Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 47: Longbourn in an Uproar

A day and a night on the road give everyone time to hope, and Mr. Gardiner uses all of it. This episode is the complete audiobook of Chapter 47 of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, in which the travellers reason their way toward comfort, and Longbourn takes it away again at the front door.

Surely, argues her uncle, Wickham would never risk an elopement with no marriage in view; the temptation is not worth the ruin. Elizabeth's answer is bleak and better informed: Wickham's debts, Wickham's character, and Lydia's dowry of nothing. At home they find Jane worn with carrying the family alone, their father silent, and their mother upstairs, receiving her visitors in her dressing-room as chief sufferer of the piece.

• Mrs. Bennet's grief takes its natural forms: blame for the Forsters, terror that Mr. Bennet will fight Wickham and be killed, and instructions that Lydia not order her wedding clothes without consulting her.
• Jane produces the note Lydia left for Mrs. Forster, and it is somehow worse than anything: all giggling anticipation, a good joke, a signature to laugh at, Lydia Wickham, and not one serious thought in it.
• Elizabeth learns there is nothing to learn: no word from the fugitives, no address, no plan, and their father gone to London with no scheme beyond searching it.
• The sisters sit up piecing together what Brighton knew: debts of honour left behind, and a verdict from Colonel Forster's inquiries that Wickham was not a man to be trusted. Meryton, which adored him three months ago, now finds it always suspected as much.