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pinkmooon 's review for:
Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen
Austen is remarkable as an enduring classic writer, the kind of which transcends influence and is popular throughout time, precisely because of how situated within her time she is. Her storytelling is entrancing and her prose is consistent, but something about her novels seems to retroactively make similar writing of the eighteenth century impotent. Not many people are going to bother slogging through Samuel Richardson's 1500-page-in-small-print epic Clarissa, but those that do will surely come away with a finer appreciation of Austen as a writer who really refines and pushes past the limits of the sentimental novel. [Naturally, Sense and Sensibility is next on my agenda.] She manages to be staunchly conventional and radical simultaneously, similarly to Shakespeare.
P&P is a novel everyone already knows the story to - my edition told me pretty much everything on the blurb - yet it still manages to make one laugh and feel. Observation of class and character so minute, and sometimes so blunt, gives the novel staying power. A lot has changed regarding the tangled webs we weave between people, but not so much one can't see the truth written here.
I will say the book needed more Mary, though. As a figure of ridicule one can't help but feel sympathetic and fond of her extremely banal moralising. Considering Austen was such an avid reader of writers like Richardson, where banal moralising is far less succinct and played without comedy, I wonder if she had a secret fondness for Mary that the book itself doesn't show much of.
P&P is a novel everyone already knows the story to - my edition told me pretty much everything on the blurb - yet it still manages to make one laugh and feel. Observation of class and character so minute, and sometimes so blunt, gives the novel staying power. A lot has changed regarding the tangled webs we weave between people, but not so much one can't see the truth written here.
I will say the book needed more Mary, though. As a figure of ridicule one can't help but feel sympathetic and fond of her extremely banal moralising. Considering Austen was such an avid reader of writers like Richardson, where banal moralising is far less succinct and played without comedy, I wonder if she had a secret fondness for Mary that the book itself doesn't show much of.