Resumo de Pride And Prejudice

Imprisoned though she was by the stifling social constraints of her time, Jane Austen nonetheless saw with such clarity and wrote with such brilliancy that her novels are relevant across centuries and continents. While most of us may not have been lucky enough to encounter a dreamy Mr. Darcy, we have probably met a fatuous Mr. Collins.
As someone who has read even the dire Mansfield Park a dozen times I include myself among the devoted like E M Forster, read and re-read, the mouth open and the mind closed.
Jane Austen has none of the satirist?s didactic moral purpose. Instead, she is the mistress of irony. Pride and Prejudice is generally considered to be her masterpiece.
Although her canvas consists only of picnics, garden parties and the quests for suitable husbands, Jane Austen displays her remarkable knowledge of human nature, so much so that W. H. Auden confessed he felt uncomfortable to see an old spinster reveal with such sobriety/ the economic basis of society. Austen?s novels deplore the financial dependence of women, an issue that is still alive in many countries today.
The novel begins with the provocative sentence: It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a large fortune must be in want of a wife. This sentence sets the tone for the entire novel, where cynical truths are casually slipped in under a polite and socially acceptable veneer.
Austen handles the various relationships in the novel with consummate skill. Take the relationship of Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, for example. Mr. Bennet married a pretty young woman, but after marriage he discovered that she was foolish, and this killed all his affection for her early in their marriage. Mrs. Bennet married for affection and financial security; she was denied both. In real life, she would elicit pity and sympathy from everyone who know her; but Jane Austen, consummate mistress of her craft that she is, uses their relationship for a comedic purpose.
Characters like Mr. Collins and Lady Catherine de Bourgh show Jane Austen?s hatred and contempt for the society she was born and brought up in. Mr. Collins is a vain and foolish man who reserves for his patroness, Lady Catherine, the kind of reverence ordinarily given only to deities. But he is deferred to by Mrs. Phillips, accepted as a respectable person by Meryton society and recommended as a good match for Elizabeth by Mrs. Bennet herself. Lady Catherine is a proud and ill-bred woman who lacks the insight to look beyond people?s station, and with nothing to recommend her except for her wealth and title. Yet she is respected and inspires feelings of awe in everyone around her, and her advice is religiously heeded when she condescends to give it.
The comfortability and ease with which these obvious caricatures establish and ensconce themselves as a part of society?s fabric, was to Jane Austen society?s own unconscious and embarrassing comment on itself.
The last ten years have demonstrated that anybody from Hollywood to Mollywood who?s seeking inspiration need only dip into a dog-eared copy of Emma before announcing a new blockbuster. Similarly, Oxbridge dons and California novelists need only work Austen into the title of their manuscripts to gain publishers and readers.
Hollywood?s recent passion for Austen has more to do with romance and cerise ribbons. The trend began in 1995 with Clueless, starring Alicia Silvertone that transported Emma from placid Surrey to the boutiques of Los Angeles. Then came the more faithful Persuasion, a film version of Austen?s novel about second chances. Then came the sumptuous but curiously unsatisfying Sense and Sensibility, starring a stuttering Hugh Grant, stoic Emma Thompson and some marvellous costumes...
By this point, even those with an insatiable appetite for sprigged muslins could have done with a breather. Instead they got BBC?s new Pride and Prejudice, most memorable for its Colin Firth-in-a-wet-shirt scene. This was followed by Emma, in whhich the flawed but spunky heroine is reduced to a pallid Gwyneth Paltrow. Latest in line was the remake of Pride and Prejudice starring the pouting Keira Knightley as the spirited Elizabeth.
Few will quarrel with the Entertainment Weekly's remark that Jane Austen is the hardest working dead authoress in Hollywood. Horrendous sequels to her novels keep surfacing. Parasitical works like So you think you know Jane Austen? Pose questions like: There is one mention of excrement in the six major novels. Where?
When she published Sense and Sensibility in 1811, Austen was astonished to make a profit of ¤150. Two centuries later, Pride and Prejudice sells 100,000 copies a year. And if this is not sufficient testimony of the novel?s enduring popularity, a poll conducted in 2004 found that British women believe it?s the novel that has most transformed their lives. A result that will spur a few more makeovers of the classic replete with ignorance.

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