Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 56: The Shades of Pemberley

A chaise and four sweeps up the Longbourn drive one morning, carrying a visitor nobody invited. This episode is the complete audiobook of Chapter 56 of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice: the confrontation in the wilderness, where Lady Catherine de Bourgh comes to extract a promise and meets the one person in England who will not give it.

Her ladyship has heard a report of a most alarming nature, that Elizabeth is soon to be united to her nephew, and she has come to have it universally contradicted. Elizabeth declines to confirm, declines to deny, and declines, above all, to be frightened. The interview that follows is the novel's great duel, and Elizabeth never gives an inch of ground.

• Lady Catherine tours the house and lawn with insolent appraisal, pronounces the park small and the sitting-room inconvenient, and then demands a private walk among the trees to deliver her business.
• The claims come in volleys: Darcy is engaged to her own daughter, planned from their cradles; Elizabeth's upstart pretensions would pollute the shades of Pemberley; the patched-up business of her youngest sister seals the family's disgrace.
• Elizabeth's answers hold the line with icy composure: if Mr. Darcy is bound to his cousin, no promise of hers is needed; and she is resolved to act for her own happiness, without reference to Lady Catherine or anyone so wholly unconnected with her.
• Asked at last, point blank, whether she is engaged to him, Elizabeth says no; asked to promise never to be, she refuses, and her ladyship departs most seriously displeased, sending no compliments to her mother.