When asked what my favorite book is, I say Pride and Prejudice. Mainly because it’s partially true, and mainly because it’s an easy answer. I’m a writer. Asking me what my favorite book is is like asking a parent who is their favorite child. It’s just not happening. There are too many caveats. Favorite book in English? In French? YA? Fantasy? Sci-Fi? Nonfiction? Memoir? Unlike Lord of the Rings, there is no one book to rule them all. For me, at least.
However, Pride and Prejudice fills enough of the gap for me that I’m happy to cite it as my favorite. It’s the only book that I regularly re-read. From a craft perspective, Austen is masterful at humor, using letters in the text, and having strong supporting characters, all good things to analyze. Personally, I always liked that a love story ended with just marriage and not kids. Yeah, yeah yeah, I know it’s implied, especially for the time frame, but let me have this one, all right? It irked me to no end as a kid when I would read books with the implied happy ending involving a family. What was the point of the whole epic love story then? I wanted to know. An early indication of me not wanting children of my own, I daresay.
I read Pride and Prejudice for the first time at 12. I was always a precocious reader, and my Dad had a copy. Now, you need to know something about my Dad. He ordered a bunch of leather bound books from a place called Easton Press. And they’re not fake. They are full on leather bound books. It has already been established that I will inherit them when he dies. This was the version of Pride and Prejudice I carried around with me in school as a 7th grader - a red leather bound book, twice the size and weight of a normal hardcover, with gold leaf pages and inlay, illustrated ever 50 or so odd pages. Despite the beauty of this book, I didn’t really understand much of it. It truly went right over my head - flowery English was not something I was much accustomed to yet.
Thankfully for me, enjoying Pride and Prejudice was a family affair. My mom has a lasting affinity for the 1995 BBC Version, with which I concur. This is the definitive adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and I will not be taking comments otherwise.1 I watched it with her sometime between 12 and 16, when I read the book again for my Junior Year English class. Our major assessment was a Quote test, which hand to God was thrilling for me. I have a visual photographic memory, so sourcing written words on a page from my memory? Easy peasy lemon squeezy. I’m sure everyone else in my class hated me and that’s fine, I understand. I bear them no ill will. My brain is weird.2 In any event, this was the perfect excuse to watch all 6 hours of Colin Firth Mr. Darcy glory, and honestly? It’s a very good adaptation. Most of the dialogue in the screenplay is taken straight from the book - either characters direct quotes or descriptions therein. So it wasn’t a bad way to study at all. I got a 97 on that test.
My junior year also included another odd, related Pride and Prejudice event. For reasons I still do not fully comprehend, a friend of mine at the time convinced a guy a year above us that I was madly in love with him. I started to realize something was up, especially when I was being cajoled to meet this person outside of our portable classrooms.3 I don’t remember if I got the truth of the situation before I went over or after, but either way, it felt like walking to my own execution. I kid you not, this man even uttered the same words as Mr. Darcy did to Elizabeth (“Would you do me the honor of reading this letter?”) and then walked away. I wanted to die. Because I liked this person as a friend, and was now left having to turn him down over a scheme that I had no involvement in. Even 15 years on, I am still completely baffled by this series of events. I wish I still had that letter, because reading it was like a fever dream. It would have been interesting to check to see if the letter was quoted exactly from the book, too. In any event, it was a while before I re-read Pride and Prejudice after that.
The last time I read Pride and Prejudice was in the fall of 2021. I went to Nice, and flew through Lisbon each way. On my way back stateside, I had a 24 hour layover in Lisbon. After wandering around all afternoon, I came back to my hotel, ordered multiple drinks at the bar, and sat in the lobby by myself, reading Pride and Prejudice.4 My brother and I did a rewatch of the BBC version together later that year - we have established that my next door neighbor growing up was Jane (the girl I was always compared to), I’m Elizabeth, and my brother Chris is Mary. No one is Mr. Collins or Lydia.5
While I enjoy the book and will always give it a re-read, I don’t necessarily wish for my life to turn out like said book. As has already been established, I’ve had one really weird rom-com moment in my life. I had another one a few years back that, once again, proved to me that rom-coms are escapist fantasies and nothing more, because if you tried any of this stuff in real life, you’d be regarded as a crazy person.6
Pre-pandemic, I used to go to therapy on Friday afternoons. I ended up making my work from home job a ‘work from cafe’ job on Fridays, where I’d go to a cafe, and just camp out until therapy time.7 One day, a young woman and I were working at adjacent tables. We didn’t talk much, other than a nod and a request to look after each other’s computers when we went to the bathroom. I got up to leave, put on my coat and scarf, and as I grabbed my bag and turned around, I saw a man with black hair and a blue sweater standing there.
