Pride & Prejudice is the first pick for the Read Great Books: A Literature Challenge. We'll be discussing it on Monday, February 16. Coming in at around 300 pages (this version is 226 pages, the one I picked up is 323), if you started today you'd need to read about 23 pages a day to finish before we discuss it. (Also, it's free on kindle!)
I chose Pride & Prejudice because I knew that I wanted to include Jane Austen in the list, and this one is probably her most famous. I'm not sure how I escaped reading Austen throughout college - she seems like she would be up my alley - but for some reason I've always been turned off by purely romantic novels. (Gone with the Wind excepted, though that book is hardly "pure romance.")
A little bit about the book:
Pride & Prejudice is a novel by Jane Austen set in England and published in 1813. The title term "Pride & Prejudice" originated in a passage about slavery in Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in 1776, but Austen probably came across it in Fanny Burney's novel Cecilia, published in 1782, which used the phrase three times in all caps.
Jane Austen wrote Pride & Prejudice between 1796 and 1797, originally calling it First Impressions. After receiving an initial rejection from publishers, she made significant revisions - including changing the title - and didn't make a publishing deal until 1812. Unlike her financial deal with Sense & Sensibility (published in 1811), where she made a commission on every book sold after the publisher's losses, Austen sold Pride & Prejudice for a flat fee of £110.
There have been numerous movies, plays, and mini-series' based on Pride & Prejudice. The most popular have been the 1940 movie starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier, the 1995 BBC series starring Colin Firth, and the 2005 movie starring Keira Knightley.
The original cover verses today's versions have gone through significant transformations. Here's 200 Years of Pride & Prejudice book design. (Some really cool ones there.)
A poll conducted by the BBC in 2003 named Pride & Prejudice "UK's 2nd Best Loved Book" behind The Lord of the Rings. In a 2008 survey of more than 15,000 Australian readers, Pride & Prejudice came in first on a list of the "101 Best Books Ever Written."
We'll be discussing the book here on the blog on Monday, February 16 over HERE. Come join in the conversation!