Book Review: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

 

Goodreads Summary: In this historic romance, young Elizabeth Bennet strives for love, independence, and honesty in the vapid high society of 19th century England.

Goodreads Rating: 4.26 stars with over 3 million ratings

Genre listing: Classics, Romance, Fiction, Literature, British Literature

Goodreads Challenge: 46/60

2020 Reading Challenge: #7 a book from Project Gutenberg (Find the full challenge here) Get ready for 2021's challenge (here)

Book Review:

Merry Christmas Eve, readers! I am off work for the next four days, and I am super excited. I plan to read at least one more book and do a final for one of my classes. Just an FYI about the 2021 challenge. There was an issue with the PDF printable version that I published. I'm not sure what's going on with it, but I took my link for the pdf down and replaced it with Tress's. Sorry for any inconvenience. You can find her post about the challenge (here). 

I had been attempting to read something for the Project Gutenberg slot for a while, but I honestly couldn't bring myself to read a classic. I thought that maybe if I went with one I was already familiar with from movies, it might go better. I adore the Pride and Prejudice movie with Keira Knightly, so I thought this would be a good option. (Side note, if I refer to 'the movie' in this post, it will be this version of it.)

Being familiar with the story helped, but some parts were overly dry and formal, making it hard to read. This is typically what makes it so I can't get into classics. Once the story progressed, it was a lot easier to get into, but it was a rough beginning for me. I'm not really going to dwell too much on Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy. That was all as expected for me, and I enjoyed it. 

I was delighted to get a more in-depth look at the character's personalities than what I had previously known. The scenes pretty much read like I'd expect them to, though maybe not in the order I was expecting them. Obviously, there were some scenes in the movie that weren't in the book. I was really pleased to see that one of my favorite lines in the film was directly from the book. 

"If any young men come for Mary or Kitty, send them in, for I am quite at leisure." -around 97% of the book.

I don't know why, but this line just amuses me. 

One thing I was really surprised at how much more ridiculous Lydia was in the book. In the movie, it was incredibly underplayed and glazed over how much of a scandal it was. There's a good chunk of the story dedicated to all of the things that had to be done to find her and Wickham and cover up their running away. I feel like, in the end, they kind of got Karma for just being awful. Somehow, Mrs. Bennet was even more vapid and ridiculous in the book. I pretty much just had to roll my eyes during her scenes. I don't really feel like she cared about whether or not her daughters were happy in their marriages (which, I get is part of the times) but just cared about how their marriages made her look. 

It took me a little bit to get into the story because of the formal wording, but I really liked the story. Because of my love of a movie version of it, it felt familiar. Truthfully, I'm mostly just in this for the sly snark like this:

"I must trouble you once more for congratulations. Elizabeth will soon be the wife of Mr. Darcy. Console Lady Catherine as well as you can. But, if I were you, I would stand by the nephew. He has more to give."