Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, was our latest Book Club pick. Surprisingly, not one of us had read it (one of our rules on our selections is that no one can have read it before). Upon picking the book, I expected it to be a heftier volume. It is not as long as I thought it would be; my version was just over 350 pages. I thought that it might take us the better part of the summer to read it, but I finished it in just a couple weeks.

The book is set in the English countryside, around the turn of the nineteenth century. It gives a good look into what life was like then. This is an aspect of the book that I found fascinating. The way people related to one another, the customs and the way the relationships were formed and maintained was very interesting. Typically, I am not interested in books with this setting, but I found that this book was the exception to that.

The genre of the book is definitely romance. Originally, I thought that if it were written in modern times it might be considered fluff. However, after finishing the book, I can truly appreciate the depth that Austen added to the romance. This book was also a statement of the times in which it was written.

Austen does a remarkable job with her character development. The characters are created in such a way that the reader has feeling for them, whether positive or negative. The reader begins to hope for the characters, and to feel with them. At least, that is how I felt when I read the book. The main character, Elizabeth Bennet, is a wonderfully strong woman who defies the times by speaking her mind more often than is deemed appropriate. But at the same time, she is vulnerable, making her a heroine that the reader can instantly like and identify with even though the setting is so far removed from our own.

By the end of the book, I was rooting for Elizabeth and her sister, Jane. As I have said before, any author that can evoke an emotion has done his/her job. In this book, Jane Austen made me care about her characters. There is something to be said for that considering that I don't typically prefer novels written in this era or even this genre. Austen has made me reconsider that, and has made me a fan. I would recommend this book, as long as you can read through the language barrier. Being written in 1796 and published in 1813, the language is very different and I needed to concentrate to get the gist of what was being conveyed. This is the only Jane Austen novel I have read, but I plan on picking up another of her novels in the future.

Happy Reading!