PRIDE AND PREJUDICE HARDCOVER SERIES
The series will be extensive and open-ended, and will provide school students with a range of edited texts taken from a wide geographical spread. It will include novels, poetry, short stories, essays, travel-writing and other non-fiction. Alix Wilber Book Description:Ĭambridge Literature is a series of literary texts edited for study by students aged 14-18 in English-speaking classrooms. Readers of Pride and Prejudice would be hard-pressed to disagree. Jane Austen considered Elizabeth Bennet "as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print". 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. 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. Good marriages for penniless girls such as the Bennets are hard to come by, and even Lizzy, who comes to sincerely value Mr. 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. 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. Darcy's insufferably snobbish aunt and the Gardiners, Jane and Elizabeth's low-born but noble-hearted aunt and uncle.
Collins, the sycophantic clergyman who aspires to Lizzy's hand but settles for her best friend, Charlotte, instead Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Mr. Having set up the central misunderstanding of the novel, Austen then brings in her cast of fascinating secondary characters: Mr. 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. 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. Bingley is complaisant and easily charmed by the eldest Bennet girl, Jane Darcy, however, is harder to please.
Bennet, who married above her station, sees their arrival as an opportunity to marry off at least one of her five daughters. Bingley, a single man of good fortune, and his friend, Mr. As usual, Austen trains her sights on a country village and a few families-in this case, the Bennets, the Philips, and the Lucases. 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.
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. "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
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