Pride and Prejudice

Literature to Film Club meets this Tuesday at Kresge Library and I am very excited! This month's book is Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Back in November, I purchased the beautiful annotated edition of the book for my collection and have thoroughly enjoyed browsing it over the past few months.

Scene: Elizabeth and Mr. Bingley on Reading/Libraries
Elizabeth: How do you like it here in Hertfordshire, Mr. Bingley?
Bingley: (smiling at Jane shyly) Very much.
Elizabeth: The library at Netherfield, I've heard, is one of the finest in the country.
Bingley: Yes, it fills me with guilt. (He looks at Jane - a little blush starts round his collar)
Bingley: Not a good reader, you see. I like being out of doors. I mean, I can read, of course...

(Postcard Photo: created by artist Heather Holloman for the Sketchbook Project. This dream was originally documented by Holloman in spring of 2010 for her ArtPrize exhibit Dream Collection which was on display at the Grand Rapids Art Museum.)

Scene: Elizabeth and Darcy Dancing
Elizabeth: I do love a Sarabande.
Darcy: Indeed. Most invigorating.
(They continue for a moment in silence.)
Elizabeth: It is your turn to say something Mr. Darcy - I talked about the dance, now you ought to remark on the size of the room or the number of couples.
Darcy: I am perfectly happy to oblige, please advise me of what you would like most to hear.
Elizabeth: That reply will do for the present. Perhaps by and bye I may observe that private balls are much more pleasanter than public ones. But for now we may be silent.
Darcy: Do you talk as a rule while dancing?

Elizabeth: We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the eclat of a proverb. So a little lubrication to avoid embarrassment might be advantageous.

Darcy: I see no striking resemblance of your own character in this, how near it is to mine I cannot say...

My two favorite scenes:
(A) Elizabeth and Darcy: Dawn

(B) Elizabeth and Dawn: Rain


Amazon.com Review
"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. 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. As usual, Austen trains her sights on a country village and a few families--in this case, the Bennets, the Philips, and the Lucases. Into their midst comes Mr. Bingley, a single man of good fortune, and his friend, Mr. Darcy, who is even richer. Mrs. Bennet, who married above her station, sees their arrival as an opportunity to marry off at least one of her five daughters. Bingley is complaisant and easily charmed by the eldest Bennet girl, Jane; Darcy, however, is harder to please. Put off by Mrs. 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. 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. Having set up the central misunderstanding of the novel, Austen then brings in her cast of fascinating secondary characters: Mr. Collins, the sycophantic clergyman who aspires to Lizzy's hand but settles for her best friend, Charlotte, instead; Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Mr. Darcy's insufferably snobbish aunt; and the Gardiners, Jane and Elizabeth's low-born but noble-hearted aunt and uncle. 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. 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. Good marriages for penniless girls such as the Bennets are hard to come by, and even Lizzy, who comes to sincerely value Mr. 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. 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. Jane Austen considered Elizabeth Bennet "as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print". Readers of Pride and Prejudice would be hard-pressed to disagree." --Alix Wilber