Pride & Prejudice

I really liked this book. Generally, I like most books, so I have a feeling a lot of my book reviews will start like this, but let's stick to the book at hand and why specifically I liked it.

I think the major reason I liked the book so much was that I really liked the movie version that came out a couple of years ago with Kiera Knightly in it. That version was fairly true to the events of the book, so I already had a grasp of the characters and the settings, which is sometimes important in a book from this era. It is not written in "modern" or "plain" English, so it takes me a little bit of reading to get back into the flow of understanding what they are all talking about and what is going on. The story is a little bit moony and over-dramatic, they fall so deeply in love but they don't even really know each other that well and it all seems a little strange, but I guess that is how they did it back in those days? Well, it is more likely in those days that very few people fell in love and decided to get married, most people married for money or "connections". I think the idea of meeting a rich guy and falling in mutual love is just a very romantic notion to novelists (especially female novelists); this is true even in novels today.

There were some things I didn't really like about the book, but these are largely picky little things that are very true to the story and the era, but an annoyance to my modern sensibilities. We never get to know the first name of any of the men, even when they are to be married to one of the Bennet girls. Even Mrs. Bennet calls her husband Mr. Bennet (and vice versa) which seems unrealistic. They've been married for 25 years, and she can't call him by his first name? Also, and I think this might just be the edition of the book that I had, but a lot of place names and dates and things are blanked out. For example, it might say, "We went to the ---shire". This is terribly annoying. I know it is probably because the place names or dates were inaccurate, but I don't care. It takes you out of the story much more to see the ---shire than it would to see a made up place name, or even a name of a place that is wrong. How am I going to know? I (and most people I would imagine) am not familiar with the geography of all the small towns and villages in Britain. Finally, a lot of the plot revolves around Elizabeth knowing something about someone and keeping it secret, and then something terrible (and predictable) happens because nobody else knew. I know that proper manners and decorum counted for a lot back then, but, really, you would let your sister go off with a man you knew was a liar and a cheat without even a small warning to her or your parents? Knowing that this would ruin everyone's chances at "landing a husband"?

Anyway, I really did like this book, and I think it is definitely worth reading, but maybe see the movie first so you have a better idea what is going on. Or be smarter than me with a better vocabulary (not hard) and maybe you won't need to see the movie beforehand.