This is my favourite Jane Austen novel and this time I listened to the audio book narrated by the wonderful Juliet Stevenson. A pleasure from start to finish.

On this read, I appreciated how this story has similarities to Pamela by Samuel Richardson (Austen's favourite author) and other stories where the immoral man is transformed into a decent person due to becoming sexually obsessed but rebuffed by a virtuous woman. But unlike those stories where the man eventually becomes the perfect husband, rewarding the woman's virtue, Austen shows that while the desire to conquer an unattainable woman may change someone's behaviour on the surface, it is based in vanity and entitlement and cannot truly make a change for the better. A breath of fresh air for the time.