100 Books to Read Poster No 19

 

In the words of a once much loved and now disgraced children's entertainer 'Kin you giss what it is yit?' Absolutely no prizes for realising that it's Pride and Prejudice. And of course I have read it before multiple times,  but the poster gave me a good excuse, if one were needed, to read it again. Austen famously once said that it was 'too light and bright and sparkling', but after the downers that were Dissolution and The Secret History it struck me that light and bright and sparkling was exactly what I needed. 

I treated myself to Penguin's new clothbound edition before reading. I have a set of Austen's completed novels which were bought for me by my parents for a birthday many years ago, and I'll never get rid of them but the texts were not prepared with any academic rigour. The new Penguin edition is based on the definitive R W Chapman text, and although there was nothing new germane to the plot I did glean a few things that I hadn't known before. There is for example quite a more detailed description of Pemberley than I'd previously met with - especially the grounds - and I also discovered that the Bennets had a butler. Who knew? Well, anyone who had previously read the Chapman text obviously, but I hadn't. (And I don't remember a butler in any of the recent adaptations that I've seen either., so perhaps their writers had not gone back to the original text.) It might seem a small thing, but actually it immediately elevated the Bennets into a section of society I hadn't previously thought they belonged to. A whole new perspective on all sorts of things. 

The other novels in this edition will naturally go onto my Amazon wishlist, and meanwhile Pride and Prejudice was, of course, a hit.