Pride and Prejudice

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Pride and Prejudice

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This is an Intermediate Level tale in a series of ELT readers comprising a wide range of titles – some original and some simplified – from modern and classic novels, and designed to appeal to all age-groups, tastes and cultures. The books are divided into five levels: Starter Level, with about 300 basic words; Beginner Level (600 basic words); Elementary Level (1100); Intermediate Level (1600); and Upper Level (2200). Some of the titles are also available on cassette.Amazon.com Review
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a excellent chance, must be in want of a wife.”

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 excellent chance, 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, but, is harder to please. Place off by Mrs. Bennet’s offensiveness and the untoward behavior of the three younger daughters, he is unable to see the right worth of the older girls, Jane and Elizabeth. His excessive pride offends Lizzy, who is more than willing to judge the worst that additional 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, as a replacement for; 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 pleased ending for persons 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. Excellent 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 questioned when she first started to like him: “It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it started. But I judge I must date it from my first seeing his gorgeous grounds at Pemberley.” She may be joking, but there’s more than a small 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-pushed to disagree. –Alix Wilber

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