My Relationship with Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice and I have a special kind of relationship, formed over many years and through many times of trouble. Our bond has changed over the years and that's why I didn't feel able to write a 'review,' as such, from my reread last week. I'm almost unable to view it objectively now - it means so much to me that it almost transcends literature.

At time of writing, I own 70 copies of Pride and Prejudice. Literally. There are that many copies sat on my shelf in order of size, all different. Well, all with a different cover, anyway. One day I'll write a post about them, with pictures. I also own a Pride and Prejudice cushion, brooch, t-shirt, playset and three mugs.

Why? Excellent question.

I read it for the first time in 2006, when I was in Sixth Form and was therefore presumably around 16 (yes, I'm obsessive enough to have kept detailed book statistics even then). My friend and I used to trail round the huge Borders store that used to exist in Leeds city centre and we'd buy those tiny green Penguin paperbacks that only cost £2.
 
I assume that was because it was all we could afford, but Pride and Prejudice was one of the first books I came home with. I remember feeling like it dragged, if I'm honest. I wasn't used to reading classics and even when I read 'normal' books, I hadn't really learned to pay attention to the text properly. 

Having said that, I remember being sat cross-legged on the floor of my bedroom as close as I could get to the electric heater without actually rubbing myself on it, and getting to the part in Derbyshire, where Elizabeth receives Jane's letter about Lydia in the presence of Mr Darcy... that's it, I was hooked. I sat on the floor, slowly burning my nose, until the book was finished and everybody was safely married off.

My God, I was blown away. I had no idea that classics could be that good! I kept buying more and more classics, Dracula, Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, but nothing gave me quite the same tight feeling in my stomach. I'd never had that before. I mean, obviously I'd liked books before, but not to the same I'm-going-to-cry-because-I've-finished-it extent.

During another trip to Borders, I bought the Headline edition you can see in the very top left of this post, just so I could have a nice edition. Yes, my friends, that was the turning point although it didn't become a collection for another few years. I also bought Sense & Sensibility and Mansfield Park from the same editions, but I was severely less than impressed with both of them.

I gave up on Austen, more or less. Clearly Pride and Prejudice was the only one worth reading. In fact, I read it again in 2008, this time choosing my pretty new edition, that wasn't printed on Bible paper, like the little green Penguin version.

By this point, I'd read it twice. However, in 2009, I read it again. Penguin had just released the first of their Clothbound editions (which I now collect in their own right) and I couldn't resist buying a semi-expensive beautiful edition of the book I loved so much. I was going through a bad time - my health issues were starting to peep through and I hadn't been given a diagnosis yet, plus my housemate and I weren't doing so well thanks to my at-the-time boyfriend being a massive prick.

Inspired by my recent purchase, I dived back into Pride and Prejudice. By this point, it had become more than just a story to me. I could dive into it and become completely immersed in a life so different to my own. Even the tone of Jane Austen soothes me.

So I now owned three copies of Pride and Prejudice, good for me. Except I started buying a pretty edition whenever I happened to see one on the shelf. I never actually consciously I decided that I may as well own them all, but shortly after the purchase of the Clothbound I had to clear a designated shelf area just to fit them all.

 
So why am I talking about this now? Well, I haven't read it since 2009. I'd read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Longbourn and Death Comes to Pemberley, plus Emma, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey. I wanted to let my memory of the (dubious quality) spin-offs fade before I could sink happily back into the proper book. This Christmas, however, my boyfriend bought me a new edition with a lovely inscription and it made me want to read it all over again.

What I love most about Pride and Prejudice is that it changes every time you read it. The last three times I read it (in 2006, 2008 and 2009) I was in various relationships that felt real at the time but looking back, were clearly going nowhere. I was so dogmatic, so independent and so stubborn that I wasn't really ready to let anybody else in... as a result, it seemed to me perfectly obvious that Elizabeth Bennett was clearly in the right and Mr Darcy was an obnoxious prat who finally becomes a nice person after Elizabeth tells him off. Prat.

Except not this time. Now I'm in a stable relationship with a man I love more than... well, more than myself. I understand what a relationship actually is now - it's accepting your own faults as well as your partner's and sometimes putting their needs before your own. As a result I can see now that it's at least as much Elizabeth's fault as it is Darcy's. She's naive and prejudiced - the scene where she rejects his proposal made me want to curl up into a ball and die on her behalf.

That said, it just made their relationship all the sweeter when it finally came together. Every time Mr Darcy smiled, I melted a little bit inside because I understood his character better. It just makes sense now - they seem more like real people because I can relate them to my own experiences.

Also, during previous readings it always annoyed me how Lydia never really got her comeuppance, but this time I noticed that she actually does -

They were always moving from place to place in search of a cheap situation, and always spending more than they ought. His affection for her soon sunk into indifference; her's lasted a little longer; and in spite of her youth and her manners, she retained all the claims to reputation which her marriage had given her.

