The toughest part of this novel is getting started.  The English idioms that sound so odd to our American ears (”in want of”, “Netherfield Park is let”), Mrs. Bennet’s silly discourse, the quaint topic…they all seem to spell BOOORRRRRINGGG! But stick with it. The drama gets pretty dramatic, the dilemmas pretty deep, the characters increasingly attractive and familiar.

I’d like to start our conversation about the novel by asking you about the narrator’s tone. At the end of Chapter 1, the narrator describes Mr. Bennet as an “odd mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humor, reserve and caprice.”(3)  Sounds a lot like a mirror describing the narrative voice so far in the novel.

To what extent is the difficulty of the novel’s opening due to the possibility that the narrator is being as playful with us as Mr. Bennet is being with his wife?  Could she be testing us to see whether we are as dull and self-obsessed as Mrs. Bennet, or, whether we are more like Lizzy, “who has something more of quickness than her sisters”? How are you, as a reader, becoming implicated already in the “pride” and “prejudice” of the novel?