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Summary: favorite book yet...
Review: Although many might find Austen boring, I'm certainly not one of them when it comes to Pride and Prejudice. I have to admit than Austen does have some pretty slow-moving novels, but this is not one of them. The characters are very lively and real. Austen really does a good job of creating a very charming and truly fairy tale-like situation. This is my favorite book to date.
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Summary: Just the best!
Review: Why is Jane Austen's work so popular even today? Because she was just the best! This is on my personal top ten list. I've read it at least ten times and probably will read it several times again. It's funny, it's smart, it's romantic, and Elizabeth Bennett is my all-time favorite fictional heroine. You can read this book when you're 16 and every ten years after that. All of Jane Austen's books are good, but this is her best - and a classic that should be part of every woman's education and every woman's personal library. It's also proof that a book can have sizzle without any explicit sex.
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Summary: Definately Jane Austen! No Less!
Review: Pride and Prejudice is a wonderful book. I saw the movie first though. I've seen it and Emma and Sense and Sensibility. All wonderful movies. I only have experience with one of the books but I am sure the others are awesome too. I plan to read them all. It was so funny when i read this one, though, because when I read I read all the time so my friends complain. They also look at me odd when I exclaim out at happenings in the book. The whole story is so exciting that I can't keep my mouth shut. Eliabeth and Darcey. Jane and Bingley. Collins and Lady Catherine. Only Jane Austen could create such characters! I recemmend the book to anyone. It tends to be more for women though. It the case of this book I also would recemmend one watch the movie first, though, because it's rather hard to understand if you're not used to the reletively old english.
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Summary: You're a good man, sister!
Review: Humphrey Bogart's line to his secretary in "The Maltese Falcon" could as easily have been addressed to Jane Austen. Long before the woman's movement of the 60s and women's studies courses of the 70s, perceptive and discriminating readers were in agreement about Jane Austen as the supreme master of her craft. In her characterizations, plotting, and language she is the model of exactness and efficiency. There simply is no gratuitous business, no room for sentiment, no place for self-indulgence or personal fantasy. Elizabeth's world is a microcosm of the complex society we habit, each of us making daily compromises, negotiations, and decisions that allow us the maximum degree of self-expression within the limitations of our social communities and of the human condition itself. The rewards of identifying with Austen's heroines are as accessible and satisfying to male as to female readers. Above all, Austens' novels are tributes to the power of language--to create plausible worlds, to capture the meanings of the heart, and to construct the rhetoric of the "self." Where lesser writers require battles and orgies to get a rise out of readers, Austen can elicit profound emotions from the most stoic readers through the description of a raised eyebrow.
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Summary: which edition is best for you?
Review: Being the literary classic that it is, you can purchase Pride & Prejudice in a variety of shapes, sizes, and prices. No matter which one you chose it's still the perfect love story of Elizabeth Bennet (who every woman wants to be) and Mr. Darcy (easily the sexiest literary character of all time), witty and entertaining as well as significant in its portrayal of femininity and other issues of the period in which it was written. It may be just as good a story in the cheapest edition as in the most expensive, but shelling out a couple extra dollars may get you more for your money. If you're reading for a class or for independent study, you can't go wrong (for this book or any other) with the Norton Critical Edition. Includes not only the original text and info about the author, but critical articles studying the novel from several different perspectives. This edition could easily save you a trip to the library to find those secondary sources you'll need for your research paper. If you're just reading for pleasure or think the Norton Critical Edition is a little pricey, your best bet is Penguin Classics. It's a well-edited version that's appropriate for scholarly study, but it also offers those little extras that make pleasure reading all the more pleasurable: endnotes that will help you differentiate a post-chaise from a barouche and an well-written and interesting introduction that looks at both influences on Austen's writing and Pride and Prejudice as a classic romance (scholarly enough to get you thinking, but not so much that it's boring or difficult to understand). In my opinion the Penguin Classics edition is definitely the best bet for your money.
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Summary: Dramatized audio book at its best!
