Pride and Prejudice and an historical novel as mystery

During the last couple of years, I've played many sessions of Regency Cthulhu, a Call of Cthulhu supplement focusing on running scenarios set in the Regency era. More specifically, the supplement calls out Jane Austen's novels. After playing, and during a break, writing a few Lovecraftian pastiches set in that era using a very different version of the character I created for the campaign, I came to realize that I really was missing out by not having read any of Austen's work. I read Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe as a kid, and some Dickens, and possibly Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, but all of these were obviously not very sharp in my mind. So, in a timely fashion, I decided to start with her classic Pride and Prejudice.

The writing was very good from the start, and the characters fascinating, but the first of three volumes had me terribly confused and unsettled. I wasn't sure what I was supposed to take as sensible, what was supposed to be ridiculous as opposed to being read as ridiculous form my modern point of view, and so on. With time I obviously realized that some of the characters are not particularly reliable, but I wasn't sure what kind of acme I could have for making sense of them.

And then, the second volume had a large, clear exposition that made me reassess my entire experience. The exposition added facts that were known neither to me nor to the character to whom it was aimed - and then the character made note of some facts that were familiar to us both, but which we had missed the significance of at the time, but now were shown in a new light with the new evidence.

The facts and what they suggested were not really culturally-dependent - they pointed to an explicit contradiction between someone's behavior and statements and their actions. If I hadn't been so busy second-guessing myself as to my interpretation of the many events and discussions surrounding this contradiction, perhaps I would have noticed it. I felt like in a detective novel, where there's a revelation of what really happened, or who did the crime, and the reader feels like they should have been able to figure it out themselves.

With this in mind, I no longer feel as I did during the first volume, that I wish that I were reading an annotated version of the novel. Instead, I would like, going forward, to try and appreciate novels like this, historical novels that do not begin with an exposition or clarifications to the reader as to the cultural and social significance of what is happening before them, as a challenge, to see if, despite not being familiar with the setting because of its distance in time, space, and/or social and cultural situation, I can nevertheless figure out when something is being hidden in plain sight like this.

I am looking forward to finishing the third volume, and then moving on to other works of this nature. Not just historical novels - fantasy and science fiction often suffer from too much exposition, but some works do gamble that throwing the reader at the deep end will not dissuade them from continuing on, and getting more and more invested in the world, perhaps exactly because they have to work so much themselves to make sense of it.