Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

 Lots of people have already read and discussed this book.  So this will not be a comprehensive analysis or review.  I will give it four out of five stars.  I can't give it five stars because the writing was often so flowery that I didn't know what was going on.  For example, I had to do an internet search to understand what exactly had happened between Wickham and Darcy.

But the four stars are because it was a very engaging story.  The characterization was very strong, despite the extreme wordiness of the prose.  There were many times that the descriptions were overwhelming.  Even so, there were many individual sentences that carried much more than their weight in moving both the plot and themes forward in quantum steps.  That's just good writing.

I find it overall kind of interesting as a woman and an American, in terms of how our male-dominated society and economy affect our thought processes.  America flowed from all things English, in our laws and attitudes. 

So it's interesting for me, at age 60, to see that there's still no Equal Rights Amendment affirming equal citizenship for men and women in this country.  I know there never will be.  This will always be a male supremacist country. As easily as I was able to recognize the truth of "white privilege" the first time I heard that phrase as a child, almost nobody in America seems to think "male privilege" is a thing.  Italy, one of the rapiest countries on Earth, made women full citizens back in 1948 (upgraded from chattel property) and now has a woman prime minister.  America will never catch up.  But I digress.

The first sentence of the book really gives it away:  "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."  I'm stunned that anyone could miss the snark in that opening.  With that masterful sentence, Austen sets the tone for her pithy observations about society, and provides the essence of the plot ahead.

In this book, men of wealth and privilege flit about as they please, oblivious to the needs and agendas of anyone around them.  Everybody else's lives hang on their whims in existential dread.  The worst thing a girl can do is run off and have sex before marriage.  This will ruin not only herself but her entire family.  The man who ruined her will remain unaffected.

The wealthiest and highest-up person in this book is Lady Catherine.  She's non-stop awful, and even so is admired by many because of her wealth and status.  And at the end of the day she doesn't get what she wants either, because men always get to decide what they will do, and women can only hope for the best.

The sharpest tool in this shed -- aside from the protagonist, Elizabeth -- is Charlotte.  She marries the butt-kissing idiot Collins, which is a power move on her part.  I think she knows he's an idiot, but a well-placed one.  Charlotte isn't pretty or rich, and is approaching her sell-by date without any offers.  So snagging Collins when he's down is, for my money, the best move in the entire book.  Like overlooking the sarcasm in the first line, it's hard for me to understand how people could read this any other way.

Overall this is a good book for rainy days.  Not super easy to read as the chapters are long and the writing is extremely flowery.  But it gives you a good window into a different world, one that still affects us now in many ways.  There's a reason many people love this book and author.

My favorite character is Mr. Bennett, who trolls everyone mercilessly and is nobody's fool.  There are a lot of P&P fan books written down the line, but I don't think anybody has written any fan fiction about Mr. Bennett.  That's a shame.