42, in print, on the record, with Stein's commentary in my ears as both evidence and permission: Pride and Prejudice is beautiful and hilarious and incisive and witty and deep and affecting. I was wrong about it in the living room, wrong about it in high school English, and wrong to stay quiet for the decades after. Being wrong about it has become one of the primary pleasures of my adult life.
Just don't tell my sister.