Jane Austen’s Most Uncomfortable Lesson

Jane Austen fans eagerly await yet another adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice,” which is due for release by Netflix this fall. Certainly, this most beloved of Austen’s novels — about first impressions and their limitations, as experienced by protagonist Elizabeth Bennet and her eventual husband, Fitzwilliam Darcy — offers plenty of food for thought about love and marriage. But the truth is that many of Austen’s precepts in “Pride and Prejudice” apply narrowly to her own time and make only a clumsy transfer to ours.