"Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen

I enjoyed “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen a great deal more than “Sense and Sensibility”.

Elizabeth’s sense of humor made her a much more interesting heroine in my opinion. She and her father seemed to enjoy a love for the absurd, although her mother’s behavior did embarrass her. Other than that there are many parallels among the characters in the story: Elizabeth and Elinor, Lydia and Marianne, Jane and Mrs. Dashwood, Wickham and Willoughby.

It still bothers me that all the women think about is finding a husband, that an “accomplished” woman “sang and played all day”, but I have to assume that was the world Jane herself was exposed to at the time.

You know that with a family that size and all those dinner parties, there had to be some people working very hard in that household, but they are barely ever mentioned and then only in brief passing and only in their concern for the family.

Fifty years after these novels were published, we see books such as “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott depicting an American family. In this book the characters are much less one sided. Although some of the girls were still thinking primarily of finding husbands, they had to pitch in and help make the world around them.

Another fifty years later, “Anne of Green Gables” by L. M. Montgomery describes a young Canadian woman from a very different set of cicumstances who puts the romantic side of life into perspective.

Both Jo and Anne are charcters that I would encourage young girls to meet early in life. The Austen women in the books I’ve read so far, although they may be a study of women from a certain subsection of society in England at the time the novels are written, are not ones I’d place before my daughters.