Against the grain of Elizabeth’s sincerely held convictions about what she thinks of Mr. Pride and Prejudice is brilliant in many ways, but its scintillating dialogue is at the heart of it. The novelist need not steer us as to what these characters’ words reveal: so confident is she in the differences between their two voices that she does not even need to use those ‘he said’, ‘she said’ clauses. Yet the husband teases the wife in ways that she does not – indeed, cannot – understand. Bennet notes that his wife’s nerves are his ‘old friends’, for he has heard her ‘mention them with consideration these twenty years at least’). Theirs is the intimacy of a long relationship (Mr. Bennet are talking to each other, and after just a couple of pages of their conversation we have an anatomy of a marriage. We all know the famous opening sentence (‘It is a truth universally acknowledged …’), and its narrator’s bone-dry irony, but most of what follows is dialogue. You can see – and hear – what is wonderful about Pride and Prejudice just by taking its first chapter.
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