Pride and Prejudice

Elizabeth Bennet meets Mr Darcy at a country assembly and decides, on very little evidence, that she dislikes him. He decides, on equally little evidence, that her family is beneath him. Austen builds the whole novel out of that double mistake, and lets both characters revise their judgement in public, slowly and with embarrassment.

What keeps the book alive is not the courtship but the economics behind it. The entail on the Bennet estate, the pressure on five daughters with no income, and the exact social cost of a foolish younger sister are described with a clarity that most nineteenth-century novels avoid. Read it once for the wit, then again for the arithmetic.