July 18 marks 200 years since the beloved novelist’s death—or, as some of our staff superfans like to say, since Austen achieved immortality. In her honor, we’re hosting a bi-Austen-tennial celebration of essays and reader discussion. Come back every day this week for more questions and responses, and check out the rest of our Austen coverage here.
Africa Studio / Shutterstock / Katie Martin / The Atlantic
“There are too many favourites,” begins the very first response to my callout for favorite Jane Austen lines, from Gillian in Ontario. Readers shared an admirable assortment of them: wisecracks and ironic turns of phrase, expressions of affection, assertions of independence and strength, small bits of wisdom. They drew their selections from a motley array of books and characters, ranging from the ever-quotable Emma Woodhouse to a lesser-known side character in Austen’s early epistolary novel Love and Friendship. (The line from the latter, which I had never before read: Run mad as often as you chuse; but do not faint.) But like me—and my parents—most readers chose satirical lines from Pride and Prejudice.
Writing from Germany, Claudia reflected on her first encounter with that book’s famous first line:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
It is the first line from the book which was my first contact with Jane Austen’s writing, at age 19 during my first month at university. When I read that perfect first sentence, endless possibilities appeared in my mind: this book, my new life, oh, the thrill of it all!
Pride and Prejudice was the first of Austen’s novels that I read, too, and I remember feeling something similar as I read the line, finally easing open the door to her literary world for myself. But my introduction to Austen—and Pride and Prejudice in particular—came years earlier, as I watched the 1995 BBC series and listened to my dad quote Mr. Bennet’s best quips. So I felt most nostalgic when re-reading those lines, chosen by several readers with a shared affection for his witticisms.
Ashley King, for one, favors this “slam Mr. Bennet gives Mr. Collins”:
It is happy for you that you possess the talent of flattering with delicacy. May I ask whether these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment, or are the result of previous study?
“It is the most outrageous thing anyone has ever imagined a human being saying to another,” she wrote. “Oh, I wish it were real and that it really happened! My jaw still drops to the floor when I read it/watch it. The cojones on Mr. Bennet are legendary.”
You can watch the exchange here, among other absurd interactions between Mr. Collins and the Bennet family:
Three readers shared another Mr. Bennet line, spoken to Lizzy after she’s rejected Mr. Collins’s proposal, to the distress of her matrimony-obsessed mother:
An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.
Writing from Uzès, France, M. Ballantyne summed up the line’s genius and its effect on Lizzy: “Calm irony and detachment saves a life.” Dustin Pascoe expanded on its significance:
It means her dad, who had seemed so foggy and disinterested, so aloof, was taking her side, defending her from something she didn’t want, and gently putting his foot down against his wife (who has her reasons, but still). It’s a hero turn from an unexpected quarter, and the line itself is so nicely parallel and exact. It ends the discussion without having to be explicit about it or raising his voice. In short, it’s the kind of parenting I’ve always aspired to pull off with my children, and never quite managed.
Like Dustin, several other readers shared lines they found aspirational. Karen and Rosemarie, for instance, both wrote in to praise the retort Lizzy gives Lady Catherine de Bourgh near the end of Pride and Prejudice, after the latter comes to tell her she cannot possibly marry Mr. Darcy:
I am only resolved to act in that manner, which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to you, or to any person so wholly unconnected with me.
“Is that not a great goal in today’s world?” Karen asked. “To achieve happiness in our own terms and not base it on other people’s expectations, especially those who don’t know or care about it?”
“The line has haunted me ever since I read it the first time as a middle-schooler,” Rosemarie wrote of the same exchange, “and has in turn given me solace and strength in times when I need to stand up for myself and what I believe in.”
Nancy, in Washington, D.C., draws similar strength from this line, also delivered by Lizzy:
I am happier even than Jane; she only smiles, I laugh.
“I went to a small religious liberal arts school in the Midwest,” Nancy explained:
It’s the closest you can get in 21st-century America to an Austen novel: Moral, marriage-minded people living in intentional community, drinking inordinate amounts of tea, and judging each other. The men of the school tended to favor demure, gentle Jane Bennet types and marry them promptly after graduation. Whenever I—a loudmouth Lizzy from the East Coast—get irritated at the trend, I remember this quote, chuckle to myself, and feel better.
