Pride And Prejudice Overview
This is a beautiful new edition of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice". Complete and unabridged. Printed on high quality paper.
Pride And Prejudice Specifications
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
Next to the exhortation at the beginning of Moby-Dick, "Call me Ishmael," the first sentence of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice must be among the most quoted in literature. And certainly what Melville did for whaling Austen does for marriage--tracing the intricacies (not to mention the economics) of 19th-century British mating rituals with a sure hand and an unblinking eye. As usual, Austen trains her sights on a country village and a few families--in this case, the Bennets, the Philips, and the Lucases. Into their midst comes Mr. Bingley, a single man of good fortune, and his friend, Mr. Darcy, who is even richer. Mrs. Bennet, who married above her station, sees their arrival as an opportunity to marry off at least one of her five daughters. Bingley is complaisant and easily charmed by the eldest Bennet girl, Jane; Darcy, however, is harder to please. Put off by Mrs. Bennet's vulgarity and the untoward behavior of the three younger daughters, he is unable to see the true worth of the older girls, Jane and Elizabeth. His excessive pride offends Lizzy, who is more than willing to believe the worst that other people have to say of him; when George Wickham, a soldier stationed in the village, does indeed have a discreditable tale to tell, his words fall on fertile ground.
Having set up the central misunderstanding of the novel, Austen then brings in her cast of fascinating secondary characters: Mr. Collins, the sycophantic clergyman who aspires to Lizzy's hand but settles for her best friend, Charlotte, instead; Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Mr. Darcy's insufferably snobbish aunt; and the Gardiners, Jane and Elizabeth's low-born but noble-hearted aunt and uncle. Some of Austen's best comedy comes from mixing and matching these representatives of different classes and economic strata, demonstrating the hypocrisy at the heart of so many social interactions. And though the novel is rife with romantic misunderstandings, rejected proposals, disastrous elopements, and a requisite happy ending for those who deserve one, Austen never gets so carried away with the romance that she loses sight of the hard economic realities of 19th-century matrimonial maneuvering. Good marriages for penniless girls such as the Bennets are hard to come by, and even Lizzy, who comes to sincerely value Mr. Darcy, remarks when asked when she first began to love him: "It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley." She may be joking, but there's more than a little truth to her sentiment, as well. Jane Austen considered Elizabeth Bennet "as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print". Readers of Pride and Prejudice would be hard-pressed to disagree. --Alix Wilber
Customer Reviews
The "enriched" Pride and Prejudice sits somewhere between the Penguin Classics editions, with introduction and endnotes, and the most complete and scientific Norton Critical Editions. What you get with this book is a text carefully maintained, with original spelling and punctuation, plus the following bonus features:
* Introduction (with spoiler warning at the beginning, nice!)
* Introduction of Original Penguin Classics edition
Comments *
*Reviews of the nineteenth century to Pride and Prejudice
* History
* References
* What Jane Austen Ate
* How to prepare the tea
* Austen sites to visit in England
* Map of sites from Pride and Prejudice
* Behave Yourself: Etiquette and dance at the time of Austen
* The illustrations of fashion, decoration, architecture and transport (in some of Linked Notes)
* Note enriched eBooks
Notes (both) are extremelyuseful and is largely on the historical, social and cultural action.
Browsing the Kindle is quite good, and there are formatting problems. The only thing I miss is the chapter-level contents are related links for faster, easier access and reference (only three volumes). This can naturally add bookmarks manaualy if you reach the last chapters.
You can use this enhanced P & P, like thinking the reader's Edition Norton. Or, as WarnerDVD Bros. opposites as a criterion. Not as ambitious and stacked, but (more than) enough. The text of well-designed and supplements and notes provide added value so necessary in these times of freely available e-books of classical literature.
... As for the novel. Jane Austen rocks, baby!
Note that: a mistake someone at Amazon, and the lid until it is published in the Oxford Classics edition.
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