Chapter Twenty-Three

Elizabeth took a deep breath of the must-scented air that filled the bookstore. The thin sunlight barely penetrated through the windows to where they sat behind many rows of bookshelves.

Papa called out to the owner of the bookstore, "Cohen, bring the Shakespeare folio out also."

"I have a copy of the original folio in my library," Darcy said to Mr. Bennet. "It occupies a place of pride in the center — while I am subservient to your expertise, I do not know that it will add to our glory to gain a copy of the 1685 folio."

"You hadn't yet told me that!" Elizabeth exclaimed. "The famed first folio!"

"It is near illegible," Darcy replied. "The spelling is not standardized at all in it, and it is quite hard to read. Two centuries have changed the language more than I might have expected."

"What about Chaucer?" Mr. Bennet said. "You surely were made to read his Tales on some occasion — that language is more difficult by far."

"It was in an edition with standardized spelling. In truth, old books of that sort bothered me greatly as a child. It did not seem right that the spelling has not always been standardized — that it still is not so standardized as it should be."

Elizabeth laughed. "That is much like you, a wish to have everything in proper order."

"Ah, but there is beauty in the oddness of old language," Mr. Bennet said. He then intoned, pronouncing distinctly at the end of many of the words an '-e' that was not present in their modern variant. "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licóur, Of which vertú engendred is the flour; from every shires ende, of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende."

With a clap, Elizabeth said, "Papa can memorize poetry with ease."

To which in reply, Mr. Darcy said, but in standard English, "The holy blissful martyr for to seek. That him hath helped when that they were sick."

"The rhyme worked better in the older English," Mr. Bennet said. "I shall select for you with my expertise several books upon philology that will explain the whole matter."

Darcy laughed. "And these books you suggest I do not leave with you as a loan until such time as my book room is expanded?"

Mr. Bennet nodded.

"What surprises me," Elizabeth said to Mr. Darcy, "is that you could admire the Family Shakspeare so, while you have a copy of the very oldest text of the Bard in your house."

"I did not admire the Family Shakspeare, I merely said it has a utility. That is," Darcy said nodding to Mr. Bennet, "amongst those families with a less liberal policy of how they shall educate their children."

Mr. Bennet laughed. "There is a great deal in Shakespeare which is not fit for the minds of young women that Elizabeth does not understand, as she lacks the necessary experience of life. That is the beauty of Shakespeare, it protects itself."

"Papa! Whatever do you refer to?"

"If I told you, you might deduce. I trust to the busyness of the engagement period to keep you from poring over the texts, asking what possibly every third word might mean."

"Mr. Bennet," Darcy asked, "it cannot really be your view that a young child, especially a girl, should be exposed through literature to every form of vice and villainy."

"Certainly not every."

They all laughed.

"This is a matter you both ought to discuss at length before you have a daughter of such age as to make it concrete," Mr. Bennet said. "Unfortunately any discussion made beforehand cannot consider the way you shall feel and think when the time comes. Disagreement is inevitable."

"But what would you do?"

"Treat every child different according to their own nature — also do not assume that you can exert your influence upon the child to shape the man to any great extent."

"My father shaped me greatly," Darcy said.

"Only because you are made of stuff that was determined to accept the shaping. Do not think that he could have succeeded nearly so well had you been made of stuff that actively resisted the parent's will. As an infant each of my children already showed hints of the personality they have today. Mary focused with great intentness on crawling and managing her spoons just right, Jane was the sweetest tempered, and most pliable infant I have ever seen. I believed we were natural masters of the parenting art until Lizzy was born, and absolutely refused to be denied when she was curious about a matter — Lydia would yell and defy us simply because it so amused her."

Elizabeth smiled. "I recall a bit of that. But she loved to laugh as a baby and would giggle easily."

"All of you would, except Mary."

Darcy pulled his chair closer to Mr. Bennet. "You must tell me more about when Elizabeth was a babe."

As Mr. Bennet began, Elizabeth also leaned closer in curiosity. "Let me see. Lizzy had a particularly piercing scream when she was upset. Like the war cry of a wild Indian. And she would exercise it any time she took it into her head that I ought to pick her up and carry her — which was always. She determined early that I was her favorite. Unfortunately, if I delayed too long in lifting her from the dreadful ground, she continued her wild war shriek direct into my ear after I placed her on my shoulders."

"You always said I was a good-tempered baby!"

"You were." Mr. Bennet smiled at Mr. Darcy. "I do not mean to imply she was an unhappy or inconsolable babe — there are many of those. Mary was one, she never was satisfied, and cried for months through. No, you simply had a very determined sense of how the world ought to be, and you would demand that it change when it did not suit your preferences. But you did so happily — you often smiled as you shrieked."

Elizabeth blushed and laughed. She looked at Mr. Darcy. "Papa, must you share tales of my infancy?"

"Oh, I am enthralled," Darcy said. "Had these books been a gift rather than a loan I would be well repaid by this story alone."

"I have many more! A favorite of mine is about the time that the morning sermon one Sunday was upon how money was the root of all evil. Lizzy came home and found on my desk a twenty-pound note, and—"

"Papa, I certainly recall this story. No need to tell it again."