So I think I've wittered (is that a Yorkshire word?) about Pride and Prejudice for long enough. I just wanted to explain my connection with it and encourage those of you who haven't read it, to do so. It's not a perfect book, but then there's no such thing. It changes with every reading, but is always, always magical.

Review: Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James

So it's a fairly well established fact that I like Pride and Prejudice - I have 54 copies of the book and I can give you a play-by-play of the Jennifer Ehle series without ever needing to consult an episode guide. I was the only person in my Law class to be amused when a court case involved a Charlotte Lucas. Therefore it wasn't precisely unfair of my boyfriend to remark "Well of course you didn't like it, stupid." But... I don't know. I think I did expect to like it, at least somewhat. Phyllis Dorothy James is an actual fan of Jane Austen and an established crime author - not some hack trying to cash in on classic fans. And yet it remains that Death Comes to Pemberley just didn't bring it home somehow.

Plot summary - The year is 1803, and Darcy and Elizabeth have been married for six years. There are now two handsome and healthy sons in the nursery, Elizabeth's beloved sister Jane and her husband Bingley live nearby and the orderly world of Pemberley seems unassailable. But all this is threatened when, on the eve of the annual autumn ball, as the guests are preparing to retire for the night a chaise appears, rocking down the path from Pemberley's wild woodland. As it pulls up, Lydia Wickham - Elizabeth's younger, unreliable sister - stumbles out screaming that her husband has been murdered.

Death Comes to Pemberley starts off with a wonderful Author's Note that apologises to Jane Austen for what P.D. James has done to her characters. It's gentle humour and clearly shows her respect. She's been a Jane Austen fan all her life and it feels like this book was written to indulge a whim of the author, not for money. It is basically fanfiction, after all.

That said, it doesn't quite work. The plot itself is fine - nothing particularly new, but then that isn't really what the novel sets out to do. The twists and the grand revelation fit in with what we know of the characters and it's easy to imagine them acting the way they did. The main problem is in the way they speak and think.

They're all so flat! Elizabeth especially is notably 'flat' - her character has none of the wit or ingenuity she is so renowned for. In fact, I'd go so far as to say she was painted quite harshly. At one point she even thinks to herself how she wouldn't have married Mr. Darcy if he was poor, despite wishing only to marry for love in Pride and Prejudice. The narrative mentions how strange Georginana found it at first when Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy teased each other... but they don't. Ever. 

It took a while for the story to get going - it's definitely more of a legal drama than any kind of crime/thriller. I know not a whole lot happens in Pride and Prejudice either, but Death Comes to Pemberley goes off on tangents about the relatives of the servants, for God's sake.

It's also quite obvious that P.D. James isn't accustomed to writing historical fiction. The prose itself is lovely - very authentic and Austen-y. It's just that every so often one of the characters will go into a full monologue to bludgeon you with historical explanation. As an example... the characters are proceeding to the courtroom. Mr. Darcy turns around and says, out of the blue, 'Remind me of the court process again?' and then one of the other characters will branch off into a full blown lecture for a page or so. He's a magistrate! I could deal with this once or twice, but not the frequency with which it happens. It stopped the flow entirely.

With reference to that... It's not P.D. James fault (or I assume not, considering she's a London magistrate and an Honorary Bencher at Inner Temple), but how backwards was the court system back then!? I wanted to scribble over and correct the entire thing! So ridiculously warped and biased.

It isn't much of a crime story, so I can't help but feel that it was written mainly to tie up a few loose ends left over from Pride and Prejudice. Mr. Darcy and Georgiana still have issues over her intended elopement, for example, and he apologises to Elizabeth for his earlier poor treatment of her. Their relationship just didn't seem to gel throughout this book though, so I remained unmoved. It doesn't help that the one thing I wanted to be rectified, wasn't. Lydia. Good Lord that girl needs her comeuppance.

To conclude, Death Comes to Pemberley is... fine. It wouldn't have stood on its own feet without using this particular set of characters, but even they are flat and lifeless for the most part. It's easily readable but nothing special.

Read my reviews of Emma and Northanger Abbey.

In My Mailbox #37 OR 'Hey look, I haven't died.'

Wow - apparently I haven't posted an IMM since my birthday way back in August. Since neither you nor I want to sit here and trail through the huge list of all the books I've got since then, I figured we could draw a line under it and we'd start again this week.

So. At the top is Pride and Prejudice #49 - so called because it is, naturally, the 49th edition of it that I own. Obviously. It was brought back from the US as a present for me, and as it's one I'd never even seen before, I was more than thrilled. One more to fifty!

Under that there are two books that I bought on a whim from King's Cross today (incidentally, has anyone else noticed that they've moved the Platform 9 3/4 sign?) as I was killing the hour and a half before my train. Station bookshops generally tend to only stock the so-called bestsellers, but I managed to find two that vaguely interested me.

