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Pride and Prejudice Review

I might be wasting the readers time on things that really spread no knowledge of the book reviewed. I'll not spend words telling you the story, describing the characters or the time, offering opinions on the social state of Britain at the time of the novel. There are other reviews that attempt this. Jane Austen is much better at these tasks than I. The reviewer is an anglophobe. If it is given five stars here it should tell you a great deal about the value of this novel. For one who protects what is left of vision to read this book three times should say even more. It is strongly suggested reader that you uit wasting time on reviews and read the book. You may believe from the title of this review that the reviewer is prejudiced. What took you so long to figure that out? Age and other afflictions of the eyes have robbed my ability to read to some degree but this edition is very kind to us ancients. Oxford has a good reputation and this publication will not detract from it. The editorial material is even somewhat amusing.There is nothing amusing about the War of 1812, the use of the wordswhere we Americans would more likely use is symbolic of the British conception of our republic. But we digress. Austen has been a favorite since I first encountered her in college. It was much later I realized one reason for the fine prose in Hiram Grant's Memoirs. He spent many hours at West Point reading Jane Austen novels. There he was given his more familiar name Ulyses Grant, hero of the Civil War and Republican president of the U. S. Had he spent his time reading the French tacticians as his classmates did the war may have been prolonged to allow McClellan to beat his opponents.

Pride and Prejudice Overview

The book has no illustrations or index. Purchasers are entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge. Subjects: Fiction / Classics; Fiction / Literary; Juvenile Nonfiction / Drama; Literary Criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh;

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

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Customer Reviews

Reviews don't apply to the audio book - KJ -
Amazon has started lumping together all of the reviews for the various versions of a title, even if the review doesn't pertain to that particular version. The review by Forestlawn, above, is a prime example. Their review has to do, apparently, with a 48 page printed book, and not the audio book which appears on this page. The audio book is wonderful, and is unabridged. I hope Amazon stops this foolishness, and separates the reviews for the individual formats for which they are intended.

follow-up - Katie -
Gave this seller a poor review for slow shipping and a book in poor condition. Happy to report that they quickly responded to my complaint email and issued me a refund.

It's not appropriate for all categories! - Maurice Chevalier -
How does this novel end up in every category? I search Fiction, it's there - okay, it's droll, but it's an okay novel, and it fits the genre. So then I search humor, and it's listed twice. "Hmm," I think, "it's not that funny, but it has its moments." Freakin Home & Lifestyle?! Now they're just being funny. I don't have a drawing room, Amazon, so you're not doing me any favors. Time to sort out the categories.

*** Product Information and Prices Stored: Sep 10, 2010 10:44:05

Children's Books

Friday, September 10, 2010