Change

Home for Christmas break, I’ve been realizing how much people change. Family and friends and myself. I can’t always tell whether it is me, the other person or both, but relational dynamics shift.

Near the end of Jane and Lizzy’s stay at Netherfield, Elizabeth and Darcy debate the difference between town and country society. Darcy finds country society “somewhat confined and unvarying.” Elizabeth counters, “But people themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them forever.”

            Of course, Mrs. Bennet leaps into the mix, protesting, “I would have him know we dine with four-and-twenty families.” But before this, Lizzy touches on one of the themes of the entire novel.

            People are in a constant state of process. Pride and Prejudice revolves around the change occurring inside both Lizzy and Darcy and their learning about one another. As Lizzy points out, the learning never stops because people never stop growing. Whether interacting with twenty-four families or just two people, “people themselves [will] alter so much, that there [will be] something new to be observed in them forever.”