Get Started On Pride And Prejudice: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Reviews, And Essays In Criticism Engineered By Jane Austen Compiled As Printable Format
Darcy
swoons
First, we need to clear something up, Colin Firth is the only Mr, Darcy.
That other Mr, Darcy was horrible! No, no, no, no, nooooo!
Make it stop, Make. It. Stop.
So, quite obviously, the BBC miniseries in all itsminute glory is the only version that is acceptable.
The other movie was such a travesty to this book, that I wept big, fat, angry tears.
. . like the spoiled brat that I am, Or maybe I'm exaggerating slightly,
What were they thinking! You don't mess with perfection!
What did you think, Elizabeth
Exactly.
I'm kidding, Sort of.
Anyway, instead of reading it this time around, I listened to an audiobook version, Apparently, which audio version you listen to makes a difference,
My reallife BFF said her version had an American doing British accents and she found it terribly annoying.
I, however, had a version with an actual lady from the land of tea 'n crumpets, and she did a fine job.
Well, she did have this lounge singerish voice, so instead of sounding like a freshfacedyear old, Elizabeth sounded like she had been smokingpacks a day for aboutyears.
Eh, I was ok with it, I kept imagining Lizzie with a cigarette dangling from her lips like a truck stop hooker, and it gave the story a fresh perspective.
I've read this so many times over the years that I've lost count, but I still wish I could go back and read it for the first time all over again.
I hated that stupid, arrogant, arsefaced Mr, Darcy when he first showed up at the ball, Ugh. What a prick!
So, just like Lizzie, I remember being shocked at his proposal, And just like Lizzie, I was horrified by the way he dissed her family while he did it!
And how could he think she would ever agree to marry him after the way he convinced Bingley that Jane didn't love him!
And the way he treated poor Wickham!
Just who did this guy think he was!
But then.
. . The Letter!
Oh, my! Well, that certainly put a different spin on things didn't it!
Elizabeth amp I were so ashamed that we had judged him so harshly.
hangs head
And the way he acted toward us when we met near the lake!
So kind.
. . such a gentleman!
Ok, I've probably read that particular scene at Pemberley a million times.
Sometimes, I would just pick up and start the book from there,
Total comfort food,
It's just ahhhhhhhhhhh.
Of course, Lydia has to go and ruin everything! How could she be such a stupid, selfish, uncaring twat! Grrrrrrr!
strangle, strangle, strangle
How will Darcy and I.
. . I mean, Darcy and Elizabeth, . . manage to get their Happily Ever After
Feelings! Oh, the feelings!
So.
Yes, I'm unashamed to admit that I am that cliché of a woman who loves Pride and Prejudice.
Unashamed!
I just insert fangirl screaming and crying
Throws panties at Mr, Darcy
Where my massive crush on Jane Austen began: alone, on a hot day in Montana, cursing her name.
I had to read it for AP English and I could not see the point, Girls need to marry. Girls can't get married. Girls are sad. Girls get married. Girls are happy.
I went to school to half heartedly discuss it and waffled and wavered in an effort to please my teacher.
Finally she said: "was it good or not, Ben"
"No it wasn't, "
"Thank you now read this twenty pages of literary criticism for homework, "
Twenty pages of literary criticism later, I was hooked, Once you know what to look for, it's hilarious, Once you're keyed into the contextual life of women, you have to feel for the plight of the Bennet sisters, and laugh at the crudity of their mother and Mr.
Collins.
So yes: I'm a guy and I love Jane Austen, You got a problem with that Huh Huh Do you Huh Well if you do, I'll be over here nursing my dorkiness just waiting for a fight for the honor of my beloved Jane.
I was forced to read this by my future wife,
I was not, however, forced to give itstars, Austen was a brilliant writer,
This story is timeless,
Simply beautiful. can you believe elizabeth and darcy invented the 'enemies to lovers' trope and have been the most iconic power couple to exist ever since
chapters in.
