Pride and Prejudice, Part II

Finished reading it. Dude. Mr. Darcy’s a freaking saint.

Looks like everyone lives happily ever after, do they not? Or at least as happily as they could manage.

That grates on me a little bit, since it simply doesn’t seem true to life (which is part of the reason I stopped writing romantic subplots for six years). Perhaps I simply know too many divorced people and too many unhappily married people – they’re certainly far more common categories than happily married people. But I suppose fiction needn’t be true to life, that it can describe the world as we’d like it to be, rather than as it is.

Still, Austen’s a very good writer, and the characters in “Pride and Prejudice” are very sharply drawn. I swear I have met a dozen different clones of Mrs. Bennett and Lady Catherine, and Lydia Bennetts beyond count. I can also see why the book is so enduringly popular. Normal people seem to dig romance (as I’ve observed elsewhere), and the book hits every single one of the romance buttons.

So I liked the book, but I don’t think I would have bought it. Fortunately, it’s been in the public domain for quite some time, and I read it on my Kindle. And it’s a rather odd feeling to read a book using a technology that did not exist when the book was written.

And one of the nice things about living in 2011 is that as you as you finish reading a book, you can go read its TVTropes page.

-JM