Pride and Prejudice Review

It took me a long time to get into this book. I found it hard to follow. Having said that, I am thoroughly happy to have read it and would recommend it to anyone interested in 19th century English aristocracy, complicated family relationships, an entirely new method of speaking English, and romance.

However, if you are at all eager to get to the romance, you will be disappointed, or at least your patience will be tried. I just thought of a more appropriate title for it! "Patience and Perseverance." It takes the whole book for these people to finally get together. But, by the end you really do want them to get together.

They were all extremely concerned with social status, who would marry whom, and never tired of talking and writing long letters to each other on these topics.

I say a new method of speaking English and I guess that would technically be "old." I just wasn't prepared for how different it was. Spelling was often different, as were punctuation and capitalization. For instance, rather than using "ed" to indicate past tense, "t" was substituted only in certain instances like "learnt." Not to mention the extremely stilted tone to everything. I'm sure our informal language would sound like pure trash to them; it sounds like trash to me a lot of the time. I do think we have come a long way in the field of getting to the point over the past two hundred or so years.

There are some timeless themes: love of family, tragic misunderstandings, and, of course, lots of pride and prejudice. There are also some stereotypes that would never fly today; those are always entertaining to me. Namely the nervous, flighty, mentally fragile Mrs. Bennett, mother of Jane, Elizabeth and their sisters.

The photos are from some of the first illustrated versions of the book.

So, in conclusion, I became completely enthralled in the story but it took me three fourths of the way through to get there. More than anything, I appreciated the artful way Austen articulated her ideas.

I am also reading the One Year Bible on the seven year plan. I just got to the gospels and I love it!

The next non-Bible book I'm reading is "Inside of a Dog" about how dogs think by Alexandra Horowitz. That should be a perfect follow up to "great literature" right?