Who knew I'd read this now that I am approximately 10 years older than an average Jane Austen reader? But I have a natural disdain for all things popular, even if they are popular only among people around me. So with my friends discussing which Mr Darcy was better in different screen versions of the book, I doubted I would ever lay my hands on it.
I only console myself with the fact that I now have the means and patience - which is not so completely unnecessary as it may seem, if you get what I mean - to read it.
So, it took me approximately 10 days to read it, though I was only reading when I had free time during my workday, which was very limited. Still it is a considerable amount of time, a larger half of it I'm sure taken by translating and memorising words such as 'covey' or 'complaisance'...
And when I finally came to the last chapters, I suddenly stumbled upon an interview with some specialist on English literature who explained me the revolutionary character of the book, which consists in the fact that the heroine being of a more humble origin marries a man of a higher position without turning out to be a secret child of some duke. And thank you, dear specialist, because if not for you hardly would I guess what exactly I have to admire in this book.
Really, the biggest thing for me to admire was the collection of word combinations that require three or four takes to grasp fully and are probably only second to Dickens among what I have read in the amount of time necessary for deciphering.
I heard people - and Wikipedia - call it a romance novel. If so, this is must be a very short romance, because rather than romance I got a considerable amount of pride and of prejudice, just as the title promises. The most passionate and eloquent scene lasted for one page out of 352, the one where Elizabeth refuses the offer. Other manifestations of love were explicitly contained in sentences like '[she] immediately, though not very fluently, gave him to understand that her sentiments had undergone so material a change', or 'he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do'.
Was it my mistake that among 352 pages what I was most eager to read was exactly how he expressed himself?
But even if it was, I didn't expect the book to have so few rewarding dialogues for the sake of so much indirect speech.
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