“Is this,” thought Elizabeth, “meant for me?” (The best clue that Elizabeth is getting something wrong.)

To interrupt a silence which might make him fancy her affected with what had passed, she soon afterwards said— “I imagine your cousin brought you down with him chiefly for the sake of having someone at his disposal. I wonder he does not marry, to secure a lasting convenience of that kind. …”

Pride and Prejudice ❦ Chapter 33

Decoding Emma first really helped me with Pride and Prejudice. Because in Pride and Prejudice Austen is honing the skills she gets showy with in Emma. And she’s already very good at it. All the scenes with Darcy and Elizabeth—and the second with Colonel Fitzwilliam—are flippable fun when read through the lens of a Darcy who thought Elizabeth knew they were courting. Long walks where he talks to her of visiting Rosings with him next year. Her blush when she says that distance isn’t a problem if money is no object. Even her feigned coolness when she tells Colonel Fitzwilliam that she’s surprised Darcy doesn’t marry for the convenience of a built-in travel buddy, all take on new shape. (You know, right before Fitzy, trying to be a good wingman, starts bragging on what a good friend his cousin is, and right after he muses about the luxury of marrying a portionless girl that is denied to him as a younger son.) And of course, the overarching topic of conversation is that Darcy keeps putting off leaving. Colonel Fitzwilliam definitely knows, and as uncertain as Elizabeth is of what Colonel Fitzwilliam is thinking, he’s doubly lost as to Elizabeth’s feelings. 

But Austen tells us what we need to know with our re-reads, and here we know—and it’s clear as day once you put it on the board as a rule—that Darcy thinks Elizabeth was not only wanting, but “expecting” his proposal. And once you make that the rule of how to read every interaction suddenly you realize that Colonel Fitzwilliam was teasing Darcy about being in love. Teasing him to the purpose of, “Isn’t Darcy in love funny?” Like not only is it obvious to cousin Fitzy that Darcy’s in love with Lizzy, but like, “it’s so obvious that everyone here knows it and we can joke about it.” But Austen uses Charlotte’s POV to tell us a lot of nonsensical things and camouflage the evidence so that we pass by without clocking the meaning of most of what she’s relating to us.

Why did Darcy come to the parsonage so often? He hardly ever talked so “it could not be for society.” Then before saying that she wanted to figure out if Darcy was in love with Lizzy but she wasn’t sure because he stared at her all the time but maybe he didn’t stare at her in exactly the right way, we’re told—technically by the narrator, but through Charlotte’s musings—that:

“Colonel Fitzwilliam’s occasionally laughing at his stupidity proved that he was generally different, which her own knowledge of him could not have told her…’

And after a few weeks of doing my very best to find some other meaning behind that statement—and I am quite good at finding arguments from every direction, as if my brain was born with a built in Devil’s Advocate—I was left with only the obvious: that Colonel Fitzwilliam was simply giving his cousin a hard time with some version of “Isn’t it funny seeing my cousin act like a fool in love?” It’s like the person who knows him best is saying, “Darcy’s not pulling off his normal ‘aloof and confident prig’ thing right now and it’s hilarious.”

I feel like we don’t appreciate enough how brilliant those scenes in Kent are. How Jane Austen wrote conversations that could so easily be turned on their heads and be totally re-contextualized with new rules to reality. Books were read again and again, and she must have delighted in the thought of us to going back through and discovering that everything fits a whole different way now that we know x, y and z. And at this point I am convinced that we are not meant to suspend our disbelief and carefully wonder if there’s more there, but that we are meant to go crashing in and turn half the scenes on their heads and look through a wholly different lens we hadn’t noticed before. In that sense Austen was finding her way through the thickets and almost accidentally beating the path that would propel an entire genre. Jane Austen developed the template of the Agatha Christie novel—hiding clues in plain sight—and she developed it not with Emma, but with Elizabeth, here in Pride and Prejudice. (Sometimes I crash through and try something on and it doesn’t work, and the clarity of the wrongness only makes me more confident of the rest. When you hit it right the certainty is beautiful. Her intention is clear.)

And then in Emma, though we passed by it for 220 years without even asking ourselves why Austen would choose this novel—or story in puzzle form, because it’s much more than a novel—to not incorporate that trick, Miss Austen really brings the house down. The story is beautiful and satisfying once you do what Austen clearly directed us to do, by factoring in that:

1. When Frank leaves the first time he suspects Emma knows that he and Jane are in love and in a secret relationship, and that—
2. After the ball—where Frank, at least co-host of the ball, takes his fiancee’s arm for the supper procession and escorts his princess and her aunt to the second best seats at the table—Frank is certain that Emma knows.

And then—the reason I have stopped calling it a novel—we must figure out what Jane knew and when she knew it. To solve the puzzle, you have to see Jane. But as you will immediately realize that the alphabet game and “Dixon” occurs after the ball, and think back to Emma’s inviting Jane to her own dinner party, and bringing up Frank’s handwriting right before throwing their whole procession into disarray by taking Miss Fairfax’s arm and personally escorting her into supper—giving Mr. Elton the slap of slinking in last with John Knightley—the entire story changes shape. Frank believing Emma knows and seeing her as an ally in the relationship shifts everything, and once it became clear to me that Frank could not have told Jane about Emma’s suspicions about Mr. Dixon until after that first trip—or until they saw Emma’s suspicions as something that once were instead of something current—both Frank and Jane begin to look like normal characters instead of these strange, disconnected creatures. It took a year of being away from Emma for me to even be able to see clearly enough to give him a chance, but once I realized that Frank had been buying gloves for Jane at Ford’s while he was telling Emma that he would tell the truth because nothing suited him so well, and then actually telling the truth, I was able to begin to not immediately suspect the worst. And the fact is that he’s really just like an immature and spoiled Mr. Weston. And also just like Emma. A motherless child who grew up sheltered and mostly alone with a hypochondriac guardian. He’s not doing all those awful things to Jane. At least until Box Hill. He is awful at Box Hill, and it is made much more devastating because it’s a betrayal by Emma, too. Emma who just the day before Jane had opened up her heart to and definitely seen as a comfort and ally when Emma helped her escape and “watched her off with the zeal of a friend.” Jane shutting Emma down so hard for flirting with a guy Emma didn’t know it was bad to flirt with never made sense, but for a betrayal it makes perfect sense.

I didn’t mean to go off on Emma, I just wanted to get in that those two scenes in Hunsford—chapters 32 and 33—flip. From what I can tell, most people realize it in the one with Darcy and Elizabeth alone at the parsonage, but don’t seem to catch that in the crucial scene with Colonel Fitzwilliam he is on a whole different page than Elizabeth.