There are some books that I find it
difficult to admit to having not read. One such book (recently
remedied) is Pride and Prejudice. My first encounter with Jane Austen
came in a Gothic lit class in college when I was assigned Northanger
Abbey, Austen's riff on the genre. I was surprised by how funny
Austen is but really that was all, and then her seminal work just
kept getting pushed further down my TBR list. Then all of the talk of
the 200th anniversary of its publication got me really
interested and I sat down to find my way to Pemberly.
Pride and Prejudice is very funny and
Mr. Bennet is now one of my favorite fathers in literature (second
only to Atticus Finch), but those are really the best things I have
to say about the novel. Pride and Prejudice is good, of course it is,
one doesn't make it to a 200th anniversary without being
so, but it does not speak to me. I never cared about Pemberly in the
way I care for Manderlay and, quite frankly, Mr. Darcy doesn't have
anything on Mr. Rochester. I get that it takes all kinds to get the
literary world spinning and I understand Pride and Prejudice's place
in the canon. Like Gone with the Wind, Pride and Prejudice is a novel
that I respect for what it is while admitting that it is not exactly
for me.
What I think I like more than Pride and
Prejudice is the culture surrounding the novel. The things that take the pith and wit
of Austen and turn them into small consumables thrill me to no end.
Kings among them are Pride and Prejudice themed board books for children and even
a Mr. Darcy pillow.
Jane Austen's humor is what has given
her work entree into the canon. As Anna Quindlen writes in her
introduction to the novel, “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 the public punishment of adultery.” I believe it is by the
basis of her wit that Austen is able to get readers into the drawing
room, a place that was before not worthy of literary immortality.
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