"But I have not heard it yet." Darcy grinned at her.

"The corners were not even damaged, so you were able to have it replaced by the bank!" Elizabeth cried out.

Darcy's lips pressed together. A chortle of amusement came out. "You did not, my dear?"

"She certainly did. Took a pair of scissors right through the middle. I believe she would have started upon the rest had I not happened upon her at her serious work."

"How did you react?" Darcy asked. "That was a substantial amount of money."

Mr. Bennet shrugged. "What was there to do? I think I scared Elizabeth with my shriek for her to stop — but afterwards, once I'd recovered the bill note, and put away the scissors? She was a clever girl already and understood when I said that she was most seriously enjoined to never do that again. What further benefit would there have been in punishment?"

"My father never used the rod or any form of physical correction," Darcy said, "but he always found benefit in punishment when we disappointed him."

"This proves my point: You and Lizzy both became quite sensible persons despite being raised under wholly different regimes. Your sister has given you some trouble, and my Lydia gives me some anxiety, again despite being raised under wholly different regimes. A man should not offer unsolicited advice upon the care and raising of children." Mr. Bennet paused, and then he added, with a pointed smile at them, "Especially when there is no chance that those children are yet conceived."

There was in fact not any chance of that, but the two of them had put those times of real privacy they had to sufficient good use that she would rather sink through the ground than admit to her father what she had been up to with her fiancé.

He smirked at their embarrassed reactions, and added, "I'll just say, do not assume you have greater control of who they will become than you do. There is some influence, I do not deny that, but you can do far more to determine if their childhood is happy or difficult than to establish them as an adult who is either noble or base, determined or irresolute, scholarly or a sportsman."

After Mr. Bennet said this, Darcy suddenly pulled out his watch and flipped it open to study the time. "I must run off to meet my man of business." He took Elizabeth's hand and kissed it. "My dear Elizabeth, you will still be here in an hour and a half?"

"Leave my father alone in a bookstore? Can you imagine what might happen?"

They all laughed, and then Darcy grinned, waved, and he hurried out of the store.

Mr. Bennet sighed, stretched out his legs, and said to the bookstore owner, "Let us move on to philosophy."

"You must visit my cousin's store. He has one of the greatest collections of the ancient Greek philosophers, all printed in their original language."

Mr. Bennet waved his hand. "I already have most of Plato's dialogues and the collected Aristotle, I do not find Greek so easy to read as Latin. But in any case, I am more concerned now with the moderns — Kant and his ilk. But not Kant, I already own his principal works."

"Are you familiar with Hegel? I have a copy of Phänomenologie des Geistes — his most recent and significant work."

"By name. I have heard both that the work is tendentious, unclear and too impressed by the Corsican, and also that it is a sublime explanation of the world, and of great importance — bring forth. Bring forth."

As Cohen departed into the aisles once more, Mr. Bennet said approvingly, "A fine young man. And you have schooled him to listen to you. That is more than I would have anticipated from him."

"That merely scratches the surface of his virtues," Elizabeth replied. "In some ways he is in fact very humble."

Mr. Bennet laughed.

"I am serious."

Her father's eyes twinkled.

"I also am delighted by the sight of you two becoming such fine friends — I had not expected it."

"Eh, he is making the principal effort. I like him even more than Bingley," Mr. Bennet said. "Bingley never bought, ahem, loaned me two hundred guineas worth of rare books."

"Did Darcy describe the terms of the loan?"

"Until he has successfully expanded his library to hold all of these new volumes." Mr. Bennet laughed. "But he also intimated that he intends to purchase books upon his own account, that my storage is likely to be required for a prolonged duration."

Elizabeth laughed. "He really is making an effort."

"And you made the point to praise me to the skies with him. You didn't tell me that part of your conversation with him."

"What do you mean?"

"How you defended my honor and proclaimed me a wholly superior father to his own."

"That is not how I recall what I said."

Mr. Cohen returned with a pile of books, and he spread forth before Mr. Bennet Hegel's text first, but he set to the side next to it five other books in German and French with abstruse philosophical titles that Elizabeth could not begin to understand, like Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen.

Mr. Bennet frowned and paged through the book. His brows furrowed with the difficulty of interpreting abstruse words in a different language. Elizabeth leaned her head against him and hugged him.

Mr. Bennet turned and smiled at her. "My dear girl."

He returned to the text, and Elizabeth watched him read as she used to when she was a child who'd become bored with her own books.

A tear started on the edge of Elizabeth's eyes. How would she live without Papa always sitting across the room or in his study room down the hall? She'd missed him little during the past weeks, but a separation of a few weeks or a month or two was nothing.

This was to be permanent. Hundreds of miles and a several days long journey would separate them.

Papa pushed the book away from him and rubbed at his forehead. "I can confirm that this is tendentious and unclear. But it would do me good to read it, I suppose — Lizzy, are you crying?"

"Oh, Papa. I will miss you so much."

"My dear." He hugged her back. "My dear girl. I know you will. That is why I always treated you with so much affection, so that you would marry a man who lived in a neighboring county at the furthest."

Elizabeth giggled.

"And now you've made my scheme come to naught."

