Confession: I actually haven't actually ever read Pride & Prejudice.


I really only have seen the adaptations (my favorite is with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle and I will die on this hill) but the books have always kind of scared me because I'm used to more dialogue, and not having dialogue/having the time skip like 4 days in two sentences was always hard to wrap my mind around cause #TimeBlind. Jane Austen's writing is beautiful but before when I tried reading it, got so confused trying to get the grasp of a paragraph that extends for half a page and employs 4 semi-colons and maybe 2 periods. Now I fucking love them and can't imagine my life without them. If you me trying to use this in my posts, you know who to blame.

What actually ended up helping me was listening to the audiobook first since then I could hear how the language was meant to be read/interpreted, and now as I read the book I understand the writing so much more. There are still times when I'm confused, but re-reading the paragraph a few times usually does the trick.

I'm not yet halfway thru the book but I'm saving this for when I finish, and can comb back over to read my annotations and such and document them here.

Except this one gripe that I already have. How on earth is the most famous line in this book: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." and not “What are men to rocks and mountains?"???? I'm livid. And listening to the audiobook there's another line at the end that I absolutely remember adoring, but because I was listening to it, I was doing something else, and never remembered to write it down. So I'll also add that here when I'm done.

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This is a discussion thread for people who have read or are reading the book in question. With that in mind, there are likely to be spoilers throughout. However, in the event of major twists or “how it ends”, please wrap content in spoiler tags.