The orangey-yellow one is called You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney and theoretically it's a look at how we delude ourselves in everyday life - like how our memories differ from what actually happened or how we convince ourselves we must appear to others. I had heard of it before, but it's not my usual type of book so it really was a whim-buy (I know, buying books on a whim... who'da'thunk, right?).

The one underneath that, if you tilt your head upside down due to my half-asleep photography skills, is Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre. This actually seemed a strange book for such a small WH Smiths to carry as it's quite obscure, but that's fine by me. I've had enough badly-chosen treatment and medication from the NHS to be willing to read up on it. Worst case scenario  - even if it's not helpful, it's heavy enough to quite literally throw at my case-team.

Under that... *jiggles with glee* The best piece of luck I've ever had when it comes to book buying. I was wandering aimlessly around Leeds one lunchtime between classes, and I found my way into Waterstones, as is so often the case. Only this time there was an empty desk set out with a fairly long queue snaking away from it, and so I asked a nearby shop assistant about it... and Brent Weeks was due any second. Brent Weeks!

If you haven't read his books, you need to. The Night Angel trilogy starts with The Way of Shadows, continues in Shadow's Edge and finally concludes in the masterpiece of adult fantasy that is Beyond the Shadows. This is easily, easily my favourite fantasy series of all time - I've read it twice through and each time I've ended up a whimpering wreck swearing that she would never read anything else ever again.

So imagine how amazing it is to absently wander into a bookstore, and right in front of you is your favourite author, ready and willing to sign his new book for you. Surprise! I swear I nearly died, sobbed and threw up at the same time. He's a really nice man too and took the time to chat properly to each and every person in front of him. I was so excited by my sheer good luck that I came away with not only personalised, signed copies of The Black Prism and The Blinding Knife (his new series), but also a signed copy of The Way of Shadows. Well I wasn't not going to get the first book of my favourite series signed, was I?

Funnily enough, the same Waterstones also had signed copies of Caitlin Moran's books in store too. I adored How To Be A Woman and while I wasn't technically going to buy her new book, Moranthology, straight away.... hello? Signed? *shrugs* I don't know if the Leeds branch saw me coming and frantically whipped out a marker pen to scrawl signatures on all my favourite books, but I've pretty much filled my spend-£100-stamp-card just on that day.

So not a massive haul, all told - Lord knows I've done much worse. I'm more than happy with it though - five signed books (including new copies of the ones I already owned) due to sheer luck and a new Pride and Prejudice? Sounds like an amazing week to me!

What arrived in your mailbox this week? Have you ever been as lucky in a bookstore as I was?

Booking Through Thursday #3 - What is the one book you'd recommend without a second thought?

If someone asked you for a book recommendation, what is the FIRST book you’d think to recommend (without extra thought)?

Okay, so obviously it depends on the person in question - you'd have to take into account what they read and what they've already read. That said, I really do think everybody should read Pride and Prejudice. I haven't met a single person who doesn't like it. The only people who say it's 'a women's book' and that nothing happens, are pretty much always the ones who haven't read it.

And the best thing? I have 37 copies they could borrow! It's true, sadly enough. I collect different editions. Look - 

 

And since I know you're all dying to know more about my obsessiveness, here are some closer photos :)

 

 So yes. As you may have gathered, this is my favourite book and without doubt, the one I'd recommend to anybody.

 

Top Ten Tuesday - Favourite Book Covers I Own

First off, some more-than-a-little exciting news - 

I GOT ONTO THE BAR COURSE!!!

And no, that doesn't mean I'm learning how to mix margaritas. I've been accepted by three different Law Schools to do the vocational part of my legal training, which is the bit that actually teaches you the advocacy skills necessary to become a bad-ass lawyer.

It's a stupidly exclusive course, and I was barely expected to scrape my way on to one, much less all three of my choices. I opened the e-mail before even getting out of bed this morning and screamed so loud my Dad genuinely thought I'd hurt myself.

So yeah, I'm slightly pleased. Is it September yet? :) 

And now, because I haven't forgotten the purpose of this course, my favourite book covers of books I actually own.

1) Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein
The cover actually sparkles! 

2) Matched by Ally Condie

3) Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea by Jules Verne (Vintage edition)

4) Soul Screamers series by Rachel Vincent

5) The Secret History of the Pink Carnation by Lauren Willig
All the books in this series have beautiful covers and they feel lovely too.

6) We Bought A Zoo by Benjamin Mee

7) Pegasus by Robin McKinley
 One of the nicest covers I've ever seen - shame I didn't like the book as much!

8) Positively by Courtney Sheinmel

9) The Princess Bride by William Goldman
My Aunt bought me this years ago and it's still the nicest edition I've ever seen

10) Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (Folio Society 2006)
I could actually fill up this entire list just using editions of Pride and Prejudice, but I won't. The Boy bought me this one last week as a surprise and it's amazingly beautiful - easily my favourite of the 36 editions I own. It's hardback with a case and really detailed illustrations. I just want to sit here and nuzzle it all day!