Pride and Prejudice

The book's Ok but for sheer pleasure you can't go pas the BBC's adaptation with Colin Firth. I never get sick of watching it. Even got my French boyfriend to sit through the version with French subtitles. Thank goodness I don't live in that age but it's still hard to find a good man.

There's a massive amount to read here about Pride and Prejudice, The Guardian.

See-

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jan/26/pride-prejudice-200th-anniversary?intcmp=239

And please don't delete other people's comments if that is what has happened.

(Cate if you deleted your own comment you are perfectly entitled to do so).

Just to make it clear - James will decide if and when a discussion gets closed. And it is not something we generally do.

Brian mentioned it - www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1342

Gutenberg has a lot of good stuff for free for your kindle and other devices, as does amazon.

If you have a Kindle you can download it free too

Looks like a healthy discussion is going on here, I hope it doesn't get too heated though as it would be a shame to discourage others from their input.

Thanks

James

After all the comments I feel quite shy to say that I like Austen and have read all her books three or more times in my long life, usually when I was pregnant. I have also enjoyed the many BBC serialisations of her books and the Bollywood version, but did not like the Keira Knightley film much. I am so enthusiastic that I have passed the French version of Pride and Prejudice to my OH and a couple of French friends, who said they enjoyed it (perhaps they did not want to hurt my feelings!)

Drop the wise cracks Cate. I am saying little different to David or Mark and, contrary to your ability to disagree just because I said it and therefore..., Dostoyevsky's Myshkin, if that is what you are referring to, is an interesting character who voices the author's views on religion and aristocracy brilliantly. A pity heis driven mad and ends up in the bin. Anyway, a denial of other people's taste Cate, take Mark's view of 'The Recognitions'. It is a kind of reworking of Goethe's 'Faust' and has shade of 'The Idiot' about it, plus what is taken from Frazer's 'The Golden Bough' (which I had as 'compulsory' reading as an undergraduate, lucky me)including the title. I agree that it is a book one comes out of none the wiser, try it some time and explain it to people who are not fans. Yet there are those who rate it as one of the best books of all time. I simply happen to prefer authors like John Steinbeck and Jack Kerouac or a good detective novel, mostly short. Mind you I do read Heinrich and Thomas Mann who both wrote rather lengthy books as well, but then I also take a very long time reading them. So, taste, dear Cate, we can't like it all or why would so many writers bother? Please carefully reread the question I asked and not simply that I said I got bored reading it thirty odd years ago, I made and will make no opinion of its quality because I have not read enough to give a fair assessment of Austen's work. I think you might think about David's comment although I tend not to share his view of Dickens.

Length Victoria... I like relatively short fiction because it has always tended to be bed time, on a train, plane or whatever and half of the problem was that if I got bored with a book and put it down I was likely to forget or lose it. I survived W&P because of the many different stories going on within it and the length did not win. In fact I think I must have read it four times now, always the same 1964 edition.

I love P & P, definitely one of my favourite books.

Yes, why did you feel you survived War and Peace, Brian? I read it when I was 15 and should have been revising for my mock O'levels and was entranced. It is such a brilliant story and providing you skim the masonic bits moves along at a cracking pace. I finished it in under a week, no time for revision of couse. Funnily enough I did much better than anyone expected, that's the power of a good book for you.

I'm ashamed to say that I haven't read it, Brian. Maybe because the adaptations have generally been so good that I haven't felt it necessary. I remember being given 'Persuasion' to read for A-level and thinking, Oh Gawd, please no. But I loved it and I loved Emma. In those days, I wasn't easily bored. I toiled through William Gaddis' massive, impenetrable 'The Recognitions' a few years later and got to the end without knowing what the hell was going on.

P&P is close to 300 pages, so long like those two - if not quite as long as those two plodding books.

No argument with either of you on women. Far too many still are playthings.

Brian - why on earth would one need to " survive 'War and Peace', 'Brothers Karamazov' " etc.???

Just saying.

And agree with Jane with the proviso that "how clever women were" can be taken another way, ie.. and still are .....:)

I blame it all on F.R. Leavis and Kitty. Close reading and the curse of Oxford Eng. Lit. Sadly I never had the Latin otherwise i would have been a judge in the High Court pace E.L.Wisty. Really most of it is rubbish that we were obliged to render hommage to throughout A level and beyond. The same goes for Dickens with his cavalcade of drôles and grotesques. Puppets with no interior life whatsoever.

It is of its time, but none the worse for that.To me all of Jane Austen's books are a reminder of how clever women were playthings in the hands of men and genteel poverty.

For anybody who wants to give it a whirl and wants a freebee version, go to: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1342

Taken from Wikipedia (I've tried to get rid of the underling and blue letters)

Pride and Prejudice is a novel by Jane Austen, first published in 1813. The story follows the main character Elizabeth Bennet as she deals with issues of manners, upbringing, morality, education, and marriage in the society of the landed gentry of early 19th-century England. Elizabeth is the second of five daughters of a country gentleman living near the fictional town of Meryton in Hertfordshire, near London.

Though the story is set at the turn of the 19th century, it retains a fascination for modern readers, continuing near the top of lists of 'most loved books' such as The Big Read.[1] It has become one of the most popular novels in English literature and receives considerable attention from literary scholars. Modern interest in the book has resulted in a number of dramatic adaptations and an abundance of novels and stories imitating Austen's memorable characters or themes. To date, the book has sold some 20 million copies worldwide.[2]

As Anna Quindlen wrote, "Pride and Prejudice is also about that thing that all great novels consider, the search for self. And it is the first great novel to teach us that that search is as surely undertaken in the drawing room making small talk as in the pursuit of a great white whale or thepublic punishment of adultery." '

Like Brian I read it. I found it very dull. I loved the characters of Mr Bennet and Mrs Bennet and Lady Catherine de Bourgh. It has some wonderful one liners from Mr Bennet.

Reading today the quote from Anna Quidlen above, I think it was a novel of it's time. Since Jane Austen we are used to kitchen sink dramas. To be fair, Miss Austen was the first.