Twenty-Four Miles from London

One fact stopped Sadie Stein cold: this whole shut-in world, which feels like the deep provinces, sits twenty-four miles from London. You could walk it in two days, and nobody does. Elizabeth finally travels in chapters twenty-seven through twenty-nine, and the destination lands like a punchline: the parsonage of the man she turned down, kept by the friend who accepted him. Stein pays real attention to the life Charlotte has built there, and to Elizabeth's first reluctant revisions. Then dinner at Rosings, where Lady Catherine de Bourgh runs the table like a cross-examination and says, out loud, a true thing no one in the Bennet family will say.