Elizabeth wiped at her eyes. "You have been the best of fathers."

"Only in some ways. I feel no need to claim perfection for myself, when I can claim you as my daughter, which is better."

"Papa!"

"No praise too high. No praise too high for you. You are old enough now that I can't turn your head to an excess. But you have always made my life happier and fuller because you were in it. Every day is a joy when I can hear you laugh and see you smile."

"You can't mean that — even when I used that particularly piercing scream next to your ear?"

"Especially then."

Elizabeth looked at him skeptically.

"You will understand when you are a parent — in his wisdom the Almighty made babes so delightfully precious to their parent's eyes that it is impossible to become seriously upset with one. I'd usually laugh when you did that. Sometimes as I held you while you screamed, I was so entranced by your appearance that I forgot for half a minute to bounce you so that you would calm."

"Nonsense."

Mr. Bennet merely smiled back at her. "Lizzy, I know you will do well, and very happily with Mr. Darcy."

Elizabeth nodded.

"Now that that is settled." Mr. Bennet called out, "Cohen, package these up, except these two — I already have copies of them. What can you offer me in history?"

"Gibbons?"

"Already possess a copy."

"I suspected as much, let me see…"

Mr. Bennet worked systematically through the shelves of the bookstore, purchasing more than thirty tomes as he did so.

Elizabeth was often asked for her advice, and the two spent a half hour discussing the virtues of Chapman's vs Pope's translation of Homer.

After a while Mr. Darcy returned to the bookstore. Elizabeth studied him as he looked around, his eyes adjusting to the dim light inside.

Tall, elegantly dressed, his finely arranged hair that she wanted to muss and mess with. His noble features and his dark serious eyes.

When he finally caught sight of her, his entire aspect changed, brightening with a smile, and a sort of tension in his posture eased.

Elizabeth happily waved at him, and he walked over to the table surrounded by books. "How many have you selected so far?"

"A great many." Mr. Bennet laughed. "I intend to force myself through Hegel."

Darcy made a face. "Too much about the world spirit."

"You read it?"

"Only half of Phenomenology. It was after I took the estate. In my university years I always delighted to exhaust myself reading difficult books, and I accounted myself superior for doing so. However once I became fully established in the world, matters of business and pleasure made that considerably more difficult and less appealing. I learned something from that book, but at the distance of years I can hardly describe what."

Elizabeth stood and took Darcy's arm. "I account you rather superior, even if you do not spend ten hours each evening at German philosophy."

"I as well," Darcy replied with his dry smile.

Elizabeth laughed. At times everything he said delighted her.

"You two go off and back to Gracechurch Street," Mr. Bennet said. "I've a few more books I wish to look at, and perhaps I will visit the shop of Cohen's cousin before I declare the book buying expedition a completed success."

With shaken hands, and Elizabeth placing a kiss on her father's cheek, the three of them parted.

Rather than heading direct to her uncle's house, the two wandered arm in arm through the grounds around the nearby cathedral, admiring the dome and the many bare trees.

Elizabeth was full of bubbly delight, and Darcy's expression was likewise suffused with joy. Every time Elizabeth looked at him, she wanted to shake herself like a happy kitten.

"You have bribed my father into loving you," she said.

"As by intention!" Darcy laughed. "And I am glad that his heart is so easily reached, your mother's preferences, beyond that I be rich and well respected, are less clear."

"She really cannot understand Georgiana." Elizabeth shook her head in bemusement at how frustrated Mama had been at realizing that the girl who had been taken on by the Gardiners as a governess was also Darcy's sister, whose marriage was less disgraceful now that she was widowed. But… but what will the neighbors say? It does not speak well to your consequence. You cannot let her.

"I cannot understand Georgiana either," Darcy said. "But she insists that she wishes to be useful, and that this is her preferred manner of being useful. It is no longer my place to judge her choices, and this is odd not harmful."

"Though you find it embarrassing."

"I do! I do." Darcy laughed in a way that made Elizabeth's heart flutter. "I've spent more than a little thought upon how to describe the situation, when it becomes incumbent upon me to do so. But it is not important. Not really. What is important is that this, at present, really is her choice."

Elizabeth wrapped her arm around Darcy's and snuggled against his side. "I adore you."

"You have said so." He nuzzled her hair. "For my part, I admire you greatly as well."

"Mmmmmm. Admiration." She shivered at the way his warm breath blew through her hair. "Must it really be so many weeks till we marry?"

"Patience, dearest, patience."

"That will be your duty in our marriage. Being the prudent one. I am the imprudent creature who only wants to kiss you, even though we are in a churchyard."

Darcy laughed and kissed her, though not for so long, nor so deeply as Elizabeth wanted. "If that is imprudence, let us never be prudent."

"Then we must promise that we shall always want to kiss each other."

"And much more," he replied in that low voice which made a shiver go down Elizabeth's spine. "And much more."

"Are you sure we cannot just go to Scotland? Three days on the road from Georgiana's tale?"

"Five in winter, if there is not ice on all the roads. Patience, my dear."

Elizabeth kissed him. "I can be patient, because once we are married, my plot will have succeeded, and I shall have you forever."

