No novel in English has ever opened with a more ironic sentence, and it is a sentence that does its work by being exactly the sort of thing it pretends not to be. A truth universally acknowledged. Put on a serious face. Now — a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. The stately cadence says: this is a philosophical claim. The content says: what the neighbourhood actually wants is his money, and the neighbourhood has daughters.

The sentence should be read as a joke told slowly, with a straight face, by a narrator who knows exactly how much the joke is costing the people inside it. Because what the sentence is quietly announcing is the economic basis of the entire book. The Bennet family has five daughters and no son. Their estate is entailed — it will, at Mr Bennet's death, pass to a distant male cousin. Mrs Bennet, who is the book's most laughed-at character and also, underneath, the character whose anxieties drive most of the plot, has therefore the following problem: if she cannot marry her daughters off to men with money, her daughters will be poor, possibly destitute, certainly without position. She is silly. She is also correct about her predicament.

Austen opens the novel by placing this truth at its most universal and most bland — as if everybody agreed, as if nobody were embarrassed — and then immediately shows us the Bennet breakfast table. Mr Bennet, retreating into irony. Mrs Bennet, agitated about the news that a young man named Bingley has taken Netherfield Park. Jane, silent and lovely. Elizabeth, listening and amused. Lydia, Kitty, Mary, barely individuated yet. The sentence of the opening is already being enacted. A rich young man has arrived. A mother has begun calculating.

Austen's real subject is not romance. Her real subject is how to survive, with dignity, inside an economy in which marriage is the only career available to a woman of the gentry. Elizabeth, whom we have not quite met, will turn out to be the book's test case. She will be asked to marry not one but two men for financial security. She will refuse both. She will, at enormous risk to herself and to her sisters, hold out for something very specific — a marriage in which she can respect and like the man — and she will, in one of the rarest happy endings in English fiction, be rewarded for it.

But nothing in the first sentence promises this. What the first sentence promises is that the marriage market will be discussed with the calm of an economic treatise and with the comedy of a farce, simultaneously, for the next three hundred pages. The gift of the sentence, and of the book, is that these two registers — the ironic and the sincere — will never once be separated.

Bingley arrives at Netherfield and, as promised, is pleasant, handsome, and easy-going. He comes with friends — his two sisters, one of whom is married, and a close friend of his named Mr Darcy. Darcy is rich. Darcy, in fact, is more than rich: he has ten thousand a year, which is twice Bingley's four or five. Darcy is tall, handsome, and perfectly mannered in any way that does not actually require him to be pleasant. He is also, at first sight, completely intolerable.

The Meryton assembly is a country ball. The Bennet girls are there. So is half of Hertfordshire. Bingley dances with everyone, meets Jane Bennet, and falls in love with her more or less instantly. Darcy dances only with the two women he arrived with. He stands by the wall and looks at the ceiling. Bingley, whose good humour cannot stand it, comes over and urges him: come on, Darcy, there are five or six young ladies with no partner, any of them would suit. Miss Elizabeth Bennet, for instance. Bingley gestures. Darcy glances. Elizabeth, sitting a few feet behind him where he has not noticed her, is in perfect position to hear what he is about to say.

She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me.

This is the sentence with which the book's plot truly begins. Elizabeth laughs about it — she has already been amused by the evening and is disposed to be amused by anything — and tells the story on herself to her friends. But something has lodged. A man whom she has not spoken to has publicly weighed her and found her wanting, and the injury is not quite forgotten. When, over the following weeks, Darcy turns out to be taken with her, to watch her, to engage her in conversation, Elizabeth reads every move through the lens of that first sentence. She knows what he thinks of her. Everything that contradicts it is suspect. Everything that confirms it is to be believed.

