200 Years of Pride and Prejudice
Pride and Prejudice was first published in January of 1813, and it remains one of the greatest novels ever written, appearing on seven of the thirteen “great books” lists I used to compile my personal summary of great books.
In The Joy of Reading, Charles Van Doren describes the novel in this way:
Pride and Prejudice was her first novel; she wrote a version of it before she was twenty. She put it aside to write Sense and Sensibility, her first work to be published; she then rewrote Pride and Prejudice and published it in 1813.
It is magically interesting, astonishingly adult. Elizabeth Bennett, its heroine—no doubt there is a lot of Jane Austen in Elizabeth—is as intelligent as she is beautiful, and as articulate as she is wise about the ways of the world.
And according to Philip Hensher at The Telegraph,
…Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice has indeed risen from a cult favourite to a present-day universal of literature. Of course, for many years, Austen was the exclusive property of the “Janeites”, as her more fanatical readers were termed in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It’s recorded that a sexton in Winchester Cathedral in the 1860s asked, with sincere puzzlement, whether there was “anything particular” about “that lady”, after so many people inquired after her grave. In 1866, a reader wrote to the learned journal Notes and Queries, seriously asking who might have written a book, mentioned by Macaulay, called Mansfield Park.
Since then, her popularity has risen and spread, and her readers have engendered still more works and enjoyed more spin-offs – from Pride and Prejudice in particular. It has been filmed dozens of times, including a 1952 television version with a very young Prunella Scales as Lydia and Peter Cushing as Darcy. Some have “improved” on the original – the 1940 Greer Garson Hollywood version, partly scripted by Aldous Huxley, makes Lady Catherine’s final angry denunciation only play-acting, a test by the dowager of the strength of Lizzie’s love. Others have spun still further off, including a recent detective thriller set at Pemberley by P D James, a vampire fantasy, and any number of novels in which the Darcys have children, face new problems, grow up, grow old, and repeat themselves ad nauseam. We are never, it seems, going to grow bored with Pride and Prejudice.
Happy birthday to one of my favorite books. Give yourself a treat and read it (or re-read it) this month.
