Am I really doing this? Yep. This guy (me), who grew up on a steady diet of He-Man and D&D, an author known for action, adventure, and monsters bleeding out across the pages of his own books, chose to pick up and read the most chic-flickiest of books ever written, and you know what? I enjoyed it!
I never go in for cheesy romance novels, like the kind with the sexy shirtless cowboys on the cover, and the current state of all these brainless, cookie-cutter “romantasies” polluting our bookshelves, I feel, has been an ongoing crime against fiction. But Jane Austen is in a league of her own, a talented wordsmith who imbues her characters with a complexity of thought and feeling you won’t typically find in many of today’s girl-on-vampire/werewolf/dragon/whatever stories. And given its two-hundred-year-old publication date, we have to credit Pride and Prejudice for giving us Elizabeth Bennet, possibly the world’s first female protagonist (though I haven’t really checked) created by a female author, and the template for every modern Disney princess/girl who doesn’t quite play by the rules/heroine who thinks for herself.
[SPOILER INCOMING]
To illustrate the point, let’s look at a scene from the book wherein our plucky heroine matches words with Lady Catherine de Bourgh, the very snobby aunt of Mr. Darcy, her love interest, who visits the Bennet family to insist she is simply too far down the social pecking order to marry her nephew. Being a badass at a time when terms like “badass” would have been incomprehensible, Lizzy tells the woman off, saying:
“You have widely mistaken my character, if you think I can be worked on by such persuasions as these.”
In case you couldn’t tell, this is your 18th-century mic drop and perhaps some of the earliest examples of badassery in the literary world, I think, right after most of Shakespeare and “malon labe.”
Of course, Pride and Prejudice might not be your cup of tea, if you’re not deeply interested in the British gentry or period pieces involving frilly corsets and top hats, or if you don’t possess a voracious appetite for love stories, or if you’re not a lit snob, like me, who enjoys the challenge of reading in a more antiquated style. Being a dude and all, I was tempted at some point to pick up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies—since, you know, monsters tend to make things more interesting—but when it dawned on me that the writing quality wasn’t on par with the original—little more than a poor imitation—I gave it a pass and went for the real thing instead. Yes, Austen’s 18th-century prose takes some getting used to, but your vocabulary will expand and your brain will thank you.
Intrigued? Curious? Bi-curious? Even if you’re a guy (don’t worry, your masculinity will remain intact), I highly recommend Jane Austen’s masterpiece, Pride and Prejudice, to any lover of the written word. After all, it’s been a pop culture sensation for over two centuries. That kind of lasting power is rare and only goes to prove the power of Austen’s storytelling.
The Art of Storytelling 
One of my favourite books.
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