This is what Austen is actually writing about in the novel. It is not a book about love at first sight. It is a book about wrong readings that last. Elizabeth will hold her reading of Darcy as a cold, contemptuous, proud man for two-thirds of the novel. She will incorporate new information into it. When Wickham — a smooth young officer whom she finds charming — tells her a long story about Darcy having cheated him of an inheritance, Elizabeth does not check the story. She does not ask for more evidence. She accepts it entirely, because it fits. Darcy's first sentence is still sitting on the chair at the Meryton assembly where she heard it.

And meanwhile Darcy, watching her dance, laugh, argue, is in the early stages of a reading of her that is also wrong. He thinks her inferior connections disqualify her. He thinks her mother is unbearable. He thinks he is being, by feeling what he feels, improperly charitable. The book will require both of them to reread.

Darcy's first proposal to Elizabeth is a masterpiece of self-sabotage, and the miracle of the scene is that he does not seem to notice, until about halfway through, that he is sabotaging himself. Elizabeth is visiting her friend Charlotte Lucas at Hunsford parsonage, where Charlotte has married the silly clergyman Mr Collins for security. Darcy is staying nearby at Rosings, his aunt's estate. Elizabeth has been alone in the parlour. Darcy walks in, agitated, unannounced, without preamble.

In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. These are the first words she hears. And then he proposes, in what he clearly thinks is a handsome and honourable way, by explaining that he has tried his hardest not to love her, that her family is mortifying, that the match would be a social disaster for him, that he has thought about all this and has decided that in spite of everything he loves her and wishes her to be his wife.

Elizabeth is not flattered. Elizabeth is the opposite of flattered. Here is a man telling her that she is beneath him, that her connections are an embarrassment, that he has done her the enormous favour of overcoming his better judgement on her behalf. And asking her in the same sentence to marry him.

She refuses. She does it with some heat. She tells him that even if he had delivered himself in the most gentlemanlike manner possible, she would have refused. She then tells him, specifically, why she could not have accepted him: he has, she believes, ruined her sister Jane's engagement to Bingley by talking Bingley out of it; and he has cruelly cheated young Mr Wickham of his inheritance. The two grievances are named clearly. Darcy, white with anger, says very little. He asks if that is all. He bows. He leaves.

The scene is extraordinary because of what it is teaching both of them. Darcy has learned, in the space of ten minutes, that the woman he loves considers him the proudest and worst-behaved man in England — and, worse, has evidence she can name for thinking so. Elizabeth has learned, perhaps, that her own honest answer to a man she does not want can cause real pain. Both of them leave the parsonage different than they walked into it.

This is the hinge of the novel. Everything before the Hunsford proposal has been wrong readings. Everything after it will be the slow business of correcting them. Darcy will write the letter that becomes the next station. Elizabeth will read it and, for the first time in her life, reread it. Austen, who is one of the only English novelists who knows how to make a character's interior genuinely change without turning her into somebody else, will spend the rest of the book demonstrating what that change looks like day by day.

The next morning, walking alone in the park, Elizabeth is met by Darcy. He does not speak. He hands her a letter. He bows and leaves. She breaks the seal. The letter is long — several pages, written in a fine close hand — and it answers, point by point, the two charges she made the night before.

On Jane: Darcy confesses he did dissuade Bingley from the match. He had observed Jane's manner in public and had concluded, honestly though wrongly, that she did not love Bingley and was responding to her mother's pressure; he thought he was saving his friend. He admits that in this he did a bad thing, and he does not try to soften it. He was mistaken about Jane. He is sorry.

On Wickham: Darcy tells a different story than the one Elizabeth has been told. Wickham did not lose an inheritance through any villainy of Darcy's. Wickham received the inheritance he was owed and then asked for a second sum in lieu of a clerical living he had no intention of taking up. Darcy paid it. Wickham blew through the money in a year. When Wickham came back asking for the living anyway, Darcy refused. Wickham, in retaliation, last summer attempted to elope with Darcy's fifteen-year-old sister for the sake of her fortune. Darcy's sister confessed the plan in tears; Wickham was paid off; the engagement was quietly dissolved. Darcy names three people who can confirm this — his housekeeper, his cousin, the sister herself — and tells Elizabeth she may verify as she chooses.