Gillian’s favorite line leaves her chuckling too; it is, she says, “whimsically absurd and a fresh amusement every time I think of it.” Since, as Gillian also made sure to note, there are entirely too many favorites, I’ll leave you with this brief turn of phrase from Persuasion and, hopefully, with some fresh amusement:
“I am not fond,” said Sir Walter, “of the idea of my shrubberies being always approachable.”
I’ll admit to tearing up, the way you do for the end of a really good novel, as I read through the scores of reader responses we received to our callout for Jane Austen introduction stories. I’m not sure what came over me. Maybe it was the charm of all those far-flung fans connected through one author’s work—or maybe just the swoony effects of watching people fall in love with a book, almost a hundred times over.
For that’s how numerous readers described it—a dizzy rush, a thrill of discovery, reading breathless through weekends or into the night. Many of their first Austen encounters came on syllabi or summer reading lists—as Jane Booth of Charlotte, North Carolina, puts it, “the classic book report assignment that seemed tedious then but feels now like a wrapped gift.” Others were more serendipitous. Sandra Hutchison in Troy, New York, picked up a copy of Pride and Prejudice forgotten by her babysitter, quickly fell in love—and grew up to write novels herself. Hasifleur in New York City found a book of Austen quotes resting on the toilet tank in a relative’s bathroom: “After the first time I picked it up, going to the bathroom was never the same.” And Angela in California received her auntie’s crumbling copy of Pride and Prejudice after she “listed ‘your favorite book’ on a birthday wish list one early-teenage year.” She still has the book, now bound with a rubber band. She also has a daughter named Darcy.
Juti in Kansas comforted a widowed friend with tea and biscuits and Sense and Sensibility. Amy in Maryland read Persuasion a dozen times while her husband was deployed with the U.S. Navy. Shannon Kitchen in Texas read Emma aloud to her 13-year-old daughter, and “watched her fall in love just as I had years before.” Katherine Hysmith in North Carolina sprinkles Austen through her doctoral work in food studies, while Ismini Sykioti in Athens writes of a lifelong love of literature: “I am head of English at an international school today because I watched Pride and Prejudice in 1996.”
And indeed, if our informal survey of Austenites revealed anything, it’s that those first encounters with the stories we love can have long-term consequences. Below are three stories from readers who found that their love of Austen transformed, shaped, and even helped to save their lives.
First up, Abby Gordon of Massachusetts recounts a true Austenian romance:
I was about 13 when my mom brought home a book-on-cassette-tape version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice from the library. It was probably 10 or 12 tapes in all, and when my mom reached the end of the first tape she excitedly handed it over to me, along with an old portable cassette player. For the next week, we played a kind of leapfrog, the person behind waiting impatiently for the other to finish the next tape. We were enamored with the witty Elizabeth Bennet, alternately angered and charmed by the arrogant but dignified Mr. Darcy, taken in by Wickham, and thoroughly ticked off by Mrs. Bennet. It was probably the only time during my teenage years that my mom and I agreed so completely.
Years later, I was living for the summer in Buffalo, New York, with a group of other young adults. Almost immediately, I found myself employing Austen’s inimitable quotes in an ongoing battle of wits with one of my housemates: Having disliked each other during college, David and I coped with living in the same house by trash-talking each other in a manner worthy of Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
Late that summer, I returned home one day to find two books on my desk—a tiny, leather-bound copy of Emma and Northanger Abbey, and an outrageously illustrated copy of Pride and Prejudice. A note beside them explained that David had found them while cleaning out an attic at work and thought of me.
In Pride and Prejudice, Lizzy Bennet laughingly tells her sister that her love for Mr. Darcy began when she saw his beautiful grounds at Pemberley. I might say the same about those books. David and I began dating at the end of that summer, and this spring we got married. The sermon at our wedding mentioned Jane Austen.
That’s an auspicious beginning for an Austen-loving household—the kind of place where Michael Ormsbee of Oakland, California, grew up:
My sisters and I were practically raised on her work. My grandfather is one of those venerable gentlemen who, as Virginia Woolf once said, react to a slight upon Austen’s genius as if it were an insult offered to the chastity of their aunts. One of my earliest memories is the night, about 20 years ago, when A&E broadcast the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice. We were at my grandparents’ house in the Adirondacks, with no internet or anything except for a TV and a VCR. We recorded all six hours, painstakingly stopping and starting again to cut out the advertisements, aware even then that we were watching a masterpiece unfold.
