The Whole Book Experience

Despite its reputation, somehow Pride and Prejudice remained unread for the first fifty years of my reading life. I’ve read some of her contemporaneous authors and classics but this one escaped my widely-cast net for one reason or the other. Or at least I consider my net wide. When I researched it maybe I haven’t read that many novels from 19^th-century English authors. I’ve read Emily and Charlotte Brontë, a fair amount of Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Joseph Conrad. So maybe it’s those so-called “romantic” novels that I’ve missed, sometimes intentionally. I’m not necessarily a reader of romances as a publishing genre but I like them more now. Especially when I read them for the glimpses of how the class, culture, and social mores of the times reflect through the story line and affect the characters and plot lines. I have to say that in Austen’s time those factors seem to make for many unlikable characters, especially when it came to their behavior in the romantic relationship category. Wuthering Heights left me cold. Jane Eyre was likeable enough as a character but I don’t remember if the story line held me that much. It’s been a while but I think I might have enjoyed the edition I was reading more than the actual novel itself. It was the 1943 Random House edition with illustrations by Fritz Eichenberg but I can’t go back to see what I liked so much because I think it left with my ex- to be imprisoned on her book purgatory shelves. I do want to revisit Jane after reading Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea to see how it strikes me now and if that reading fleshes it out even more. Is there a better edition than the Random House? I’ll have to do some homework there but I may have to search out another copy. Continue reading →