*Everything is spoiled below, so be warned*
I haven’t read Pride & Prejudice since I was a grad student in
the mid-90s, and it was fun to come back to Austen as a seasoned adult.
Austen’s writing is always enjoyable, and what I learned this time around is
that it reads pretty easily out loud as well.
(I read the novel to my wife, Ann, each night before bed.)
Austen’s wry sense of humor is always a joy, and it’s easy to see why her
books still resonate today. In many ways
her books lay the foundation for the modern romantic comedy, creating its
tropes and standards in a way I never appreciated before. (Of course, I say lay the foundation, but I
don’t know what books she was inspired by, so there are likely a whole set of
books that precede her, though I believe the popularity of her own books set us
up for what we see today.)
Coming to the book as a 47-year-old in 2019, the age of Trump and a crushing
disparity between the wealthy and the poor, made it difficult for me to take an
uncomplicated pleasure in the trials and tribulations of the Bennet sisters.
Hearing sympathy for someone who only has 300 pounds a year when you know that
governesses at that time made only 30 pound a year got under my skin. And
Elizabeth’s love affair with Pemberley is stronger than her affections for
Darcy. Yes, I realize that part of the point is that women in this society were
entirely dependent on marriage for their financial well-being and that Austen
is critiquing and working within those restraints, but Austen never questions
the social structure that so well benefits her and her characters. The concerns of money and reputation make for
excellent dramatic constraints and define the stakes facing the characters, but
I had a hard time buying into them at this point in my life, even for the sake
of the narrative. The pearl-clutching
surrounding Lydia’s running off with Wickham requires you as a reader to accept
terms in order to share in the concern.
The same goes for the Bennet girls losing ownership of Longbourne. Yeah,
it’s painful to think of losing your family home, and yes, it’s a horrible
system that can allow an estate to be entailed, but to worry about these women
who have hundreds of pounds a year even without the estate when you know that
working women in the class below them live off a fraction of that amount, it’s
hard (or at least it was hard for me) to not let that willful suspension of
disbelief sag and think these women need to not fear working for a living.
That said, I enjoy Austen’s writing immensely. The scene in which Elizabeth rejects Collins’s
proposal of marriage is one of my favorite scenes in literature. Austen is an expert at mocking people, and I
don’t think I ever appreciated fully how snarky and vicious she was. I also never noticed how relentlessly she
pushes the plot forward in this novel.
There could be Law and Order-style “donk donks” between the
chapter breaks, especially in the first volume of this book. Austen is an expert at getting to her point
and then moving to the next scene. Most
impressively, she keeps at this pace while giving the impression of moving more
leisurely.
Austen’s critique of Mr. Bennet struck me on this read through as
well. The criticism of her mother is
readily known and typically delighted in, but she has really harsh words for
her father too who she criticizes for abdicating his role as moral contributor
to the family. It feels like an oddly modern
critique to say this loving father let his girls grow wild. But having just stated Emma, I expect
that blaming the parents will be a regular part of Austen’s storytelling. That’s something I’ll be paying attention to
going forward to see if some kind of analysis presents itself.
As a love story, I give the book lower marks than as an entertaining work
of fiction. I have never found Darcy
particularly inviting, and my opinion didn’t change on this read through. Elizabeth is bowled over by his moral
rectitude once she realizes she had been treating him unjustly, but as she
observes to Jane, the real point at which she fell in love with him was when
she saw Pemberley. Now, the book makes
it clear that that statement was a joke, but it feels like a true statement,
especially as we see that as she wanders through Pemberley she marvels at the
idea that all of this could be hers instead of merely being stops on a tourist’s
travels. If Darcy’s prospects were
grimmer, he would not have been a romantic interest let alone a romantic lead.
Austen seems skeptical of people who are socially adept because they are
so good at winning favor. I’ll be looking to see if that holds true in her
other novels as we re-read through them.
Regardless of the bumps and difficulties for me personally, I am glad I
got to re-read the work and am looking forward to the remaining five.
