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“All novels, but comedies in particular, lose much in translation. There are some, however, which are so transcendently brilliant that they lose nothing, at least, in time. Not even in centuries.
Pride and Prejudice is radiant, so witty and so delighted with its own irreverence that I know it will have people laughing for the centuries to come. Of the heroine Elizabeth Bennet, Austen herself was to remark, "I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print," and such is her charm that readers have echoed that sentiment for close on two hundred years.
Austen and Elizabeth are possessed of the same species of irony and the same capacity for wicked humour. Together they are irrepressible as the author surrounds her heroine with all manner of airheaded relatives, ridiculous acquaintances, and suitors successively dashing, ludicrous and patronising. This is satire at its most glittering, as Lizzie Bennet wades through the uncertain waters of courtship and wooing, eligibility and angling, at times a spectator to and sometimes a player in the intricate act that is the making of matches. Haughty proposals are refused, deliciously. Preconceived notions are overturned, precipitately. Accusations are discovered to be misjudgements and gossip is proven ill-founded, bemusedly.
By the end, every notion born of the eponymous hubris and bias has been turned on its head, laughed at and dosed with several pinches of salt. If all the pride and all the prejudice in the world were half as delectably amusing as this, we could do with more of each.”