Until I went to college, I thought of Jane Austen as an eccentric almost-ancestor whose exploits were the stuff of family legend. I loved the books, but they were there to enjoy, not to study. If I was going to major in English literature, I thought then, I would need to find something meatier. Something with more gravitas (possibly translated from Russian). And certainly something I didn’t reread every year and occasionally on rainy days.
Then I read D.A. Miller’s Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style, and I discovered how much more there was to Austen’s work than I had realized. By senior year, I ended up writing a thesis on free indirect discourse in Austen’s novels (thereby successfully taking one of the beloved pillars of my childhood and sucking all of the fun out of it, as my sisters have often reminded me). In the fall I’m starting a graduate program in English at the University of Rochester, where I will focus on narrative authority in the English novel and procrastinate by writing steampunk fantasy novels set in Regency England.
It’s hard to measure the full impact that Jane Austen’s work has had on my life, but it has certainly been a positive one. And I’ve been blessed to grow up surrounded by the “small band of true friends” who love Austen, even now, 200 years after her death.
Renee, a reader in the Netherlands, found a home in that band as well. Her first reaction, on seeing the Pride and Prejudice film starring Keira Knightley at 15, was disappointment: “My mother had promised me a wet-white-shirt scene, which isn’t in the 2005 film.” But she came to rely on Austen’s world for much more:
Jane Austen was my rudimentary tool for mental self-care throughout my high school years. I struggled in school, struggled in friendships and in my family, but Georgian England was a wonderful place to escape to—for a teenage girl who dreads social interaction, there is something wonderful about a world so ordered and contained by norms and codes of behavior. (I was in a high-achieving school and I had a terrible fear of failure. If I am honest, I sometimes saw the attraction of a society where nothing much seemed to be expected of a young woman beyond sitting in a room and waiting for people to call on her.)
I loved Austen so much that I got my dad to read Pride and Prejudice. I don’t even remember encouraging him that much: I think he did it to better understand me. Looking back, this means a lot to me. Even better, he enjoyed it! and he especially loved Mr. Collins. I remember feeling gratified by this because when I was a teenager, I related to Elizabeth Bennet mainly because of her bond with her father, whose dry sarcasm reminded me of my dad.
Meanwhile, my increasingly desperate parents waded through bureaucracy to get me help from social workers, therapists, you name it. In hindsight, I am sure I suffered from severe social anxiety and depression, but at the time no one could quite tell us what was wrong with me. I remember feeling lonely and defective pretty much all the time, and none of these professionals ever made me feel better except for one: a diagnostician who asked me what I was into. When I said Austen, she told me she had once seen Colin Firth (Mr. Darcy!) in New York! Over a decade later, all those well-meaning child psychiatrists, or whatever they were, sort of blend together in my memory, but this moment I recall vividly because it was the only time someone seemed to be talking directly at me, with me. It made me feel a little less alone.
Fast-forward several years, and I am going to a prestigious American college on a Fulbright scholarship. It feels cheap to narrate my life this way: I struggled with suicidal depression all the way through college, and recovering from that involved more than watching the latest adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. Still, I suspect there is something sacred about Austen’s world to young women who feel overwhelmed and out of step in their own.
As another one of those young women, I can heartily second Renee on that last point—and so can Sümeyye Ceren Özkan, a reader in Turkey, who has this to say about what Austen taught her:
She helped me learn my own competence, value myself as a woman without worrying much about what others think of me, wander freely in my own mind, and finally realize that I am quite a normal person.
If Jane Austen were alive today, I like to think she’d be pretty at home on the internet. That eminently judgy narrator of hers would delight in quipping and snarking her way through Twitter and Tumblr—not to mention the fact that so many of the dynamics she observed in Regency-era England continue, even 200 years later, to be just a little too real. As one Tumblr user puts it:
Austen is a relentless observer of her world and its ironies, of her characters’ absurdities and their redeeming graces. Austen analyzes a minor social interaction and sums up the universally acknowledged truths in it—those feelings you could hardly express, much less find funny, until you saw them elegantly summed up in one or two sentences. Austen, in other words, is excellent fodder for memes.
