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Originally Posted by DixieGal
I voted #2, because while I detest Austen, the addition of zombies really livened up a boring story about girls trying to get men to marry them.
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And yet Elizabeth Bennet turned down TWO very eligible proposals of marriage: one from a man who was to inherit her family home--which would protect her and her sisters and mother from becoming homeless in the event of her father's death--and one from a man of excellent fortune and high social standing. Golddigger!
It helps to understand that in Jane Austen's time (and she was writing for a contemporary audience--late 18th/early 19th century to be specific) the general sentiment was expressed by Charlotte Lucas, in indirect narration: marriage was the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune. Elizabeth Bennet swam against the stream* when she refused those two gentlemen. She refused them, though they offered her a lifetime of security, because she could not respect them--Mr. Collins, for obvious reasons; Mr. Darcy because he "had been given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit," and he had to be humbled and learn that the world was not there to cater to him. To put it in terms from a more recent work, she made him want to be a better man.
Both Elizabeth and Darcy have to learn and grow. She has to learn to not depend quite so much on first impressions and that people are not as easily read as she thought.** When they do learn their lessons, they are then fit to come together--and they are so wonderfully complementary. They really are one of the greatest, best-matched romantic couples in literature.
All this being said, P&P is currently probably my fourth favorite out of Austen's six novels. You don't want to get me started on
Persuasion.
One of the things for which we read great literature is to, as Atticus Finch put it (speaking of great literature--and Harper Lee wanted to be "the Jane Austen of southern Alabama," btw), allow us to crawl inside someone else's skin and walk around in it for a while. Literature teaches us to look outside ourselves and see the world from different perspectives. (That's one of the reasons why diversity in literature is important.)
Jane Austen is one of the great writers who understood people and viewed them unsentimentally, and through her eyes we can learn about others and, in doing so, about ourselves.
*As did Jane Austen herself. She refused a very eligible offer of marriage from a young man who was heir to an estate. Actually, she accepted him and then broke it off the next morning. She probably accepted him, though she did not love him (nor he her), because to marry him meant she would have been able to offer her mother and sister a home when her father died. As it was, the ladies ended up bouncing from lodgings to lodgings in Bath and Southampton until Jane's brother Edward, who had been adopted by rich, childless cousins, offered them a cottage that he owned to live in. The security of that home allowed Jane to rewrite and publish two early works (S&S and P&P) and write three others of sparkling wit and genius (MP, Emma, Persuasion). She also did some reworking of NA, which was published posthumously.
**It's kind of funny to carefully read Wickham's early comments to Elizabeth about Darcy. He says he can't publicly badmouth Darcy because he had too much respect for the memory of Darcy's father, but as soon as Darcy goes off to London, he's blabbing about it to everyone who will listen. Only Mr. Bennet seems to notice.