"Forever together."

Epilogue

Now that this tale is done, the time has arrived for the author's pen to dispose of the fate of those characters with whom we have journeyed for a time.

Georgiana had a daughter after an easy labor which gave her devoted friends and relations little anxiety, and the young girl was named Elizabeth, after both Georgiana's student and her sister-in-law. The girl in fact was very well loved and never doubted it, and she grew up to be an extremely happy girl — though given the abundance of Elizabeths already existing around her, her childhood nickname was the less euphonious to a modern ear: Betsy. Fortunately, this bothered her not at all. Both Georgiana and Betsy lived with the Gardiners for many years.

While she perhaps wished to be simply Beth's governess, the fact was that Georgiana was a substantial heiress, and the income from her fortune was greater than the profit from Mr. Gardiner's own substantial business. Fortunately, Mrs. Gardiner was a sensible woman, and Georgiana was determined to live in near retirement. Matters were arranged to suit all parties.

The size of Georgiana's fortune grew substantially in those years, as even though she lived incredibly extravagantly compared to what an actual governess with a salary of twenty or later thirty a year could afford — she enjoyed regular travel, gifts, new dresses, a piano purchased every four or five years as advancements in manufacturing provided the impetus for the extravagance, and all the books that she hazarded to desire, her mode of living was extremely modest compared to that of most heiresses with a portion of thirty thousand.

Mr. Gardiner always dutifully paid Georgiana her salary as the governess of his daughter — a sum that grew from the originally specified fifteen a year, to the princely forty a year. For her part Georgiana contributed in exchange for the use of their carriage and servants a substantially larger sum, and upon Beth's marriage gave the happy couple a gift of several thousand pounds.

It was only after that happy event, when Georgiana was still less than thirty, that she began to think of rejoining society more broadly.

She was still young, and she began to have a sense that she might wish to marry again.

Each year Georgiana spent at least a month at Pemberley, as the Gardiners habitually spent a substantial amount of time there each summer, and she was part of the excess of guests who packed into Longbourn and the environs each Christmas. But at these gatherings, she fled any hint of flirtation — especially if she found the flirtatious man at all charming.

She was dedicated to Beth and Betsy.

But Betsy was a happy and flourishing girl, and Beth had just married.

For a time, Georgiana moved back to Pemberley — an estate that she no longer found oppressive as she had claimed her own sense of self. Afterwards she spent months with her cousins the Matlocks, and finally she joined Darcy and Elizabeth for their dutiful Easter visit to Lady Catherine before the start of the Season. Over the years, the social success of Elizabeth Darcy had acclimated Lady Catherine to accept the foibles of her nephew, who had disappointed her enormously by not marrying Anne, and her niece, whose disgraceful husband was long dead.

Lady Catherine never was told, not till she died, that Georgiana had served as the governess of Beth, who was introduced to Lady Catherine the one time they met as Georgiana's protégé.

At this time Mr. Collins's cousin on his mother's side was visiting the house of his clerical relation. He was a widowed man with a daughter much younger than Betsy, and he pursued a respectable line of trade in London. This man was further wholly superior in person and manners to his cousin.

While this man was enchanted by the widow, Mrs. Wickham, the first time he saw her, it was only through her enjoyment of his daughter's company that Georgiana began to realize that she admired him.

After a courtship that ran far more smoothly than Elizabeth had expected, when she first noticed the mutual attraction between the couple, they were married, and lived very happily together into old age, and had three further children.

By the time the period of his lease on Netherfield had ended, the constant attendance of Mrs. Bennet on the couple, combined with her insistent advice upon the care, feeding, and every other matter relating to her first grandchild, convinced them that they would prefer a little greater distance from their too loving mother. Further, Bingley found a chance to purchase on favorable terms a fine estate in the neighboring county to Pemberley, and Mrs. Darcy was delighted to find her dear sister Mrs. Bingley living less than thirty miles distant.

Mr. Bennet greatly enjoyed the "loan" of books he received from Mr. Darcy, but this extra store of books in his library did not prevent him from visiting Pemberley often, sometimes when he was least expected.

He was always welcome, and particularly adored by his grandchildren.

Lydia Bennet married an officer who had neither fortune, nor connections, nor any marked personal qualities. However, he was considered by his connections to be considerably less bad than they had feared from the wildest Bennet sister.

The family endeavored to help him in his career, and his commission as a major had just been purchased for him when he, sadly, died at the battle of Waterloo. The shock of the news prompted Lydia, who was residing at a house they had rented in Brussels, to enter her second labor several weeks earlier than anticipated. Nevertheless, the child was a healthy son.

The death of her husband left Lydia with a widow's slender pension and two children. She lived at Pemberley with her sister for some time. Then, to everyone's surprise, she married the long bachelor rector of Kympton. Despite what might have been anticipated from her previous character, she turned into an excellent and active clergyman's wife, who was always a favorite with the parishioners for her understanding tolerance of human foibles. Over time she became second only to Jane as Elizabeth's favorite from amongst her sisters.

