Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 51: Lydia Lets the Secret Slip

The wedding day comes, and the bride arrives at Longbourn entirely delighted with herself. This episode is the complete audiobook of Chapter 51 of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, in which the Wickhams pay their family visit and sixteen-year-old Lydia, incapable of keeping anything, mislays the most important secret in the novel.

Shame was expected somewhere in the party and appears nowhere: Lydia is Lydia still, untamed, noisy, and fearless, showing her ring to the servants and claiming precedence over Jane at dinner because she is a married woman now. Wickham's easy manners are all they ever were, and Elizabeth sits through his smiles thinking about everything the family owes to not discussing.

• Lydia's homecoming performance includes a tour of the neighborhood to display her husband, and generous offers to get her elder sisters husbands of their own before winter.
• Her account of the wedding morning is all fret and trivia, her uncle late, her fear the church would close at eleven... and then it drops out: Mr. Darcy was there, standing up with Wickham.
• One gasp later she claps her hands over the breach, it was to be such a secret, and Elizabeth, burning alive with curiosity, extracts nothing further.
• A letter goes to Mrs. Gardiner within the quarter hour, demanding to know what her aunt knows, and the chapter ends with Elizabeth waiting on the post.