Jane Austen

I read Pride and Prejudice first at age 12. That was just the kind of thing I did. I am a homeschooler, and my mom began teaching me to read when I was five. She always bragged about my reading skills, and I took pride in reading books that were supposed to be over my head. I usually didn’t understand them on the level they were meant to be understood, but I could grasp the story. Since Pride and Prejudice was a rather long and boring story in my 12-year-old opinion, I didn’t bother reading anything else by Jane Austen. Most people were awed enough by my having read Pride and Prejudice, anyway. However, when I was 13, I watched the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice (and that was before the Keira Knightley version was filmed) and decided to read the book again.

By age 14 I had begun to understand the nuances of human interaction enough to be enthralled by Austen’s amazing descriptions and understanding of her characters. They didn’t just come to life, they leapt off the page and turned my world into theirs. I didn’t stop with Pride and Prejudice, I read all her works, and I finished them all too soon. I watched the movies, but couldn’t enjoy them unless every detail was as she’d described it.

I went with trepidation to see the “new” Pride and Prejudice movie starring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen. I was certain they couldn’t possibly have done Austen’s work justice, but I was wondering how horribly it had been butchered. At the conclusion, I determined that it completely destroyed Jane Austen's story; it had been turned into just another sappy romantic movie that wasn’t for intellectuals, but for females who needed something to watch while they sipped sodas, munched popcorn and devoured chocolate.

But then, on April 1st, 2009, the worst disgrace of all was released. “Pride and Prejudice and ZOMBIES?!?!?!” I screamed, “ZOMBIES?! Really?!?!?” How could anyone so maliciously disgrace Jane Austen’s most popular novel by mixing ZOMBIES in with her classic, genteel story? Some of my friends read it, and tried to tell me about it, but I couldn’t listen.

That’s when I declared myself what I have been, and always will be: A loyal Jane Austen devotee.

Austen’s stories are not romantic stories; they are studies of human character. She understood people, and she describes the reasons behind her characters’ behaviors clearly. So clearly that you realize you’ve seen the same behavior in people that you are around, and your vague feeling about their motivations is exactly explained by Austen’s gently mocking narration.

The very first sentence of Pride and Prejudice is the well-known line “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man of good fortune must be in want of a wife.” Out of context, that first sentence appears to be Austen’s own view of single men of good fortune. But the very next sentence reads, “However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering the neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.” If you do not instantly comprehend the sarcasm overflowing from Jane’s pen, then you don’t deserve to read another word of her book.

Jane Austen did not write flat, surface stories, like many novels are today. There’s the story, and then there’s the development of her characters, the intricacies of the plot, and her own sardonic explanations of the way life was “supposed to be.” And yes, they all contain romances, because romance is a big part of living. And the hero and heroine get a happy ending because it’s supposed to be entertainment… and what good is entertainment if you end up sad? But the point of the story is not the romance; the point is seeing Lizzy overcome her prejudice and Darcy overcome his pride. Or watching Emma learn the problems with matchmaking, Catherine growing up and Elinor trying to take care of her family after her father's death. And that is what makes every Jane Austen worth reading at least 3 times.

~Lizzie