You’d need to have spent your life in a cave not to know about Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy, the ill-natured, land-owning über-spunk; Miss Elizabeth Bennet, sharp as a tack with a will of her own; her skewed array of sisters; her disengaged, ironic father; and her insufferable mother, the archetypal nineteenth-century airhead. They’re part of the tissue of every literate person’s mind. But I confess that when I opened the novel last week and was greeted by its famous first sentence, which everybody, including me, claims to know by heart, I wasn’t quite sure when, or even whether, I had read the book before. I sharpened a pencil and sat down at the kitchen table. Austen blasts off with a fast-moving passage of dialogue between Mr and Mrs Bennet that lays out their relationship—her garrulous stupidity, his dry, self-protective ‘teazing’—and the central matter of the tale: the business of getting their five daughters married. My God, Mrs Bennet is appalling. Every time her husband opens his mouth he takes revenge on her: today he is punishing her by means of a sadistic reticence about Mr Bingley, a wealthy, single young gentleman who has moved into their neighbourhood and set it abuzz.
