Jane Austen: Pride & Prejudice

I happened to watch the movie "Pride & Prejudiced" which was produced in the year 2005. This movie is adapted from Jane Austen's novel "Pride & Prejudice" (1813).


'Pride and Prejudice' has been the subject of numerous television and film adaptations. This one being the latest of all. Starring Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennet and Matthew Macfadyen as Mr. Darcy. Knightley's performance earned an Academy Award nomination, and the film was nominated for three additional categories.

I felt that the movie was in no way comparable to the original novel. It was moving too fast and the dialogs were unclear. I was watching this movie witha friend who had not read this novel before. My friend commented, " If I did not have this commentator ( me,lol) next to me , I would have never understood this movie. The characters were not as depicted in the novel.

In the novel, the character Mr. Darcy is admired for his fine figure and was a far more the subject of attention than Mr. Bingley. However, he is soon regarded contemptuously as the villagers become disgusted with his pride and arrogance. I felt in this movie had give Darcy a more softer tone than the Mr. Darcy of the original Pride and Prejudice.

Nevertheless, nothing can be compared to the original!

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Why the name pride and prejudice?

Fitzwilliam Darcy is the central male character and Elizabeth Bennet is the central female character in the novel. Mr. Darcy is potrayed as an intelligent, wealthy, extremely handsome and reserved 28-year-old man, who often appears haughty or proud to strangers but possesses an honest and kind nature underneath. Initially, he considers Elizabeth his social inferior, unworthy of his attention, but he finds that, despite his inclinations, he cannot deny his feelings for Elizabeth. His initial proposal of marriage is rejected because of his pride and Elizabeth's prejudice against him; however, at the end of the novel, he finds himself sharing his home, Pemberley of Derbyshire, with his beloved new wife, Elizabeth.

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Jane Austen (16 December 1775–18 July 1817) was an English novelist whose works include Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion eventually made Austen one of the most influential and honoured novelists in English literature. Her novels were all written and set around the . Her social commentary and masterful use of both free indirect speech and ironyRegency Era. She never married and died at age 41.

England's first truly important female novelist, Jane Austen had difficulty in establishing a reputation for herself, despite the fact that she counted the Prince Regent among her admirers of the time. A novelist of manners, her work dealt with a limited social circle in society—that of the provincial gentry and the upper classes. As she stated in a letter to her niece, Anna: 'Three of four families in a country village are the very thing to work on.' She explored their relationships, values and shortcomings with detachment and irony, and her restrained satire of social excesses of the period was perhaps nearer to the classically minded moralizing of the eighteenth century than to the new age of Romantic rebellion and potential sentimentalism. [ Words, Words, Words, English Literature: The Romantics and the Victorians, La Spiga languages, 2003]

Austen's best-known work is Pride and Prejudice, which is viewed as an exemplar of her socially astute novel of manners. Austen also wrote a satire of the popular Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, Northanger Abbey, which was published posthumously in 1818. Adhering to a common contemporary practice for female authors, Austen published her novels anonymously; this kept her out of leading literary circles.

Austen's novels of manners, especially Emma, are often cited for their perfection of form. Modern critics continue to unearth new perspectives on Austen's keen commentary regarding the predicament of unmarried genteel English women in the late 1790s and early 1800s, a consequence of inheritance law and custom, which usually directed the bulk of a family's fortune to eldest male heirs.

Although Austen's career coincided with the Romantic movement in literature, she was not an intensely passionate Romantic and the social turbulence of early nineteenth-century England was barely touched upon in novels which concentrated on the everyday life and ostensibly trivial aspects of genteel society—balls, trips, dances, and an unending procession of marriage proposals. Thus, it could be argued she was more neo-classical in outlook. Passionate emotion usually carries danger in an Austen novel: the young woman who exercises twice a day is more likely to find real happiness than one who irrationally elopes with a capricious lover. Austen's artistic values had more in common with David Hume and John Locke than with her contemporaries William Wordsworth and Lord Byron.

Within her limited field, however, she did create a memorable range of characters whose dealings with love, marriage, courtship and social or personal rivalries were treated with a remarkable degree of objectivity and psychological depth. Although Austen did not promote passionate emotion as did other Romantic movement writers, she was also sceptical of its opposite—excessive calculation and practicality often leads to disaster in Austen novels (for example, Maria Bertram's marriage of convenience to the wealthy but dull Mr. Rushworth has an unhappy conclusion). Her close analysis of character displayed both a warm sense of humour and a hardy realism: vanity, selfishness and a lack of self-knowledge are among the faults most severely judged in her novels (e.g. in the case of Wickham and the flighty Lydia in Pride and Prejudice). (wiki)

More about Jane Austen's life