Elizabeth reads the letter once and is furious. She reads it again and is less furious. She reads it a third time — by now sitting on a bench in the park with the letter folded on her knee — and the world reorganizes itself around her. Wickham, she realizes, has never actually told her a verifiable thing about Darcy. He has dropped hints, insinuations, set pieces of grievance. Darcy, by contrast, has named names and offered witnesses. She thinks back through every conversation with Wickham and sees, now, how each one was managed.

And she thinks about herself. She has prided herself, all her life, on being a good reader of people. That pride has been her favourite thing about herself. She speaks a famous sentence, to herself, at the park bench: How despicably I have acted! I, who have valued myself on my abilities! Who have often disdained the generous candour of my sister… she walks home across the park a different person.

This is what Austen means by prejudice. It is not, in her grammar, a prejudgement of race or class or sex; it is the more local sin of holding on to a wrong first reading because it flatters you. Elizabeth has been prejudiced. Elizabeth has also, uniquely among major characters in English fiction of her century, just caught herself at it. The book from this page on is the novel of a woman learning.

Some months later, travelling in Derbyshire with her aunt and uncle, Elizabeth is persuaded, against her shy better judgement, to visit Pemberley. She has heard for months that the master is not at home. The housekeeper takes tourists through. It is a famous place. She goes.

Austen stages this perfectly. The carriage comes up a long drive. The park opens. The house appears at the end of a long sweep of lawn above a lake. Everything is in taste. Nothing is ostentatious. No fashionable nonsense. No Chinese pavilion. No sham ruin. A stone house proportioned to the landscape, looked after by a housekeeper who has been there thirty years, kept by a staff that visibly likes its master.

Inside the house, the housekeeper Mrs Reynolds shows them around. She says remarkable things about the absent owner, in a plain voice, as they look at his miniature and his library and his music room. She says he is the best master, the kindest brother, the most generous landlord she has ever known. She says she has never heard a cross word from him in her life. She says that if only he could find a young woman good enough for him — she says this to a stranger in front of a miniature — she would be very happy.

Elizabeth, who by this point in the novel has re-read Darcy's letter thirty times and reconsidered every opinion she ever had of him, stands in his music room and absorbs what she is being told. And she thinks — Austen gives her the line — and of this place I might have been mistress! The line is mocked by anti-Austen readers as the novel's most mercenary sentence, as if Elizabeth were suddenly being calculating about bricks and mortar. They are missing the tone. The sentence is wistful, not covetous. It is not Elizabeth wishing for the estate. It is Elizabeth recognizing, for the first time, the life she would have had, the scope of it, if she had not misread the man in the rose-bush drawing-room at Hunsford.

And at that moment Darcy himself walks around the corner of the lake.

He was not supposed to be there. He has come home a day early from business. He is in his own grounds, in his own riding clothes, and he is meeting — in the most accidental way possible — the woman he proposed to, five months ago, whom he has not seen since. He is, briefly, in distress. He collects himself quickly. What he says is quiet, polite, even kind. He asks after her family. He walks her to her carriage. He is not the man who proposed at Hunsford. He is some other man, or the same man operating on completely different instructions.

Elizabeth goes back to the inn in her uncle's carriage and cannot, for the rest of the evening, remember half of what was said. Something has been set in motion that she does not entirely understand. The second half of the novel begins at the lake.

A letter from Jane reaches Elizabeth at the inn the next morning. Lydia, the youngest and silliest Bennet daughter, has run off from Brighton with Wickham. They are not married. There is no evidence Wickham intends to marry her. Lydia is fifteen. If she is not recovered and somehow made respectable again, the entire Bennet family will be socially destroyed; no decent man will marry any of the remaining daughters.

Elizabeth reads the letter and breaks down crying. Darcy walks in on her. He sees her weeping with a letter in her hand. She, without thinking, tells him everything. Everything. She tells him about Lydia, about Wickham, about what Wickham has already done to the family's standing. She tells him she has to go home. She watches his face. He does not say much. He says the right conventional things and leaves.

