n 1813, five years before Scott's novel, Pride and Prejudice appeared. Its famous opening sentence inaugurates a narrative that will grapple with the problem of reading, literal and metaphorical, and grapple with it specifically in relation to issues of privacy and community. The truth that a rich man must want a wife is "universally acknowledged." What comprises the relevant universe, and does it really have the authority to determine "truth"? If not, how can one discover where truth lies?

Although the Bennet sisters inhabit a much higher social stratum than does Jeanie Deans, they are granted little more physical privacy. Like Jeanie, they have their bedrooms (it is not clear how many of them share rooms). But they also have their social obligations. The only time we see Elizabeth Bennet reading a book, she does so in a drawing room full of other people, one of whom soon interrupts her to demand her engagement in another kind of activity. Elizabeth's propensity for long solitary walks partly reflects her need to find space for private reflection. She understands, though, that privacy does not altogether depend on physical situation (a truth more fully elaborated in Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park), and her private internal commentary on what she sees and feels continues unabated in company.

In a novel so self-evidently concerned with problems of interpretation, reading might be expected to play an important part. Austen does not, however, after Northanger Abbey (written early, though published late) indulge in direct addresses to her own readers. Instead, she makes her characters readers. Books appear from time to time, mainly as props of one kind and another. Mr. Collins reads aloud to the Bennet sisters, Mary Bennet proclaims her preference for books over people, Miss Bingley praises Darcy's family library, Mr. Bennet occupies himself with reading while the rest of the family attends a ball. But it is the reading of personal letters that best locates, complicates, and eventually clarifies the dilemma of interpretation. Darcy's letter of self-explanation after his botched proposal provides the richest example, but others have preceded it: notably Miss Bingley's letter from London, explaining their sudden departure, which Jane reads as having one meaning and Elizabeth as having a completely different one. In the case of Darcy's letter, Elizabeth must play the part of both readers, the one willing to believe the best about the writer and the suspicious one. And she must confront the undependability of public opinion, as well as of her own.

"Everybody" has reached a conclusion about Darcy's nature from the time of his first appearance. By the end of the ball at which he declines dancing with Elizabeth, "his character was decided. He was the proudest, most disagreeable man in the world, and every body hoped that he would never come there again." Indeed, long before the time of the crucial letter it has become a truth universally acknowledged that Wickham epitomizes male attractiveness and that Darcy has no regard for other people.

Mr. Darcy stood . . . in silent indignation at such a mode of passing the evening, to the exclusion of all conversation, and was too much engrossed by his thoughts to perceive that Sir William Lucas was his neighbor, till Sir William thus began,

Illustration from Pride and Prejudice (Century, 1903)

"What a charming amusement for young people this is, Mr Darcy! There is nothing like dancing after all. I consider it as one of the first refinements of polished societies." "Certainly, sir; and it has the advantage also of being in vogue amongst the less polished societies of the world. Every savage can dance." Sir William only smiled. . . . Elizabeth at that instant moving towards them, he was struck with the notion of doing a very gallant thing, and called out to her--"My dear Miss Eliza, why are not you dancing?--Mr Darcy, you must allow me to present this young lady to you as a very desirable partner."

The process by which Elizabeth comes to reverse these judgments, through successive readings of Darcy's letter, demonstrates the arduousness of interpretation. In her first reading, controlled by her rage over his insulting proposal and over the harm he has done to her beloved sister, she finds his explanations unpersuasive. But she acknowledges her own "prejudice." She tries hard to allow reason to shape her judgment. In her second reading, she "commanded herself to examine the meaning of every sentence." Putting down the letter, she weighs "every circumstance with what she meant to be impartiality--deliberated on the probability of each statement--but with little success. On both sides it was only assertion." Unable to rely on textual exegesis alone, she brings to bear the evidence of her memory, with detailed analysis of her past experience and of other people's responses. She wanders the lane for two hours, "giving way to every variety of thought; re-considering events, determining probabilities, and reconciling herself as well as she could, to a change so sudden and so important"--a change, that is, in her understanding of Darcy and of Wickham, and in her own judgment. Darcy has convinced her, but only by virtue of her own ardent participation in the process of interpretation.

