Book Review: Pride and Prejudice

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Dover Publications, Inc. New York. 1995. (262 pages)

 

            After completing Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, I feel like I have had quite a bit of experience reading some of literature’s most famous classic novels. Pride and Prejudice was just as challenging as some of the other novels I have read such as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

            Just like the other classic books I have read, Pride and Prejudice began its story with so many characters that I had an extremely hard time keeping them straight. There were multiple times I had to find charts on the Internet and consult them as I read. It was hard to keep the names of the families, such as the Bennets or Bingleys, apart or the names of towns or estates, such as Netherfield or Pemberley, straight. Just as in Wuthering Heights, this made it difficult to focus on the plot, rather than the characters and the setting.

            The switching of narrators also made this book a challenge. When there isn’t a consistent person telling the story or distinct breaks in which a different narrator begins, it makes the book harder to follow. In this novel, the narration shifted many times within one chapter, sometimes within in the same paragraph. As this book takes place in England in the early 1800s, the English is hard to decipher at some points. There were many large words that I didn’t know the meaning of and there were several old English words that aren’t used today. This made for some frustrating reading but it probably helped my vocabulary in the end.

            The relationships between characters and the “love story” theme reminds me a bit of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Romeo and Juliet. These classic novels are filled with drama and twists that most people cannot predict. This is something I enjoyed reading about in Pride and Prejudice. The way the Bennet sisters interacted with another and how everyone seemed to have his or her own story made the plot interesting and unique. An aspect that made this novel practical to read was the short chapters. This made it much easier to read a bit and stop if needed. I do not like starting and stopping in the middle of a chapter and I did not have that problem with this novel.

            The experience of reading classic novels is something everyone should strive to achieve. It’s challenging but worth it in the end because you feel like a more accomplished reader. After reading two of what may be considered literature’s greatest novels so far this term, I am anxious to move on to another genre. I have learned over the course of the last few reads that there are many aspects to novels, so there is bound to be something I can enjoy in all types of books.