What Elizabeth does not know, and what she will not learn until much later, is that Darcy leaves the inn that morning and goes directly to London. He finds Wickham. Wickham is in debt. Wickham has no intention of marrying Lydia. Darcy — who, remember, has personal and painful history with Wickham going back to Wickham's attempt on his own sister — pays Wickham's debts, settles money on Lydia that allows the marriage to be financially feasible, and finds the regiment that will take Wickham up north and keep him at a safe distance. He arranges the entire rescue of a silly fifteen-year-old whose family has nothing to do with him except that he is in love with her sister. He does all of this without telling Elizabeth, and he makes everyone involved promise not to tell her either. The credit goes to Elizabeth's uncle Mr Gardiner, who has done the running around in London on the Bennet family's behalf.

The fact comes out only because Lydia, returned to her family as a new Mrs Wickham, lets a detail slip — mentions, in her self-absorbed chatter, that Mr Darcy had been at her wedding — and Elizabeth, catching it, writes to her aunt Gardiner and extracts the whole story.

This is the proof. A thousand pages of proposals and letters and long walks in landscaped parks do less to mend Elizabeth's reading of Darcy than the simple information that this man has, in perfect silence, done the hardest and most thankless thing a gentleman of his position could do for her family, at genuine personal cost, asking nothing in return, and specifically arranging that she should not know. It is the novel's great silent gesture, and Austen's craft is that she does not let us see Darcy doing it. We see only the aftermath: a cleaned-up scandal, a married Lydia, a quiet Darcy, and Elizabeth finally — finally — in full possession of what sort of man she is dealing with.

Darcy and Bingley return to Hertfordshire in the autumn. The Bennets are thrown, as the Bennets always are, into agitation. Bingley re-engages himself almost immediately to Jane. Darcy is present in the house often and says very little. Mrs Bennet, not understanding his quietness, mostly ignores him. Elizabeth, who knows everything now and has said none of what she knows, cannot quite bring herself to begin.

She begins by accident. One morning, walking with Darcy in a country lane, she thanks him — not in a sweeping way, simply correctly — for what he did for Lydia. She says she could not have borne to say nothing. She says her aunt told her. She says she is very grateful on her family's behalf and on her own. She meant to keep it at that. She cannot. She ends by saying that her family does not know.

Darcy, whose face had been a little pale, answers her quietly. He says that if she wishes to thank anyone, she should thank herself alone, because whatever he did was done for her sake. He pauses. He says that his affections and wishes are unchanged from Hunsford. But one word from her, he says, will silence him on this subject forever.

Austen does not give us Elizabeth's speech. This is one of the great choices in English fiction. The second proposal is accepted, and the acceptance is not written out. We are told, instead, that Elizabeth makes him understand that she has come round; we are not made to overhear the sentence. It is too private. Austen, the most ironic of narrators, drops the irony for exactly this one moment and draws a veil across it.

What she shows us instead is what the two of them say to each other afterward. They walk on through the fields. They reconstruct the whole book, scene by scene, from each of their points of view. Darcy explains how he felt at the Meryton assembly, how he felt at Netherfield, how he felt writing the letter from Rosings, how he felt walking up from the lake at Pemberley. Elizabeth corrects and supplements. They laugh at themselves and at each other. They catch errors they had each held for a year. By the end of the walk, the novel they have been living inside has been rewritten, by the two of them, into the novel it turns out to have been.

This is Austen's final gift to her heroine and to her readers. Love, in this book, is not blind. Love is two people doing the close reading of each other until they arrive, patiently and with enormous effort, at an accurate version. The marriage at the end of the book is not a reward for passion. It is a reward for rereading. Darcy and Elizabeth walk back to Longbourn engaged, and the book we have been reading — for three hundred pages we kept calling a romantic comedy — closes, very quietly, as the story of two clever people who did, at last, the work.