I’ll be honest: I am by no means as well-versed in memes as I am in Jane Austen, although I did write at least two college papers on each of those topics. (Did you know, for example, that “Socially Awkward Penguin epitomizes the inverted self”? I assure you that it does.) But I’m partial to this widely covered series from the writer and blogger KC Kahler: a mash-up of Onion headlines and Austen-adaptation scenes that perfectly captures Austen’s seamless blend of large-scale and small-scale social satire. Juxtaposing text in a crass or clinical tone with gauzy romantic imagery, she addresses broader issues like class and gender dynamics by noting how they play out in everyday awkward moments. Such as this uncomfortable truth that underlies the romance of the well-intentioned-yet-slightly-snobbish matchmaker Emma Woodhouse:
But again, my meme knowledge is limited. So I’m turning to you: What’s your favorite Jane Austen meme? If you’ve created or spotted one that gets at the heart of Austenian humor (or pathos), please share it on Twitter and Instagram with the hashtag #biAustentennial, and we’ll post a roundup of some of our favorites next week.
Maybe you’ll emulate this one from the Tumblr user janeaustentextposts, and wryly critique the economic realities of romance. Or go for the personally relatable, like this one from the Tumblr user whatwouldelizabethbennetdo. Or this one:
“The first rule of Fight Club is: One never mentions Fight Club. No corsets, no hat pins—and no crying.”
That’s Lizzie Bennet, dictating to her fellow fighters the rules that govern an improbable collective: Jane Austen’s Fight Club. The club, portrayed in a viral YouTube video first posted in 2012, features a collection of Jane Austen’s most notable heroines (Lizzie, Fanny, Emma, Elinor, Marianne) slapping each other, hitting each other, kicking each other, swinging off trees, flipping their way over well-manicured lawns, and in general acting like a bunch of punch-drunk characters in a Chuck Palahniuk novel. Except … lady characters. Feminist characters. Characters who, despite being boosted of breast and empired of waist, can totally fend for themselves. “You’re very clever, aren’t you?” an anonymous man asks Lizzie. “How’s that going for you, being clever?”
Lizzie smiles a knowing smile. “Splendidly,” she replies.
Jane Austen’s Fight Club is essentially, as HuffPostsummed it up after its launch, Pride and Prejudice and Punches. It is purposely absurd. It is also undeniably brilliant. It resonates—the original video currently has more than 1.5 million views on YouTube—in large part because it captures something essentially and enduringly true about the worlds Austen’s books portray with such sharp specificity: the belligerence that underscores all the daintiness. The eat-or-be-eaten quality of the early 19th-century marriage market. The Darwinian forces lurking within the most innocent meal, or country ball, or “turn about the room.” Women, in Austen’s novels, are often sisters and friends who truly love each other; they are also cruelly cast as each others’ competitors by a society that values women primarily for their willingness to become wives.
Jane Austen’s Fight Club translates that, cleverly, to a world that congratulates itself for having progressed beyond such reductive views. And it isn’t the only recent work to have done that. The video joined a teeming field of films and TV shows and writings and web videos, from the cheeky to the serious, that have sought to situate Austen’s stories and themes within the drawing rooms of contemporary life.
There was, in 1995, Clueless, which located the story of Emma within Beverly Hills’s Bronson Alcott High School. There was the short-lived TV show that followed it. There was, in 2001, Bridget Jones’s Diary, based on Helen Fielding’s newspaper column, which adapted the themes of Pride and Prejudice to the dating culture of early 21st-century England. There was, in 2004, Bride and Prejudice, a Bollywood-inflected take on the Austen novel’s marriage plot. There was The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, the Emmy-winning, multi-platform series that imagined Pride and Prejudice’s heroine as a grad student—still living at home, still prone to romantic (mis)adventures. There was Austenland, Keri Russell’s 2013 comedy about the misadventures of a woman who spends her vacation at a Pride and Prejudice-themed fantasy camp. There was 2016’s Eligible, the novelist Curtis Sittenfeld’s “modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice.” And there was also, in 2016, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which offered a feature-film take on some of the themes Jane Austen’s Fight Club had explored: fighting, feminism, the hermetically sealed universe of life in Regency England.
Those have come, of course, in addition to the many straight-ahead adaptations of Austen that have sprung up in recent years: multiple versions of Pride and Prejudice, Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility, and the recent Love and Friendship, based on the novella Lady Susan.