Elizabeth is an exemplary reader. But there are no guarantees of her rightness, even after her exhaustive and exhausting effort. Emotion has interfered with her capacity to interpret accurately, and emotion remains as a potential distorting force. IRONY, undergraduates like to write in the margin next to Elizabeth's self-critical comment, "Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind." Even on a first reading of Pride and Prejudice, one may suspect that she is in love and does not know it; on subsequent readings, one feels sure of this point. Unaware of her feelings for Darcy, Elizabeth may not assess his self-exculpation correctly. Or she may: the reader cannot know for certain, and neither, ever, can she.

Elizabeth has much at stake in interpreting Darcy's letter, more by far than anyone coming to terms with a work of fiction. Yet she stands as a model for novel readers. She tells us of the urgency of "private" reading, and of its dangers. The urgency depends on the fact that the community Austen imagines is often wrong. Echoes of Elizabeth's procedure, as well as of its results, reverberate back and forth through Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth's new comprehension sharply suggests that truths universally acknowledged are more likely than not untrue. Austen has more fun with cliché and platitude in Pride and Prejudice than in any other of her novels. Mary Bennet's conduct book maxims and Mr. Collins's obtuse commonplaces and Sir William Lucas's predictable sentiments may serve to remind us that what the community accepts as self-evident need not prove accurate, relevant, or even meaningful. What the community accepts can create obstacles to thought. "Private" reading and speaking, therefore, provide the only inlet to clarity. Elizabeth's total immersion in the text and its problems, her effort both to use feeling and to prevent it from overpowering thought, her capacity for imaginative participation and imaginative expansion (she entertains herself by fancying--prophetically--how Lady Catherine might respond to the news of her marriage to Darcy)--the way Elizabeth reads the crucial letter exemplifies the best possibility for interpretation.

In truth, all reading is selective, conditioned by our individual and collective experience. We are likely to filter out aspects of a novel that seem irrelevant, to notice what makes most sense to us, reading in our own historical moment.

But how far we must feel ourselves from the absolute moral clarity of Jeanie Deans! Elizabeth's endeavors of interpretation include and rely on the testimony of her feelings, perception, and intelligence, draw on her memory and her sympathetic imagination, demand the effort to divest herself of "prejudice." But her best efforts can produce at most provisional and personal clarity. A certain exhilaration, that of the private reader, attends the process of attaining this stability of judgment. Elizabeth and her sister Jane, both of whom understand the exigency of interpretation, differ in this respect from the rest of their family and from others in their neighborhood, who rest in the comfort of the taken-for-granted. Elizabeth and Jane know that one must "read" constantly--read people and events and conversations as well as letters and books. Although they have each other, they know also that one must read alone. And if they can enjoy at some level the pressures of the need to interpret, they can never enjoy Jeanie's sense that God has authorized the course she follows.

It is a commonplace reiterated by generations of critics--yet another truth universally acknowledged--that Jane Austen interests herself in "society," in microcosmic societies that illustrate the tensions and the comforts of living within group conventions. Equally commonplace is the perception that she anatomizes the inner life of individuals. In many ways, the group--an essentially secular group, although all its members go to church--supports the individuals within it. But in the crucial process of interpretation as Austen renders it, the individual must stand alone, understanding her own ultimate undependability. When Darcy proposes for the second time and is accepted, he recurs to the subject of the letter. Now he, its author, has reinterpreted what he has written: "When I wrote that letter, . . . I believed myself perfectly calm and cool, but I am since convinced that it was written in a dreadful bitterness of spirit." Elizabeth insists that they talk no more of the letter, since the feelings of both of them have radically changed since its writing. Now it would have been written

The Schoolmaster's Daughter, c. 1870, by James Sant, R.A. (Courtesy of the Royal Academy of Arts, London)

differently, now it would be differently read. Private interpretation is a slippery matter.