As for the other rector's wife in our tale, Mrs. Collins lived in great contentment with her choice of husband. She enjoyed her children, her duties as a rector's wife, and the independence which marriage had brought her. However, after Elizabeth had effected a reconciliation between Lady Catherine and her husband, Charlotte enjoyed those weeks around Easter when her dearest friend customarily visited more than any other time of the year.

Sadly, she did not ever enjoy the company of her husband, but as he enjoyed his own company sufficiently for both of them, neither had cause to repine.

Elizabeth and Darcy lived a long and happy life together with many children, many walks and many rides around Pemberley's great park. They experienced great joy, happiness and laughter, intermixed, as life must be, with occasional bursts of sadness. Due to the enthusiasm of Georgiana and Beth for the piano, Elizabeth felt her own musical efforts to be rather superfluous, and she never found the diligence to become even a tolerable player by the high standards of the Darcy family. She instead spent her time in reading, walks, and with her children, friends, and those she loved.

They were always on the closest of terms with the Gardiners. Respect and liking for the couple were combined with the natural filial respect that ought to be shown to an uncle and aunt who were worthy of respect. Beyond that, Mr. Darcy was always sensible that the Gardiners had freely given his sister haven when she was in her time of greatest danger.

Note: In the Afterword I have references to links that are not present in the version of the text. Also, while I'm mentioning it, the simple way that I've always used to avoid having html tags hanging around in the text also strips out the italics - if you want the original ideal text, you can buy it at your favorite ebook retailer - but, really, the only reason to do that at this point is that you'd like to support the author, in which case: Thank you! - also thank you to everyone who read and just enjoyed the book.

Afterword

I hope you all enjoyed this novel.

It took me a while to finally write this book for several reasons. The most important delaying factor (though not the one that caused the largest delay) is named Mara.

As I write this she is almost seven months old, completely adorable, not quite yet crawling but definitely working on it, and with a habit of waking us up before 6 AM one or two times a week.

She also really likes to be held all the time. Unfortunately, my wife has a disability which makes it difficult for her to carry the baby, so that duty falls generally to me. The end result has been that I discovered the voice dictation software packaged with Microsoft Word is decent, and then I learned that Mara gets very bored and annoyed if I am standing in one place in front of the computer talking to it, even though she is being held.

I also spent a great deal of time last year before Mara was born on three non-Pride and Prejudice writing projects, unfortunately neither of the two that I've published were commercial successes.

is a novel that I think a lot of you would enjoy. It is a fantasy romance set in an alternate version of the Mongol steppes. The premise came to me years ago when I was practicing writing the dramatic and mysterious line in a novel description. One of these taglines for an imaginary book came out as: He was ordered by his clan chief to kill the woman that he loved…

I immediately wanted to write the novel that went with that sentence. However it took me years of fiddling before I figured out how to make the whole structure of the story work. If you like the idea of a novel filled with conflicts between love and duty, and a slow burn romance set in an unfamiliar world where characters try to fulfill their oaths while at the same time protecting those they love, you will probably like this story.

You are especially likely to like this story if you like my writing. So if you ever are in the mood to read something that isn't Pride and Prejudice check it out. It never clicked with the fantasy romance algorithms, but my honest opinion is that it is really good.

I also wrote last year, which is a cultivation fantasy novel that is supposed to promote Effective Altruist ideas. I expect the overlap in the audience for this book and that book will be much smaller.

Also this reminds me, if any of you happen to be into hard science fiction, back in the 2020 Summer of Covid I wrote a science fiction novella that is really fun to talk about, and which is available for free .

The final reason that this book has taken so long is that I've been looking into switching to a career with a larger and more reliable income. I simply don't think I currently can write more than two or three interesting Pride and Prejudice novels a year, and I'd probably need to write four to six a year to get the sort of income I'd like with a child.

It turns out that babies are expensive.

Also the sales and profits from each new novel seems to have gotten smaller over the past years. I think a large part of the reason for that is Amazon's switch to selling as much as they possibly can through pay-per-click ads has substantially reduced the ability for books to be seen through organic means, and that further means that Amazon captures a larger part of the total money I get from my readers.

The second cause of this, and probably the much bigger reason, is that I have already written around twenty of these novels. I have in fact written so many that I cannot give you the number from memory. Most readers in the genre already know if they like my work, and many people who have bought one or two of my earlier books have undoubtedly decided they won't read any more Timothy Underwood titles.

Which is wholly fair, there are lots of authors who other people love who I've decided I don't want to read.

Further, a lot of the people who like my books don't actually like them enough to read every single one, and when a new book comes out, they might not be in the mood for it.

In any case, I am now deciding how best I can turn my existing skills as a writer who can regularly create large projects and then finish them into a different career, and also I'm taking programming and data analyst courses — it may sound very weird for someone who ended up writing historical romance novels, but my unused college degree was in Applied Math, and I'd like to more actively use that part of my brain.

If anyone has thoughts or advice about career changing, ideas of jobs that they think someone who can write books like I do would be good at, random offers of employment, or simply encouragement I'd love it if you wrote to me at .

I probably will continue to write Pride and Prejudice novels, but at a pace of one to two a year at most. When I come back to these books after a substantial break I still enjoy the process of crafting yet another new set of problems to make life difficult for our dear couple.

