Spoilers ahead, though for a 200-year-old book I don’t have much sympathy for anyone who minds
I started reading Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen early last year and gave up on it halfway through. Turns out I was reading it wrong the whole time. Around the same time as I started reading Austen, I was also reading Calvino, who writes a particular type of fiction where structure and concepts can be as meaningful as characters. It’s a style that I particularly enjoy, as it often plays with ideas and concepts in a way that really tickles my brain. What I’d done was train myself to read books with particular attention to the structure, which isn’t remotely how this book was meant to be read.
The tensions weren’t paying off in any way I enjoyed, so I stopped reading it. I skipped to the next book, and the next, and the next (mostly Dungeon Crawler Carl. Don’t judge!). It slipped to the bottom of my reading stack until earlier this year, when I decided to give it another shot.
It took about 10 more pages before Austen had me hooked. I had stopped reading only a few pages before Darcy confessed his attractions! I kept reading. I read during my breaks, while walking around Oriental Bay, on the bus. And as I read I became anxious. I was waiting for that tension to build again, to see where the second fuse was lit, for a detonation that was never coming.
Elizabeth misread Darcy; I misread the book. After Elizabeth reads and rereads the letter from Darcy, she turns her disdain inward. After I read and reflected on the book, I realised that the structure I was anticipating wasn’t there. Only, Elizabeth was quicker to realise her mistake than I was. It took me a few more chapters of anxious reading to intuit that Austen used this pivotal point as the impetus for growth. I had been wrong about what this story was going to be, and when I realised that, the characters became real, not pawns being moved to play out a structure.
It’s not often I read just about people. I like books about concepts and structures, and speculative fiction. This wasn’t that. I’d narrowed my reading enough to forget that a book can just be about someone realising they were wrong.