The first sentence of the novel - “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife” - is perhaps the most artful way of saying that if a girl catches a man’s interest, he’ll want to sleep with her, and it’s been that way since the beginning of time. And Elizabeth's zinger toward the heinous Miss Bingley - “have you any thing else to propose for my domestic felicity?” - should be a feminist bumper sticker of the first order.īut what irony and wit might overshadow is the weight of Austen’s words in terms of parsing human nature. That was certainly the case - the scene wherein our bourgeois heroine Elizabeth Bennet holds her ground against keeper-of-the-old-guard Lady de Bourgh is the best (“your name will never even be mentioned by any of us,” “These are heavy misfortunes”). I came around to it having heard enough people insist that Austen did indeed have a sharp sense of the language, and that in the interest of reading some good verbal sparring, Pride and Prejudice would be worth the while. I understood her work to be girly, romantic, Victorian fluff, and as goes the common fallacy, I figured it had nothing to say to me about my life - since that’s why anyone reads anything anyway. But there were other reasons just as influential as they were crass. None of her novels were required reading in school, which is probably my main justification. For several reasons, I hadn’t read Jane Austen up until a couple of weeks ago.
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