Review: There are many audiobooks version of this time-honored classic, but I found that LA theatre's works's lively dramatized version pales other reading versions. For one thing, various actors play out the parts of the story. Granted, there are many ommision for this two hour audioplay, but essentially, it retains the very essence of the story.
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Summary: First Impressions Indeed
Review: Let me tell you about my first impression of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. At the age of thirteen, it was one of the most amazing love stories I had ever read. Five years later, it became one of the most wittily crafted stories I had ever read. By the time I was twenty-one, it was the finest work of literature I had ever experienced. Elizabeth Bennet is a byproduct of genteel poverty. The second daughter of five, she possesses the most sense, tact, poise, and sound judgement of the family in general. On the other hand, she is also irreverent, daring, and judgemental. She stretches the envelope of what might be construed as "polite" society. She also acknowledges the limitations of her gender even as she subtly tries to defy them. As a part of the landed gentry, Mr. Darcy is the embodiment of all that is dignified and honored. He is a gentleman who was born to privilege and money. His kind make up the "polite society" Elizabeth dares to flout. His pride, his disdain, and his arrogance make him unappealing to the people of Longbourn, as well as the community surrounding it. It is his interference with the relationship between his friend and her beloved sister, however, which is a personal affront to Elizabeth. It is fortuitous that Austen retitled her book because First Impressions does not begin to touch upon the complexities that Pride and Prejudice, as a title, connotes. In Darcy and Elizabeth, Austen has drawn two very complex characters who, on the one hand, seem simply drawn and characterized, but on the other, are so much more than they seem. It would be easy to say that Darcy is arrogant and Elizabeth is willful. The truth is, looking beyond my own first impression, as a reader, Austen has deceptively crafted two characters whose thoughts and actions make it clear that they aptly straddle both of the title characteristics.
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Summary: A happy thought indeed
Review: Jane Austen has created a very believable world in P&P. Although the book's official theme is marriage, it is also a statement on human behavior. The problems suffered by the characters are the result of their own folly, and no one else. The love story woven into the book is also wonderful, as it shows the characters concerned getting to know each other's positives and negatives before committing, instead of simply jumping into bed as the characters of modern novels do. This book is smartly written, with much humor. It is lighthearted and easy to read, although it was written over 200 years ago (the first draft of the book was written in the late 1700s, but not published until after 1800). I highly recommmend it to a reader of any age. It is, as Elizabeth Bennet would say, a "happy thought, indeed."
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Summary: One of the Best!
Review: Pride and Prejudice is one of my favorite books of all time. Jane Austen writes with impeccable wit and creates characters who are likeable, laughable, and very real. Pride and Prejudice is an absolute delight, Jane Austen at her best. Read it. If you are anything like me, you will be in heaven.
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Summary: Not so dated as it seems?
Review: It feels a little strange and even presumptuous to review Jane Austen online. I was prompted to do so when reading other reviews dismissing Pride and Prejudice as nothing more than a silly romance and a relic of a bygone era. It would be silly to suggest that the social mores and manners that Austen skewered are unchanged. Young women are no longer dependent on a husband simply for food and shelter, and I have no intention of spending my life in a drawing room trimming hats and sewing screens. But it would also be silly to suggest that Austen's tale offers nothing to the modern reader. Even in our enlightened age, young women in indelicate situations are pressured by their humiliated families into unfortunate marriages. Manifestations of social standing may differ, but money, education, and other modern expressions of social class still play more of a role in the choice of spouses than most of us would wish to admit. And to this day, young men and women alike are mortified by their families in public situations, justified or unjustified. To fully appreciate Austen's sense of humor takes a bit of effort on the reader's part, but once acclimated to the language the hilarity of the book becomes apparent. Pride and Prejudice proves that classics need not be dull; Austen had a lively and sharp wit. If you are truly put off by the language, and don't get the humor, it's actually worthwhile to find a good production on video and rent it. The BBC version produced in the 1990's is long, but a very faithful and extremely well-cast adaptation that does an excellent job of translating Austen's humor onto the screen.
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