Consequences – Audio

Consequences is a cautionary tale about the evils of hasty judgment, revisiting Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and one of those pivotal moments, when Elizabeth Bennet decisively threw away Darcy’s offer of marriage. What transpired from that point is well known to Jane Austen’s extensive readership, but what if even one element in the chain of events in her novel had turned out differently? Would Jane Austen’s happy ending have eventually come to pass, or would the outcome have been more bleak? And if, in order to secure financial security for her loved ones, Elizabeth had not rejected Darcy, would she have married a proud, arrogant, disdainful man who would have, as she thought, forced her to deny her own relatives and thus have condemned herself to a lifetime of misery? Or would she have found herself married to a man who cared enough for her to reject the expected opposition of his family, chance his very standing in society in order to marry a woman he loved beyond measure? Consequences, written by the author of A Most Civil Proposal, examines the two halves of this coin, both tragedy and triumph.