I have been distinguishing between a kind of communal reading suggested by Scott's novel and the private reading that takes place in Austen's. The private reading sounds much more "modern," although Austen probably wrote the first version of Pride and Prejudice in the late eighteenth century. Most readers now would agree about the necessary ambiguity of interpretation and the degree to which personal elements may dictate perceptions about a text, and they would agree that reading is a private matter. Yet Scott's approach as well as Austen's partakes of the Romantic debate over the place of the individual, fully conscious self in the human community. David Bromwich speaks of "the imaginative identification of a self with the community of humankind" as an aspect of "Romantic idealism." Scott's turn to the past (the action of The Heart of Mid-Lothian takes place in eighteenth-century Scotland) records his effort to construct and assert human bonds over time. His didacticism and his imagining of Jeanie Deans belong to the same effort. Austen uses the strenuous interpretive endeavors of Darcy and Elizabeth primarily as a basis for adumbrating a new kind of community, a community of the likeminded.

inally, I want to speculate about the possible contributions of gender to the different approaches of Scott and Austen. The only character in Pride and Prejudice who appears able to claim the right to privacy when he wants it is Mr. Bennet, who has his library and freely asserts his privilege of retreating to it. In eighteenth-century novels by women, privacy clearly does not belong to women. Fanny Burney's Evelina, for instance, can almost never be alone, she can only be silent. Charlotte Lennox's delightful novel, The Female Quixote, published in the middle of the eighteenth century, represents a disillusioned male aristocrat who decides to retreat from the court to the country. He chooses privacy for himself, and inflicts it on his wife and daughter. The wife dies, leaving the daughter to the life of isolation her father has elected. She fills her enforced privacy, predictably, by reading romances, and therefore gets in trouble: an untrained reader, she fails to understand that romances have nothing to do with reality.

If social circumstance largely deprived women of physical privacy, as conduct books and personal letters confirm, it would seem unsurprising that a woman writer might dwell on the urgency of constructing psychic spaces of self-discovery and self-assertion. Such construction can take place by means of reading novels. Jane Austen (and Charlotte and Emily Brontë after her) helped us to grasp the private way of reading. To be sure, not only women cared about privacy, but early women novelists may have felt special impetus to imagine reading as temporary escape, a grateful interval of self-enclosure, and hence they in particular urged their readers toward a new way of reading.

It is easy now to understand Austen's implicit recommendations about interpretation in this fashion, but to do so requires highly selective reading. In truth, all reading is selective, conditioned by our individual and collective experience. We are likely to filter out aspects of a novel that seem irrelevant, to notice what makes most sense to us, reading in our own historical moment. My account of Pride and Prejudice deliberately ignores elements of Elizabeth Bennet's reading that seem less immediately appealing to twentieth-century readers than her attention to her own feelings. Although Elizabeth does not, like Jeanie Deans, emphasize her own religious commitment, she as much as Jeanie tries to judge according to moral principles that belong, after all, to an existing community. She is not a twentieth-century reader but an early-nineteenth-century one. Elizabeth reads, to the degree that she can, with the whole of herself: her experience, her feelings, her knowledge--and her principles. Although she recognizes and values her uniqueness, she also values the ideas she has inherited. Her very determination to be just to everyone reflects her consciousness of ethical obligation. To call her a "private" reader fails to acknowledge the degree to which she understands the necessary participation of the private in the social. Austen infuses her fiction, in sum, with some of the same values that Scott so conspicuously promulgated in his.

e do not consciously read like Elizabeth Bennet, but maybe we should. Most late-twentieth-century readers have lost something in their allegiance to the private. In our assumption that novel-reading belongs to the sphere of privacy, we may forget that reading also happens in history and is informed by it, that a long sequence of other writers stands behind the one whose work we read and a long sequence of other readers stands behind us. If reading takes us "far away," separating us from our lives' mundane actualities, it also returns us to important connections. We read as members of a historical and of a contemporary community, as ethical beings with values partly formed and informed by the past. To fail to remember that, to insist too much on the uniqueness that we may connect with privacy, diminishes the experienced density of our encounters with novels.

Techniques of exegesis have multiplied in recent years, valuable as methods of grasping and of using what we read, but what concerns me is something much more primitive: the way one reads a novel for the first time, before any systematic effort to fit it into large intellectual patterns. The danger of falling into the merely moralistic inheres in the kind of reading Scott implicitly recommends. But there is a corresponding danger on the other side: that of solipsism. Ideally, we might read both as treasuring our privacy, like Elizabeth Bennet, and as valuing our community, like Jeanie Deans, but like Elizabeth as well, who teaches us about privacy but also reminds us of our inevitable and unending participation in community. Reading novels allows us to fulfill the Romantic ideal at its highest by functioning simultaneously as private and as social beings.