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Pride and Prejudice
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Jane Austen |
Pride
and Prejudice |
Jane Austen
Jane was born on December 16, 1775 and she died in 1817. She was an English novelist. Her father was a reverend and her mother was Cassandra Leigh. Jane was the youngest of seven children. She led a very typical life that was uneventful and boring. She never married and she never left her home except for little getaways to Bath. She started writing at a very young age. As she grew older she paid a lot of attention to the people and society around her. Jane saw enough of the middle class society to base her novels on them. They are said to be the most accurate representations of middle class families during that time than from any other writer. Her first piece of work was Pride and Prejudice and it was also her best known manuscript. It was written between October 1796 and August 1797. This piece wasn’t published until 1813 which was two years after Sense and Sensibility. Believe it or not Jane was not an instant success and it took a while for her books to become popular. Its only been within the last few years that Jane has become "all the rage" if you will. Jane Austen is now considered an English classic.
Jane wrote in a genre that was all her own. She had no predecessors in her genre and no one else has attempted the genre in which she wrote in. Jane wrote about the simple everyday lives of the middle class families that she grew up around. She paid close attention to the way people interacted with one another and their emotions. She didn’t take everyday life and make it better she wrote it like she saw it and how it truly was during her time period. In Pride and Prejudice, she writes about a middle class family with daughters they must marry off to wealthy gentlemen. It also focuses on how the social lives were then too. Her characters weren’t fake or unbelievable in any way. They were based on real people with believable predicaments and lifestyles. Her characters were based on English country folk and the country life because that is where she grew up and wrote her novels. Although it was rumored her love life was uneventful, she wrote about the woes of love in her books not only focusing on the good but the bad as well. Sense and Sensibility has been rumored to have been based on her own personal love life. Her work is full of irony, romance, comedy and real life situations. It has appealed to more modern day readers because it’s a glimpse into a life none of us would have ever experienced and it also is so close to reality that we can sometimes relate to what she has written.
Pride and Prejudice is one of my favorite books as well as my favorite movie. I liked it so well because I can relate to what she has written. It is also extremely well written and very easy to comprehend. I first watched the movie that was released on A&E in 1996. I have seen the movie several times so I decided to read the book and I found them very close in the retelling of the story. I liked them both equally. I love the Bennetts because they are so funny. Elizabeth Bennetts father is a very hilarious man who loves his daughters very much. Their mother is a nuisance. She is a truly comedic character. The daughters are all very different but they represent every aspect of girls during their time period. This story is of a mother and father who’s daughters are becoming of age and ready for marriage. They all are out in society around the same time which had to be expensive, time consuming, and hectic all around. This story has several different focuses but it is all told from the point of view of Elizabeth Bennett who herself has almost given up on love and marriage because she is growing old (I think she was only 21 or 22). Elizabeth is a very balancing person who only wants her sisters to marry well and not to disgrace her family. She herself gets drawn into the social situation of balls and parties. She tries to keep a watchful eye on her sisters and herself but she soon gets put in situations that are trying on her character. She meets Darcy, a wealthy gentlemen who is a friend of a man who is courting her sister. At first she hates him, but then she grows to love and respect him and he of her. It’s a great novel because not only does it focus on this but it also focuses on the lives of her sisters and her family as well. I thoroughly enjoyed this work of hers and I feel like it is one of her best pieces.
I went to Amazon Books on the internet and found that many different people had two extremes on how they felt about this novel Pride and Prejudice. Either they absolutely hated it or loved it. Almost all the reviews I read were from women and they all loved the book and found it intriguing but the males hated the book. In some of the reviews some of the women felt like most men would not like this book if they didn’t have the time and patience to read it. They also felt that it was written with females in mind and not geared to both sexes. The two reviews that stood out to me was one from a young girl and one from an older woman. The young girl said she felt it the language was hard to read at first but once you got used to the way they talked then the words flowed perfectly. She loved the book saying that it was Jane Austen’s best work and she recommended the book to anyone who loves the escape of a good book. The older woman felt the same way about the language but they both said it would not have been better any other way. I also read one review and it was from a man who felt that the book was stupid and the characters were shallow. But more than the majority of readers found it to be one of the best books that they have ever read. The two reviews I focused on said that it’s a never-ending question of "Will Elizabeth and Darcy ever fall in love?" that kept them reading on till the end. I think they all agreed that if you are a hopeless romantic or a lover of a good classic novel then this is a wonderful story that will keep you guessing till the end.
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By Crissy Campbell
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Works Cited and Consulted
Amazon Books: www.amazon.com (accessed on October 9, 2000)
Information page about Pride and Prejudice: www.prideandprejudice.com (accessed on October 11, 2000)
Jane Austen bio page (last modified: July 11, 2000): http://home.earthlink.net/~lfdean/austen/critbio/index.html (accessed on October 11, 2000)
Barnes and Noble (last modified: November 1, 2000): www.barnesandnoble.com (accessed on October 13, 2000)
The title Pride and Prejudice came from (last modified: August 25, 2000) : http://members.nbci.com/pemberley/ (accessed on October 13, 2000)
The picture of the old book cover came from the Barnes and Noble website and the picture of Jane Austen came from the Amazon Books website.
