A timeless classic
This week: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
THE following brief exchange, between teachers of English, and students, may or may not have taken place, last month, in 99% of all 5th Yr classrooms the length and breadth of Ireland:
The Teacher: Right, if you take out your novel, please, ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ....
The Pupil(s): Ohhh Goddddddd!!! Why do we have to do this stuff, it’s ancient?
The Teacher: It’s a Classic!
The Pupil: But what’s it got to do with us? It’s like Shakespeare and algebra! What’s the point? It’s, like, 2018! Come on, this has got nothing to do with our lives today! Goddddddd !!!!
The Teacher: Well, believe it or not it holds far more relevance to your life going forward than anything you might read about Rihanna or Wayne Rooney!
The Pupil: Wayne who?
The Teacher: Never mind.
Poor Teacher. In life there are certain things we are exposed to, and learn from that seem to stay with us forever, things that seem to replicate or be applicable to real life situations that we find ourselves in as we make our merry and troubled way, life lessons, as it were.
Bearing witness to the human conditions uncovered within this novel, Pride and Prejudice, is exactly the same such. And Teacher knows this. And Teacher also knows that long, long after the pupil has departed his or her classroom and school, that somewhere down the line, the clever insights into human character and situations, created by Jane Austin, will make an awful lot more sense.
Written in 1813, Pride and Prejudice is a romantic comedy. Our heroine, is Elizabeth Bennet, one of five sisters for whom the possibilities of any of them settling down with a suitable husband of acceptable standing in Regency England, appear to becoming more remote and fading far over the horizon. And worried, interfering parents, who realise that none of their daughters stand to inherit absolutely anything, only add to the growing concerns.
That is, until Mr Bingley, a wealthy young gentleman, rents a nearby country estate. He arrives in town alongside his lofty self-obsessed sister and his good friend, the dashing Mr Darcy. Mr Bingley is well-received within the community, but Mr Darcy, well, they are less than sure of. He appears, on the surface smug and condescending and overly proud toward the lowly ‘country’ folk. Elizabeth is stung by Darcy’s haughty rejection of her at a local dance and decides to match his coldness, and go to battle, armed with her own wit. What follows is a mesh of human wants, desires, wishes and interferences. A comical depiction of marriage, money and aristocratic manners. And Ms Austen throws out reams of memorable, humorous one-liners, ones that set for the reader the tone and thinking of her characters at the time, but yet, at the same time, she is sharing a really clever giggle with us.
‘A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment...’ or... ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’ Wonderful!
And so it unfolds, relationships between parents, sisters, siblings and suitors, in a society where social class is everything, and hasty judgements, along with prejudice and pride, only prove to be a hindrance to the path or hopes of love. The reader goes on this journey with Ms Elizabeth, and can only admire and empathise as she experiences a variety of life’s lessons, indeed, moral lessons. And witness as she questions all of her earlier held beliefs and understandings.
‘How despicably I have acted!’ she cried... ‘Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind! But vanity, not love, has been my folly. Pleased with the preference of one, and offended by the neglect of the other, on the very beginning of our acquaintance, I have courted prepossession and ignorance, and driven reason away, where either were concerned. Till this moment I never knew myself.’
But despite all the complexities of love affairs and relationships, some happy, some not so, some with resolution and some which remain less certain, Austen’s genius is in her ability to breathe life into characters who hit the difficult balance between being conservative and prudent on the one hand, quirky, and humorous on the other. Characters that stay with us forever. A Classic.