... I wasn't arguing (at least in my mind) that Darcy was necessarily innocent of universal despite. I was arguing that he wasn't necessarily guilty of it, either. The same goes for my arguments concerning Denny and Charlotte in other threads.

I love Austen's delicious wit, but for me a substantial enhancer of her wit is her delicious ambiguity, and the constant settling of opinion on one point of view to the exclusion of all others, even to the extent of denying the validity of alternatives, is disturbing to the point of being painful.

I'm working on a message to start another thread to expose and discuss these (slowly congealing) ideas publicly.