When my English teacher told me Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is a funny book, I did not believe him. A funny classic? Impossible. Yet, reading the first line of the novel, I instantly realized that my teacher might be right: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of wife.” This single sentence is an explanation of what to expect in the rest of the novel. This is the early 1800s. The fact that a man is in want of a wife can lead the reader assume that there are also women who are desperate to be the wife of said man.
The protagonist is Miss Elizabeth Bennet. Her father is a smart man who mistakenly married a foolish woman. He tends to withdraw from his family, and every statement he makes is loaded with sarcasm. Mr. Collins is a pompous and idiotic man who is deeply concerned with his social status though he is a clergyman who should care of no such thing, while characters, such as Lady Catherine de Bourgh, epitomize the proud ignorance of the upper class. The varying personalities throughout the novel perfectly oppose each other and enhance the novel.
Some might call it chick lit, especially if they believe the intention of the book is the same as the 2005 film version featuring Keira Knightley, but it’s really a comedy. It is a comedy of manners. Jane Austen created this masterpiece that addresses class, propriety, family, and relationships. She uses the characters in the novel to mock the society of the late 1700s and early 1800s, while at the same time she manifests the type of people that really did exist. Unlike many authors of this era, Austen does not use circumlocution (a word that is an example of its own definition, “The use of unnecessarily wordy and indirect language”) and is surprisingly modern and easy to follow.
If you’ve never read Pride and Prejudice, this includes if you never understood its hilarity, give it another shot. If you’re careful, you’ll notice that the novel is indeed chock-full of brilliant sarcasm and wit.
[...] first encounter with Jane Austen was through Pride and Prejudice. Though the movie version of the novel is considered a “chick flick,” and some might [...]