Pride and Prejudice

by Jane Austen

Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections?--to congratulate myself on the hope of relations, whose condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own?"

The pompous rhetoric. The self-indulgent alliteration (you can practically hear Mr. Darcy spit out the repetitive letter c’s in his defiant anger.). This first proposal by Darcy to such a delightful and unsuspecting heroine—at the EXACT moment in the text when she most wants to throttle him—is a romantic disaster written for maximum effect. I defy any invested reader at this exact moment to not want to grab Darcy by his Regency collar to stop him from further humiliating himself. Truly the greatest—and most self-sabotaging—proposal scene in all of literature.