“Oh I’m leaving, you can have my table.” That was what I assumed he was standing there for.
“No, actually I just saw you through the window putting on your scarf and you looked so beautiful that I wanted to come in and ask you out.”
Reader, I kid you not. This is what actually happened. I was truly floored. I turned him down because really, I wasn’t interested and I was on my way to therapy, and to his credit he left immediately afterwards.8 A moment after he left, the woman at the adjoining table looked over at me.
“I just saw that, that was insane. Are you all right?”
I wasn’t sure, honestly.
What’s a gal to do when she’s looking for Auesten-esque rom-com content but at a more livable pace? Because believe me, my ancestors were not schlepping around ball rooms in Europe, even if they weren’t in England.
I was reading Anne Helen Petersen’s newsletter,
, and she mentioned in one of her periodical link roundups that she was reading Longbourn, basically the servants’s version of Pride and Prejudice. Aka, the downstairs people of Downton Abbey. This intrigued me, because one of my issues with reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time at 12 was that I missed a lot of the historical context - and by a lot, I mean all of it. I don’t blame Jane Austen for this - she wasn’t writing for me, a 21st century girl. She was writing for the people of her time, who would implicitly understand the social mores of upper crust British society and were well versed in the ways of servantry and the Napoleonic Wars. I missed all that the first time around, even the second time around in high school. I always wondered *what* exactly the Militia was doing in Meryton, because what war was going on? Napoleon. That’s what war was going on.In some ways, though, the distance from political and historical events was realistic to that time period, because why would young ladies looking for an eligible marriage be concerned with what Bonaparte was doing on the Continent?
I view this book as the other side of the coin to Pride and Prejudice - in my estimation, it’s impossible to understand one without the other and the two should be read in tandem. Jo Baker cites in her author’s note that she lined up every servant action mentioned in Austen’s original work with what is described in Longbourn. The prose was sparse at times, but deeply illustrative of someone who has to do manual work for a living, and what all of that repetitive, back-breaking work entails. The physicality of the book was on point. Here, we get a real glimpse of what wartime service would be like in those infernal battles, and why being an ocean away on a small estate might actually be desirable.
From a craft perspective, the narration style annoyed me. I didn’t mind the omniscience so to speak (that’s the God-like narrative voice), but the fact that each chapter switched between 3 to 4 people, sometimes within paragraphs, drove me nuts. There were a few instances where if I didn’t keep my pronouns straight, I had no idea what was going on.
The book added a fuller perspective to my understanding of the ‘world’ of Austen and its socio-political-economic context, which is honestly something that interests me greatly. Why do people make the decisions that they do? We can only ascertain that as readers when we have the full facts, and something always felt missing from Pride and Prejudice for me. It was a sweet enough book that mirrored the original plot of Pride and Prejudice in many ways - there’s a love triangle, enemies to lovers, miscommunication, hopeless situations that are redeemed - and it’s enough to remember that no matter who you are, big or small, we’re all deserving of our fancy love stories.
Except if you come up to someone randomly in a cafe and ask them out. Please do not do that.
No matter how much I enjoy Keira Knightley and the 2005 version.
As I’m not doubt sure you’re well aware of by now.
I went to a private boarding school, I have no idea what they were doing with our tuition money if not to build actualy BUILDINGS.
I regret nothing.
Though justice for Mary because SHE WAS RIGHT THERE MR. COLLINS. RIGHT. THERE.
Unless you’re doing something over the top romantic with your romantic partner and they are consenting in all of this. Then by all means, carry on.
It’s called Mr. Crepe and it’s amazing and I will also not be taking comments otherwise.
THE BAR IS IN HELL.
I'm proud to be Mary in some areas of my life, but I feel like the answer to "which Bennet sister are you" is a spectrum and varies based on context. Maybe I'm just insecure about being Mary all the time lol.