. . I want that to sink in for a moment, . . ok.chapters in and NOTHING has happened, I am enjoying her writing style very much, but I also enjoy the back of an occasional cereal box so that may not mean much.
We will see.
I am sitting here eating a tootsie roll, a Halloween left over, and I can't help notice the similarities between it and the novel Pride and Prejudice.
First off, like P and P, the tootsie roll wasn't one of those dinky ones that you can almost swallow in a single bite so you know that I've been at this for a while and now that I finally got it down, I have to wonder why I put it into mouth to begin with.
Secondly, tootsie rolls are a throwback to another age, there are far better candies out there and thewrappers littering the floor will attest to this.
You have to really like tootsie rolls to appreciate them, I don't.
Pride and Prejudice is the dullest most wonderfully written book that I have ever read, I read it simply to get a feel for the author's fantastic ability at arranging words, and really I mean it when I say, oh what wonderful blather.
I give the book one star,
Afterchapters, there is nothing that happens, There is barely a story to the story, at least not one that could be remotely interesting, . . even to people who like romance, In the age of bodices, there is nary a one that is ripped open, let alone one that is undone with the gentle exploring fingers of a lover.
And then there is the hubbub over the book, . . Satirical A witty comedy of manners Sure, I smiled a few times at the only funny character in the book, Mr.
Bennett, but overall, I read, studied the sentence structure, noticed the wall paper and waited patiently as the paint dried.
Even the dramatic ending where Lizzy gets the guy, is a letdown and dull, Just to let you know, I was joking about it being in any way dramatic, Which brings me to the characters, Other than Lizzy, they are all stereotypical and lack even the most remote concept of depth, Jane is pretty and sweet from the first page to the last, The mom is overbearing, the dad aloof, Other than Darcy, no one grows or changes in a book that spans a few years and endless pages.
Normally, I use one star for books that I just can't finish and if I wasn't an aspiring author, I wouldn't have bothered to get through half the book, but since I did.
. . and when I compare it to yawner like A Tale of Two Cities, I had to bump this one up a notch.
PS, Don't read Moby Dick either, if you know what's good for you, THIS BOOK IS MY JAM, JANE AUSTEN IS MY JAM, I LOVE EVERYTHING ABOUT HER AND THIS BOOK, READ THIS BOOK. THAT IS ALL. sitelinkmy spotify playlist
“You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.
”
i want a mr, darcy, but this world is full with wickhams and collins, ugh, I am so unqualified to write about this book,
I am physically unqualified, because I could write infinite words about how much I love this book, and I type in a weird way that makes my wrists hurt so infinity is simply not going to happen.
I am emotionally unqualified, because I lack emotional intelligence when it comes to my own feelings and the idea of trying to explain how I feel about this book is overwhelming.
I am spiritually unqualified, because of the aforementioned overwhelmedness,
I am also unqualified generally, in the grand scheme of things, because so many people have written so intelligently about the wonderfulness of this book and I have nothing better to add.
Just more rambling like this,
I read a lot of romance, and if you want to venture a theory as to why, Id love to hear it.
I very seldom like it, so maybe its a masochist tendency, Maybe Im a glutton for the attention that writing negative reviews of popular books gives me, Definitely not that one, since the few mean comments always outweigh the far more numerous nice ones in my stupid brain.
Whatever.
I read a lot of romance, but I almost never feel anything about it,
I LOVE this book, It gives me uheveryone stop reading this to save me the embarrassment and allow me to preserve my rough and tumble reputation.
. . butterflies.
I know. Im cringing forever. But its true.
This is a lovely book, Its beautifully written, its funny, its filled with characters who feel full and real and different from one another even though half of them have the same name, and it truly is the best love story ever told.
What more could you ask for! Spoiled rotten, the lot of you,
Bottom line: A dream,
rereading updates
i am currently being paid to reread this book, highly recommend that everyone works in publishing
prereview
starting a fundraiser to raise money for a monument in honor of Jane Austen's brain
review to come /obviously
currentlyreading updates
my heart has space for exactlypages.
the entirety of my heart is made up of Pride amp Prejudice, nothing else. Some years back in one of my APAs, someone castigated Jane Austen's books like this: "All those daft twits rabbiting on about clothes and boyfriends and manners.