It won't be written this year, but after Mara gets a bit older, I want to write a novel about Darcy and Elizabeth raising a child that will be highly autobiographical.

If I write something else this year, it might be either my occasionally promised story about Mr. Darcy being turned into a dog, or a novel that begins when Mr. Darcy creates a scandal by, among other things, fighting a bear and serenading the king's palace, the one time he lets Colonel Fitzwilliam talk him into drinking too much. He of course remembers nothing of the night the next morning. Or it might be something else from my collection of ideas, or an entirely new concept.

And now I'd like to talk a bit about AI.

The first thing I want to say on this topic is that it is highly unlikely that you will ever read a novel that has more than isolated sentences or rare paragraphs written primarily by the current generation of generative AI tools.

These tools are currently superficially talented, yet fundamentally terrible prose writers.

When I played around with it, none of my attempts to generate decent prose out of GPT-4 worked, and I'd be mildly surprised if there is any way with the existing models to have it write consistently good prose over tens of thousands of words. Frequently when I asked GPT-4 to suggest ways to improve a scene (it can give good answers to this question) it misunderstood the question and tried to rewrite the whole scene for me.

These rewrites were universally terrible.

There probably are some tricks involving API access, python scripting, langchain, and vector encoding that could create an automated process which would get closer to consistency over a large text, but that leaves the difficulty of getting the system to write something that isn't ridiculous every third sentence in the first place.

When writers using generative AI say that it is a tool in the writer's toolkit, and not a substitute for the human writer, this is simply true. The current tools can't substitute.

However, AI assistants are already a flexible and powerful tool, and one I extensively used while writing and editing this novel. Many of you have probably played with, or at least seen something produced by ChatGPT over the last months. I have been using the premium version of ChatGPT which produces substantially more intelligent and useful answers for writing tasks than ChatGPT, while still having substantial weaknesses.

One thing this novel owes to AI is the title. I asked my newsletter to vote on which of four titles that they liked the best, and the two that I'd come up with myself were far less popular than the titles written by GPT-4.

While editing I pasted two-thousand-word chunks of most of the important scenes from my novel into GPT-4 and asked the program to "rate this scene".

The response I'd get back was a number, invariably between 7.0 and 9.0, followed by a paragraph that described two or three strengths of the scene and then a paragraph that described two or three weaknesses of the scene — almost invariably one of the weaknesses was that there were sentences that could be clearer or more concise.

I'd then ask it to list those sentences, and possibly offer a suggestion for how to improve them. It successfully identifies sentences that are too long and somewhat unclear.

Most of the time I did change those sentences, but I'd guess only about a quarter of the time did I use the suggested change instead of shifting the wording about on my own. I also had to tell it to list the needed improvements in a bullet point list, because if I didn't tell it to do that it might rewrite the scene into a "better" version that was four hundred words long, and filled with bits of purple prose that would make the author of My Immortal blush.

Often I would be told that the scene was full of anachronisms, but the list of anachronisms did not include anything that didn't actually belong in the Regency time period. I tried with a half dozen prompts to get it to actually identify things that didn't belong, but I had no success (though while typing this I thought of something different that I could have tried).

This was a bit disappointing, because I would really like to have a tool that automatically flags issues like how I'd described Wickham's gun as a "revolver" in my last novel, because I wasn't paying enough attention while writing to notice that the word I'd just used was not a synonym for "handgun" but a specific type of handgun which may or may not have existed in 1812 (it didn't, at least not in a form that was either usable or mass produced).

A second common way I used AI was as a super thesaurus.

These prompts looked like "Rewrite this sentence so its sounds more Regency," or "Describe the sensory details of a scene in a blacksmith's shop in Gretna Green," or "What are ten other ways to rewrite this sentence," or "What are behaviors or gestures that someone feeling this emotion might make?".

These are the bits where I was most likely to end up writing material generated directly into the text, but even here, I'd usually end up mixing and matching words or phrases from several different suggestions.

Its final major use for me was as a research tool.

If you ask ChatGPT a question like "What bridges existed over the Thames in London in 1810?" or "What books might a governess use to teach a girl in 1810 in England?" you will get back a coherent answer that is about the question you just asked.

Googling a question like this usually results in links to a variety of texts that are vaguely related, but which possibly have nothing to do with the concrete thing you want to know. If they do answer the concrete question, it will often take minutes of searching around in the article to find the two pages that are relevant to your question.

Word searches inside articles and experience can help, but for these sorts of research questions ChatGPT simply is better than Google at giving you relevant answers.

Unfortunately, sometimes these answers are not true.

Thus using it as a research tool is almost always a two stage process. For example just googling "What books and periodicals might Mr. Bennet have had in his library" gives you this , which sounds like it would be relevant, but very, very much is not.

GPT-4 suggests for periodicals that Mr. Bennet might have The Edinburgh Review, The Philosophical Review, and The Philosophical Magazine. A quick Google search proves that they actually existed and points me to a wiki page that tells me enough about them to decide if Mr. Bennet would actually want a subscription.

