From the Bookshelf of Never too Late to Read Classics…

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen

Start date: July 15, 2015

Finish date: August 14, 2015

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Jul 29, 2011 Yair Ben-Zvi rated it liked it · review of another edition

Alright, long overdue but here's my re-review of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Firstly, my initial assessment of the novel from way back when:

"Quite honestly, this is one of the worst novels/stories/works of anything I have ever read. How this novel remains not only popular but acclaimed baffles me beyond measure."

Yikes. I can't believe I could ever be that harsh...hot in here from all the hate. But, in my defense, I can remember the mental state I was in when I first wrote it. Okay...less Alright, long overdue but here's my re-review of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Firstly, my initial assessment of the novel from way back when:

"Quite honestly, this is one of the worst novels/stories/works of anything I have ever read. How this novel remains not only popular but acclaimed baffles me beyond measure."

Yikes. I can't believe I could ever be that harsh...hot in here from all the hate. But, in my defense, I can remember the mental state I was in when I first wrote it. Okay...less a defense than a facile explanation but here it is. I wrote my initial review of P and P back during a particularly stressful time of my life in that shiftless and wandering period between community college and my first quarter at university. Being of an angry and depressive mentality, my thoughts and opinions of the book were hooked onto the time when I was first forced (yes, forced) to read the book even further back in my life...back to senior year in high school. Having been an even angrier child then, I was unfortunately gifted from above with an English teacher who wasn't qualified to speak the former let alone practice the trade of the latter. Her and I shared no little bit of mutual antagonism and as such this greatly colored initial perceptions of the novel...as in negatively.

Fast forward a bit to my first quarter at university and I discover goodreads.com, a far more worthy successor to the momentarily interesting but ultimately fucking wasteful visual bookshelf (anyone else remember that?). And it was in my dorm that I penned the first review you saw up there. Venomous, barbarous, immature, and ultimately horribly myopic, but there it is/was.

Now, fast forward another few years and I'm forced (yes, forced again, for a class) to re-read P and P and here we find ourselves. And here I must say:

I'm sorry, I tried, I really REALLY tried to like Jane Austen. I've now read Pride and Prejudice twice AND Northanger Abbey twice and can only come to this conclusion....I just don't think Ms. Austen is what she's cracked up to be....at least to my sensibilities as both a fan and student of world literature.

I can and will say, however, that Ms. Austen is a master at the level of the sentence. Never before or since have I seen a prose stylist able to craft a sentence so beautifully rendered and just a joy to read as Austen is able to do so consistently (like Philip Roth minus the perverseness and bitter intellectual rancor).

But stepping back and looking at Pride and Prejudice as a whole and not just an exercise in gorgeous sentence structure...the book just fails on a fundamental level. That level of being able to hold my interest. Looking at the historical and cultural context in which the book was spawned, I couldn't help, as I was reading, but translate Austen's oblique stance toward the truly pressing issues of her day as a smugness and possibly even an arrogance. For those not well schooled in the time, a little barely referenced and not much studied event known as the NAPOLEONIC WARS was going on at the time of Austen's writing of this novel. And Austen's flip stance towards an event of such historical import in favor of what can only be called a 'farce of manners and blushing' just rubbed me and continues to rub me the wrong way. This is not to say that the only significant stories one can tell must deal exclusively with the likes of war and ideas such as the place of women in any class are to be relegated to some kind of 'lesser' sphere of literature...such is nonsense. But if one, like Ms. Austen, is to tell a story of such issues then one must give them the gravity they deserve.

Gravity? Yes. Because I am of the firm belief that every person carries in them at least one conflict that threatens to sunder them without a proper mode of expression to extinguish or at least redirect the arduous fires in another more healthy way. And for Austen, maybe, it was a woman's place in a predominantly male dominated world. But Austen undoes this with just the skill that so many celebrate her for. Her wit. Her flippant, casual, well spoken, softly laughing, heartily blushing, mother fucking WIT. Is she actually witty? Oh yes. Is she funny? Oh god no. And does she actually serve to trivialize her cause by being so damn 'charming' about it? Well, your mileage will vary and you can guess regarding mine.

However, I awarded her novel three stars and, again, this is due to Austen's truly incredible skill as a writer at the technical level of the word and the sentence. If one emphasizes not the content of the story but the style and lets their sensibilities be deluged with the grandeur of Austen's verbiage, then you, like me, will be rewarded greatly. So she's a better writer than my formerly and hopefully less mature self first surmised...but just don't invite me to Austen fan fests anytime soon... ...more

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