"
Since then, Ive encountered other variations on the theme that a modern woman ought not to be reading such trash because it sets feminism back two centuries.
Well, much as I laughed over the first caveat, that isn't Austen, It sounds more like the silver fork romances inspired by Georgette Heyer, Austen's characters don't talk about clothes at all, outside of airheaded Mrs Allen of Northanger Abbey, who doesn't think of anything else.
Austen sticks her satiric quill into young ladies who think and talk about nothing but beaux, such as poor, luckless Anne Steele in Sense and Sensibility.
Manners are emphasized but not manners without matter Austen saves her spikiest irony for hypocrites,
I think it's important to remember that whereas Heyer was writing historical romances in the silver fork tradition, Austen was writing novels about contemporary life, especially the problems facing young women in her own walk of life, the country gentry.
She criticized herself in a muchquoted letter to her sister Cassandra, saying in effect, 'the problem with Pride and Prejudice is it's too light and bright and sparkling.
' Many have misinterpreted this remark, It seems to me, on close reading of her elsewhere, that she meant the novel to be taken more seriously than it was.
What is it about, really It's about the wrong reasons for marrying, and how those can affect a woman for the rest of her life.
Of course a hardline feminist can point out that novels about marriage are hideously retro for today's woman, who has many choices before her.
During Austen's time, marriage was the only choice a woman had, unless she was rich enough to shrug off the expectations of her society, or unless she was willing to live on as a pensioner to some family member or other, which more often than not meant being used as an unpaid maid.
Of course there was teaching, but the salaries for women were so miserable one may as well have been a servant.
The hours and demands were pretty much equal,
If one looks past the subject of marriage, the novel's focus is about relationships: between men and women between sisters between friends between family members and between families.
As for marriage, Austen sends up relationships that were formed with security as the goal, relationships that were sparked by physical attraction and not much else, relationships made with an eye to rank, money, social status, or competition.
And, with abundant wit and style or as shed say, with éclat, she offers some truths about the
differences between love and lust, and what relationships based on either mean to a marriage monthsor decadesafter the wedding.
The fact that Austen doesn't use modern terminology doesn't make it any less real than a contemporary novel that has a supposedly liberated woman romping desperately from bed to bed for forty pages while in search of the perfect relationship.
The message is the same, that women who mistake falling in lust for falling in love are usually doomed to a very unhappy existence.
And in Austen's time, you couldn't divorce, you were stuck for life,
I've had dedicated feminist friends give me appalled reactions when I admit to liking Austen, I don't consider reading Austen a guilty pleasure, as I do reading Wodehouse, I consider Jane Austen a forerunner of feminism, She doesn't stand out and preach as Mary Wollstonecroft did, Her influence was nevertheless profound, Again and again in those novels she portrays women thinking for themselves, choosing for themselveseven if their choices are within the conventions of the time.
What the women think matters,
In Austens day and too often, now female characters were there as prizes for the men to possess, or to strive for, or as catalysts for male action.
Jane Austen gave her female characters as much agency as a woman could have in those days, and the narrative is mostly seen through their eyes.
Charlotte Lucas is a remarkable example for the time she is not the least romantic, but she sees what she wants, and she gets it.
And doesn't pay for getting what she wants by dying of consumption as too often happened to forthright females in novels of the period.
The famed relationship between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr, Darcy makes it very clear that they were first attracted by one another's intellectthose two were clearly brainsnogging before they ever got to the fine sheets of Pemberley.
It is also clear that the manhis higher social and economic status notwithstandinghad to earn the woman's respect, and rethink some of his assumptions, before she could see in him a possible partner.
There is no dominant male making the decisions: those two are equal right down to the last page, and Austen makes it clear that it will continue to be so after the marriage.
Each time I reread the novel, I notice something new, but in the meantime, will I continue to recommend it to young women just venturing into literature You bet.
.