With all those—and many others—in mind, we’d love to know: What are your favorite Austen adaptations? You could make a very good case, I think, that Gossip Girl, with its Edith Whartonian antecedents, could also be read, given its omniscient narrator, its stifling setting, and its obsession with class, as a very loose Austen spinoff. Or you could stan for 2007’s Becoming Jane, the gauzy Austen biopic starring Anne Hathaway. Or for Death Comes to Pemberley—the novel or the miniseries. Or for one of the many musical productions—Pride and Prejudice, Austen’s Pride, Austen—that have been performed in recent years. Or for 1914’s Old Friends and New Fancies: An Imaginary Sequel to the Novels of Jane Austen, which found the author Sybil G. Brinton writing fan fiction before that genre had a name.
Or you could, of course, argue for the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, the miniseries that introduced Austen to a new generation of fans, and that, via a brooding dive into a murky pond, catapulted Colin Firth to his current fame.
Whatever your favorite, we’d love to hear about it. (Or, for that matter, if there’s an Austen adaptation that especially rubs you the wrong way, we’d love to hear about that, as well!) We’ll be talking more about revisions of Austen as part of our celebration of her life and legacy next week, and, as part of that, we’re looking for your nominations. In this form, please share some of your favorite/least favorite tributes to Austen. We’ll discuss them in more detail in an upcoming thread.
Just before she began writing Emma, Jane Austen called the novel’s young protagonist “a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like.” Emma Woodhouse is privileged, self-involved, often frivolous, and sometimes even (unintentionally) cruel. In her overconfident attempts at matchmaking, she repeatedly misinterprets signals and muddles relationships to the point of catastrophe. She lacks the wise-beyond-her-years insight and the intellectualism of most of Austen’s protagonists. She’s also my favorite of all Austen’s characters.
When I was younger I loved witty, headstrong Lizzy Bennet and the diametrically opposed Dashwood sisters, self-contained Elinor and passionate Marianne. I enjoyed the pompousness of Mr. Collins and Lady Catherine de Bourgh and the sometimes awkward charms of love interests like Mr. Darcy and Colonel Brandon. I watched the 1996 film version of Emma and Clueless, a contemporary adaptation of the novel, but never felt much attachment to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Emma or to Cher, who came off as shallow and lacking in genuine compassion.
It was only when I read Emma for the first time as a freshman in college that Emma Woodhouse really got to me. As Austen wrote her, Emma felt flawed in a way I could relate to: good-hearted and clever, but too wrapped up in her own world and too assured of her own opinions and talents. She felt like people I knew, or maybe even like me—like a fortunate young woman trying, and sometimes failing, to live well.
I’ve never encountered another literary character quite like Emma. Well-developed female protagonists—including those in Austen’s other books—most often have some sort of edge: cynicism or anger or grief. But Emma doesn’t. Emma is fun, and she makes Emma fun, too. She’s open and optimistic, full of a youthful joie de vivre that permeates the whole novel. By virtue of circumstance and personality, she’s romantically independent and intends to stay that way, but she’s fond of conversation, of organizing and attending social events, and of dancing. She likes being around other people, and loves those closest to her earnestly, if clumsily. And at the end of the book, after she’s made a mess of her relationships, she reveals a wholehearted capacity for empathy and for change, working to better understand the people around her, to soothe the hurt she’s caused, and to become a kinder, more mature person.
What about you—who’s your favorite Austen character? Do you favor Lizzy Bennet or the Dashwoods, like I did when I was younger? Are you a fan of Mr. Collins and Lady Catherine de Bourgh, like my mom, or a Mr. Bennet aficionado, like my dad? Let us know which of Austen’s characters you like best, and why, in this form. We’ll use your responses to start a new reader discussion next week, as we celebrate Jane Austen’s legacy.
Africa Studio / Shutterstock / Katie Martin / The Atlantic
I learned Jane Austen’s lines like a second language when I was growing up. My quip-quoting, BBC box-set owning, Austen-loving parents began immersing me in her literary world before I was old enough to comprehend all its nuances and ironic undertones. By the time I picked up Pride and Prejudice to read it myself when I was in middle school, the characters and scenes felt as familiar as memories from my own life—and I already knew my parents’ favorite lines by heart.
But the lines my parents love are still the ones I know best, and the ones I hold closest to my heart. So when I started listing out my favorites, I reached out to both of them, prompting two enthusiastic text conversations.