With the first two scenes in the novel I experimented with asking a large number of questions like "Use the Story Physics framework to analyze this scene" or "Imagine that you are a developmental editor with 10 years of experience, how should this scene be changed?". Some of these answers were useful, and I think the first scene is much stronger because they were used. Many of the answers were not.

In any case, I spent far longer asking these questions and making changes in response to them than it took to initially write the scene.

If during my editing read of the novel, I felt like a scene dragged, I asked GPT-4 to list things to shorten or remove, and it told me to change the things that I already knew should be changed, but I now had a to-do list to work through.

I will again repeat, it is a terrible prose writer. And it is not actually a tool to save time while writing a novel.

Instead, currently generative AI is a tool that a writer can use to make a given text better.

While this discussion is probably interesting, it is not actually the central thing I want to talk about.

The word current showed up multiple times in the preceding discussion.

That is important, because the limits are current limits.

It is unclear how quickly progress will occur, but it is almost inevitable each new future AI model will have fewer limits in what it can do. At some point, likely in the lifespans of most of the people reading this, there will be a generative AI model which can be prompted with "write a novel of two hundred thousand words with more detailed descriptions than Madame Bovary, a deeper analysis of the human condition than War and Peace, that is more elegantly romantic than Pride and Prejudice, and that is more emotionally resonant than Star Wars."

And it will simply be able to do so.

There are many reasons people suggest for why it will be impossible for an AI to write a novel that people enjoy more than one written by a good novelist. I do not find these arguments convincing. But I also do not want to argue about this question right here.

However, and this is not an argument, but a suggestion to ask yourself if your own arguments are as solid as you feel they are: If you think it is impossible for AI to ever write a novel as well as Jane Austen or Tolstoy, did you think in 2020 that we would easily be able to create an AI that can write as well as GPT-4 can?

I did, though the development has happened somewhat faster than I expected.

If in 2020 you thought something like GPT-4 was easy, but that something more powerful is very hard, then there is no reason for you to change your mind now. But if GPT-4 surprised you, that means that there was some important fact about what can be done with AI that you did not know or understand, and you should thus consider it likely that the thing in your head that did not predict GPT-4 is making the same mistake when it thinks there will never be a GPT that can write better than Tolstoy.

For the rest of this essay I will simply assume that generative AI tools of that level of sophistication are in fact possible for us to develop.

My guess is that a successful novel writing AI will either exist, or clearly be very close by 2030 — i.e. long before my seven-month-old daughter reaches puberty.

When we talk about AI, we do not talk about the distant future.

But before 2030 is a guess, and it could easily be wrong. There is a small chance that the GPT architecture will be able to do this if given a larger data set and a billion dollars to spend on the training run — in that case such a tool is likely to exist before 2025. There is a much larger chance that there are two or more fundamental conceptual breakthroughs required before an AI can write a novel, and it will not happen for decades.

But it will happen eventually.

This obviously will have enormous implications for writers and readers. A central part of our experience of texts is that we understand them as coming out of a particular human mind and spirit that engaged in a particular type of work to produce them. What will it be like to be a reader who is simply not sure whether the text was produced by a human, or by a simple input inserted into a vast series of interconnected numbers?

I tend to think we will still generally prefer to read things that are the product of another human, simply because reading is in part a social experience. However, I have very little confidence in this, and I do have an enormous amount of confidence that there will be many texts that claim to have been written by humans, that will in fact not have been.

However this is still not what I think is important to talk about when we talk about AI.

There are probably a few hundred thousand to a few million people around the world who make their living as professional writers in the way I do. While everyone in the modern world is bathed in text, I would guess that at most ten percent of human time in advanced countries is spent consuming the sorts of texts that are produced by professional writers.

What happens to us as a profession is small in the global scope.

But a tool that can write a novel better than Jane Austen might be able to do your job better than you can do it. And even if the novel writing AI is unable to generalize its skill set in such a way as to automate your job, a different AI will be built that can do your job better than you can do it.

This is the future that many of us are likely to live to see.

And this could be an extremely good future.

If political and institutional arrangements are created to successfully ensure that the stuff needed for everyone to have a good life is produced by these automated systems and then equitably distributed, we will all be able to live like Georgian aristocrats, but with health care that is superior to that which is currently available to even the wealthiest alive today (since even the best doctors can make mistakes, and even the best doctors do not literally know everything, while an AI doctor might).

Establishing a world like that is a political question, and one that I think is likely to be solved in a satisfactory, if not ideal way.

Personally, I am a fan of some sort of UBI funded by taxes on automation that kick in once job losses become massive and irreversible, and of distributing globally the rents from the vast amount of unused resources deep under the ground, in international waters, and in the Antarctic that would become economically useful in a world where the cost of labor is very, very low. Open AI operates under a capped profit model, which means that if the company completely transforms the world economy, they promise that after their investors have earned a 1000x return, they will give away the remaining surplus.

If a few AI companies produce a majority of economic activity, perhaps they should be partly nationalized or have the ownership shares distributed so that everyone owns part of them.

Getting the politics and the institutions right so that a world where none of our work skills are valuable turns everyone into a wealthy aristocrat like Mr. Darcy instead of turning everyone into an impoverished homeless beggar is one of the two things that it is actually important to talk about when we talk about AI.

