Sophie Gee

It's a rare example, I think, of an adaptation that it's not perhaps as good as the book, but it's the peer of the book.

Yeah, it's really fabulous.

Agreed.

So we're touching on adaptations now.

To repeat a joke of mine that I'm so fond of that I never tire of it.

How has the two-inch bit of ivory grown into this mammoth task?

I mean, you know, why this endurance?

Why this persistence?

What's your take?

after thinking so deeply about it for a year now.

Well, for four decades, but let's call it a year.

How many writers can we say that for?

No, it's extraordinary.

Do you have a sentence that you came to afresh this year and it

struck you with a new kind of force.

Let's get the bumper stickers going.

You're so right about that.

And this perhaps speaks to another aspect of Austen's sort of endurance, which is...

The way in which she rewards and repays close reading.

And in literary criticism circles, I think it's fair to say, the art of close reading, of getting very deep, getting very intimate on the level of the word choice and the word order and so on.