Pride and Prejudice and being taken in

Since I discussed it last week, I finished Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. I enjoyed the experience tremendously, but following the afterglow, I started having second thoughts about my reactions to it.

I was happy to see my thoughts about Mr. Darcy being confirmed - not only that, despite Elizabeth's incredulity, he was still in love with her and this was motivating his actions favoring her and her family, but that he, at least, recognized that his first proposal to her was insulting, and she was right to reject him, despite some of the accusations she leveled at him being false. Also, Elizabeth explicitly coming to terms with her father's irresponsibility and her mother's ineptness interfering with their future. I found myself reacting to Lydia and Wickham as Elizabeth and the rest of the family did.

However, why would I feel that way about Lydia? Wickham, sure, is scumbag, a serial predator of minors, and had to be strong-armed and bribed to at least not put Lydia's feelings and future, as well as the future of her family, in jeopardy - but what's wrong with her wanting to enjoy life?

It's not her fault that she lives in such a society as would find her at fault for an adult's abuse of her. She's 16 at the end of the novel, having started it at 15. I can't say that I was making very good long-term decisions at her age, nor a decade later. Someone in her position today would do best not to marry a useless predator, instead of permanently tying herself to him, and him to her family. Why was I letting myself be pulled into the frame of mind of the 19th Century English landed gentry?

Possibly it is because I am impressionable, possibly it's because of what I noted in the previous post, that the way the novel was structured encouraged me to seek out solutions to the mysteries presented in the first volume, and therefore to implicate myself in getting immersed in a different era and class. Is this not what I wanted?

I supposed it's good to hold all of these perspectives in my head: First, that of a modern person reading a novel of manners befitting a different era; second, that of Elizabeth and her peers, and their view of what occurred in the novel; and third, hopefully, of a person able to be critical of that era's norms from that frame of reference.