Pride and Prejudice

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Summary: simply lovely..and romantic!
Review: i love this book!i read it first in 5th grade[though it was hard to understand!] then in 6th, 3 times in 7th and 4-5 times in 8th.i m like obsessed with this book!i also loved the film version, and i watched all the 3 versions.jane austen is indeed a great author. the way she portrays her characters is really creative, and u can just imagine what they look like, their personality, etc. i simply enjoyed this book!

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Summary: Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice
Review: A masterpiece. I consider this to be the authors finest piece. The only fault I found were the lenghty descriptions and at times the story lagged as is true to the time period. Elizabeth Bennet proved to be a worthy charature as well as Mr. Darcy. They were both very interesting charactures and in the end I felt as to kow them. I was much surprised to find out about Mr. Wickhams charature, he was not what I had thought him to be.

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Summary: Pride and Prejudice
Review: This was a really good book, although there was some confusing description at some points. It's about the daughters of the Bennet family, Elizabeth and Jane in particular. The courtships of Elizabeth and Darcy and Jane and Mr. Bingley are the focus of the novel. Jane Austen does a good job of describing the romances because the dialog for the most part is easy to understand.

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Summary: Written with a pen dipped in vinegar
Review: My mother used to read me a chapter a night of this book when I was about eight. I didn't get it. For reasons lost in the mists of history, I picked it up on my own in my 20s and found, to my delight, that I couldn't put it down. Since then, I have bought, read, and reread everything Austen ever wrote, and was a member of the Jane Austen Club back in the early '80s, loooong before she became so fashionable.

What I've learned from my frequent readings of her works is that each time I read them, I get a little more than I did the last time. Her language appears convoluted to us, yes, partly because she wrote with the voice of her time and partly because we are probably like, you know, as inarticulate a people as ever lived. So do we denigrate Shakespeare or Chaucer for their voices?

The themes of Austen's works are all similar - they all relate to the difficulties of women finding their own places in a rigidly structured society in which women were defined strictly by the men in their lives. In fact, when I visited her burial place in Winchester Cathedral, I was surprised to find a 6-foot marble slab fully engraved with a lengthy narrative about her, until I realized that there was NOT ONE WORD about her writing - she was described and defined strictly in relation to her father and family. So she definitely knew whereof she spoke; in her time, there was no life for a women outside of marriage, and the frantic attempts of parents - and the girls themselves - to marry off their daughters, which appears funny to us in our more enlightened age, is actually painful and somewhat pathetic. (Almost as pathetic as the efforts of many women today to find their own rich, indulgent Mr. Darcys... especially in light of their many other options.)

One of the characteristics of Austen's writing that I find most interesting is that while she writes in great detail of the lives of her characters and their immediate surroundings, there is not one word about the greater world. I doubt that the word "London" appears in any of them except briefly in "Sense and Sensibility"; they all take place in small villages somewhere in the middle or south of England, and rarely wander further than the distance of a post-lunch walk. The novels were written at the end of the Napoleonic era and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, so there was plenty of upheaval, social and otherwise, occuring all over England and the Continent, but nary a whisper of it ever rears its ugly head in her works. She holds her magnifying glass very close to her own garden gate; her perspective is entirely microcosmic without being claustrophobic - that's part of her genius. She can turn over a rock and document the frantic scurrying underneath it in its own terms, drawing no inferences from the activity under the rest of the tree. Good? Bad? I don't know, and I think it doesn't matter - but there is probably not a better, more detailed, or more honest picture of time and place in all of English literature.

I am torn between being glad that students are exposed to literature, and sorry that the teaching of it is so pedantic that all the humor and magic of great books is buried. I only hope, for those who were force-fed on Austen and others of her ilk, that they will pick up these works on their own later in life and derive from them the pleasure that is there for the asking. Meanwhile, I strongly recommend periodic infusions of all of Austen's works, of which I believe "Pride and Prejudice" is the most accessible.

Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable but not literature
Review: Is there anything better than a sleasy romance novel. How about one from the late 18th century early 19th century? Not the literature that everyone expects but it is a wonderful window into the life and times of the people of a certain class of a certain time. Most of her works are over rated but Pride and Prejudice is absolutely not. You can relate to everything in it. Proving once again that somethings never change.

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Summary: My Favorite Story of All Time
Review: I first read this book when I was about 15 years old, and I loved it. Even though it took me some time to understand the old english text, the meaning was still there. Just recently (now I am 18) I saw the tv mini series of Pride and Prejudice, and fell in love with it all over again! You can feel Mr. Darcy's anguish as he watches Lizzie from afar, and you squirm in your chair knowing that Lizzie despises Darcy because she thinks that he abhors her. Mr. and Mrs. Bennet make you laugh, and you can just feel the embarrassment that the younger sisters bring to the older ones. This is the most amazing story, and I do not feel that it is in the least an ordinary one. It is a hold-your-breath romance with comedy, intrigue, a little suspense, and coincidence. A beautiful tale of old English life, and an easy to love character - Elizabeth Bennet. This is by far my favorite story of all time. I recommend to anyone - including younger people.

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Summary: Not the prudishness and palaver I once thought it was
Review: My first experience with Jane Austen was an unfotunate one since, like many people, I had her prose rammed down my throat by a dodo high school English teacher. To make matter worse, the instructor, Ms. Z was a retired hippie who wore burlap sacks to school and worshipped Freud. At one point she had me write a paper comparing the three principle characters to the id (Lydia) the ego (Elizabeth) and the superego (Jane). At the tender age when a youth's mind is ripe for absorption and exploration, mine was already acclimated to the professional academic practice of ideological regurgitation of canonical literature.

But years later, I saw the mini series and really enjoyed it. I promptly reopened the novel after many years and discovered the intensely liberating sensation of rereading required highschool texts without pedagocical intrusion.

Austen's portrait of Victorian society is a sociological gem. And this time instead of taking my teacher's word for it, I actually found the book enormously funny. Much of the language, environment, and social circumstances are completely out of date, but in order to appreciate them, one must read the book in context. Some argue that it is too verbose. But there were no malls, cars or televisions in Victorian England. People entertained themselves, among other ways, by reading and writing and corresponding with each other. Words played heavily in the day to day lives of the middle class and aristocracy.

I recommend that anyone who detested this book in high school, reread it and enjoy it. And I recommend that educators present this book in context so that students can appreciate it's humor, language and historical perspective.

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Summary: Excellent Book
Review: I must admit, I saw the mini-series before I read the book, but the book was still good. Jane Austen is a wonderful storyteller. The only problem I had was with some of the lengthy description in the book.

Rating:
Summary: My favorite book of all time.
Review: This book has humor, drama, romance. Everything I love to read in a good old fashioned story. If you have never read Jane Austen you don't know what you are missing. Even my husband was a convert after Pride and Prejudice!

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Summary: THE GREATEST LOVE STORY EVER IN THE LITERATURE HISTORY
Review: THIS IS A WONDERFUL LOVE STORY THAT HAS EVER BEEN WRITTEN. JANE AUSTEN SUCCESSFULLY DESCRIBED EACH PERSON'S HUMANITY. THE FIVE SISTERS OF BENNET REALLY PULL OUT A LOT OF INTERESTING SCENES IN THIS BOOK. AFTER READING THIS, I FEEL LOVE CAN REALLY PULL TOGETHER THE DISTANCE BETWEEN EACH PERSON, AND AS LONG AS WE HAVE LOVE IN OUR MIND, THERE IS NO PROBLEM THAT IS UNSOLVABLE. WE SHOULD GO BACK AND READ THIS BOOK EVERY COUPLE YEARS, BECAUSE EACH TIME WE READ, WE WILL HAVE DIFFERENT FEELING. AND THE MORE WE READ, WE WILL DISCOVER MORE NEW MEANINGS FROM THIS BOOK.