Pride and Prejudice

Handsome enough of a novel to tempt even you.
Pride and Prejudice is quite possibly the most beloved novel ever written. Not only did it spawn everything from The Bridget Jones Diaries to the BBC television version to recent Bollywood and Hollywood adaptations, but the book itself, unlike so many classics, is actually read — voraciously, and time and time again, by everybody from literature professors to teenage girls who swoon over the love story of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy.

This is the text that inspired it all, the arch, playful romantic comedy sprinkled with satire and wisdom. There’s the delightfully dull-witted Mrs. Bennet (“a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper… The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news”); the buffoonish Mr. Collins (“not a sensible man, and the deficiency of nature had been but little assisted by education or society”); and the imposing Mr. Darcy (his first words about Elizabeth are, "[s]he is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me").

It’s nearly impossible for a book this good to be anything but brilliant. Still, I wish reader Nadia May were a little less fussy, less schoolmarmish in her interpretation. Though Austen’s language is proper and restrained, she, like Elizabeth Bennet, is of “a lively, playful disposition, which delighted in anything ridiculous,” and it would be nice if Ms. May sounded as if she were having a little more fun.

Small matter, though. No matter who reads it, Pride and Prejudice is beloved for good reason.