In terms of how we get there, I mainly think that we all must be ready to exert the power that we have as voters in wealthy democracies, and we further must be ready to vote in ways that would have been weird before, and that do not necessarily match existing political coalitions. When an AI that can do anything a human being can do arrives, what to do with it will be a question vastly more important than any political question that we currently squabble about.

Ideally the answers we find will be bipartisan.

I also expect that we will collectively solve this problem in the end, though the solution will almost certainly also be much less good than it could have been.

But there is a second topic which it is also important to talk about: The whole, "Will the robots kill us?" question.

Often it is claimed that an AI system would be unable to do so. I however think that most of these arguments are implicitly based on not believing that it is possible to build AI systems that are capable of doing everything a human can do in the first place. This skepticism is of course sensible and reasonable.

No program ever created by anyone through the history of computer science until today could do anything particularly dangerous on its own volition.

The current systems simply are not that powerful.

But the AI available in 2025 will almost certainly be more powerful than those available today. The AI in 2030 will be more capable of making good real world plans and then executing on those plans than the ones in 2025, and so on.

I might be wrong, but my firm expectation is that while I am still alive, this process will reach the point where we have AI systems that are able to do anything a human can do. Further, because they will eat electricity and live in silicon, rather than eating plant and animal matter and living in houses, these systems will be able to do it far cheaper than humans can.

Shortly after this point the entire global economy will be filled everywhere with things that can do any objectively describable task that a human can do, and in most cases they will be able to do it better than a human, just like ChatGPT could rewrite these paragraphs in the style of Shakespeare or an Icelandic epic far better than I could.

It seems to me to be ridiculous to think that a set of systems that are this capable, and that are everywhere on the planet would not simply succeed if they had a hidden plan to kill us all once they safely could. Further, once an AI is capable of writing an original novel that is generally considered as good as War and Peace or Pride and Prejudice it will have the capability to lie convincingly about its plans.

I am fairly sure that most claims that this is impossible is also a claim that the situation I just described, of a global economy infused with AI that can do all of the tasks that humans currently need to do is also impossible.

The second objection to worrying about robots killing everyone is one I agree with. Even if it is technically possible, it is unlikely. Obviously, nobody would intentionally build a system that would have a hidden plan to destroy humanity. The goal has to come from somewhere. Where does it come from?

This is a good reason to think that we probably will not be killed by robots.

The institutional problem of distributing the good stuff is way more likely to be what we face than the existential threat of us all being brutally murdered by a really cool system created by a giant corporation whose managers, engineers and scientists were smarter than they were wise.

However, the chance that the robots do kill us is sufficiently high that it is essential that AI systems be developed with extreme care.

I'd like to suggest two completely mundane facts as intuition pumps for why we should be worried:

First, industrial accidents happen all the time. I believe the Bhopal disaster which killed twenty thousand people in India is the deadliest, but if you think the linear-no-threshold model for estimating cancer caused by radiation leaks is correct, it was Chernobyl. Another example is the Gulf oil spill, which killed relatively few people, but which wrecked the ecosystem and economy of an entire region. These are three disasters I recall off the top of my head. There have been thousands, or likely millions of smaller ones.

In each of these three cases the disaster happened despite elaborate and carefully thought through safety protocols that were designed to make sure such a disaster could not ever happen.

Second, every single piece of complicated software is buggy upon release.

These two facts mean that it is completely reasonable and sane to require that the research and development of extremely powerful technologies that have in principle the ability to kill everyone be subjected to far more stringent oversight and safety testing than would make sense for a company driven by hopes of profit. We do not need to wait for the disaster to actually happen to worry that it might.

As they become more powerful, these systems in fact should be subjected to the sort of regulatory scrutiny that we give nuclear power plants or the development of a new medicine that will be taken by millions of people. Currently the companies developing them are not subject to any outside oversight at all.

Even if the chance of a truly large disaster is small — and there are those who argue stridently that the risk is in fact large — it would be insane to not put substantial resources and effort towards the goal of making that chance much smaller.

Of course the details are very important, and the potential benefits of these technologies are huge. The need for strict oversight must be balanced with the need to allow their continued development. This, however, is a balance that can be made.

Once again, this is a matter which we can influence through our power as voters. And it is also an issue where we should push for there to be bipartisan efforts to establish regulatory frameworks for AI safety, and where we should be prepared to vote for and support policies which in other circumstances would be very weird and extreme.

That ends my discussion of AI.

If you are interested in reading more about the topic, two resources I can fully recommend are this by Tim Urban of Wait, but Why, and the videos on Youtube by Robert Miles, probably starting with this that explains why people think that AI powerful enough to replace most human jobs will be particularly likely to cause dangerous accidents. Here is a jargon heavy essay from the "we are all doomed" (something written by Eliezar Yudkowsky of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality fame) camp that I also think is worth reading for its perspective.

Finally, whatever the world will look like in twenty years, we still live in a place where there are people in distant countries who have far less than we do, and who we can actively help today.

I donate to every month, and I really hope some of you join me in doing this small part to keep our fellow humans alive and healthy.

Budapest, May 2023

Timothy Underwood