My mom is an especial fan of Pride and Prejudice heroine Elizabeth Bennet’s absurd, puffed-up cousin and suitor, Mr. Collins, and Mr. Darcy’s haughty aunt, Lady Catherine de Bourgh. This, from Lady Catherine, is her “all-time favorite” Austen quote—and also one of mine:
There are few people in England, I suppose, who have more true enjoyment of music than myself, or a better natural taste. If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient.
My dad, on the other hand, is a devotee of Lizzy’s wise-cracking, socially disenchanted father, Mr. Bennet. “The best stand-alone JA quote of all time,” he texted me almost immediately, is this one, spoken by Mr. Bennet to Lizzy:
For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?
It’s one of my very favorites, and the first one I thought of, too—because it’s a great line, but also because it always, always reminds me of my dad, and the days we’ve spent watching and discussing and laughing over Pride and Prejudice together.
Now we’d like you to join the discussion. We’ll be talking more about the best Jane Austen lines as part of our celebration of her life and legacy next week, and we’d like to hear your nominations. In this form, please share some of your favorite turns of phrase from her books (and the many adaptations they’ve inspired), and tell us a bit about what makes them your favorites.
If you, like me, are a fan of Jane Austen’s novels, you must acknowledge the crucial importance of a good introduction. And I owe my enduring Austen addiction to my mom—who, with all the best parts of a Mrs. Bennet’s concern for her daughter’s well-being, introduced me to Ang Lee’s adaptation of Sense and Sensibility when I was still young enough to play make-believe as Marianne Dashwood. From there I was hooked; we watched Gwyneth Paltrow in Emma and Laurence Olivier in the 1940 Pride and Prejudice, which I mostly appreciated for the hoopskirts. For a few years we made the viewing of the six-hour BBC Pride and Prejudice into an annual ritual, involving homemade cream scones (clipped from the New York Times recipe page), marmalade, English breakfast tea, and (this was the part I found most exciting) sugar cubes. Mom spread out the china and antique doilies she never had an excuse to use, and I’d stitch outfits for my dolls in imitation of the heroines.
At the two- or three-hour mark we’d take a break to clear away the crumbs; my dad, who normally folded laundry in front of a college basketball game, would bring a hamper up from the basement; and in this way my family absorbed Austen into our lexicon of inside jokes. Dad perfected the Mr. Collins wave; Mom adopted “icky Wicky” as an insult; and to this day we tease each other with imitations of Lady Catherine, pronouncing ourselves in haughty falsetto “most seriously displeased.”
I soon outgrew the tea parties, but I haven’t outgrown Jane. Today—200 years after Austen’s death on July 18, 1817—I still turn to her novels and to the many adaptations of them for insight and comfort. Austen’s shaped my interests as a reader, my voice as a writer, and my confidence as a young woman—but all of it traces back to watching those movies when I was a kid. And so, to kick off a reader discussion in Notes about Austen’s legacy, I asked my mom to tell me how she, in turn, was first introduced to Austen. She replied:
I think I must have met Lizzie and Mr. Darcy when I was a teenager, probably on a lazy weekend afternoon when I had time to kill and was flipping through channels on TV. Back then you could always find an old black and white movie, like an Abbott and Costello or an Alfred Hitchcock, on the local station. That’s how I discovered the 1940 version of Pride and Prejudice, with Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson. I loved it. It was so campy and lively, with the over the top costumes and stagey acting, and it seemed like the actors were having so much fun. I had never read the book, so I didn’t know that they took so many liberties with the story.
Years later, when I was a mom with two kids and money was tight and time was scarce (no more lazy Saturday afternoons), I heard on Fresh Air that there was a new annotated Pride and Prejudice. By then I owned the book and had read it a few times, but I was excited to get a hold of that annotated version even though I felt guilty spending the money. I wanted to read all the details, the background explanations, get to know them better. I remember sneaking in a trip to Barnes and Noble between errands, and then sitting in the car and opening up that fat volume. The sun was shining outside. I knew I had to get going, get back to work; but for a brief, stolen moment, I was alone with Jane and her lovers.
Do you remember your first meeting with an Austen novel? Have Austen’s characters played a significant role in your life? Fill out this form to tell us your story, and we’ll share some of the responses next week—and follow along on this thread for more Austenian discussion.
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