Elizabeth takes her morning walk expecting solitude and meets Mr. Darcy at the edge of the park, holding an envelope. This episode is the complete audiobook of Chapter 35 of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, which belongs almost entirely to a single document: the letter that answers every charge she threw at him the night before.

He asks only that she read it, and the chapter gives it to us whole. On Jane, he pleads honest error: he watched, and believed her heart untouched, her serene countenance giving no sign of particular regard. On Wickham, he pleads facts, and the facts are devastating, ending with a secret about his own family that he trusts to her silence.

• Darcy admits detaching Bingley from Jane and defends the interference, though one part sits ill with him even now: concealing from his friend that Jane had been in Lon ...