In Bed With Brontë et al - Pride and Prejudice (SHORT)

Podcast by Stephanie Poppins published by Neworld Books - Listen to the full podcast here: creators.spotify.com/pod/show/stephaniepoppins

Back again!

Thank you for listening to my tracks.

We are talking about Pride and Prejudice today, which is the stalwart, the foundation upon which everything else, classically speaking, that I do, is built upon.

It is one of my favourite novels, and I am going to explain why.

It has an endearing quality and it is many people’s favourite but I would like to pin point exactly what it is that makes it so good.

I’m going to start on time, and I’m going to start by saying thank you for listening and I am hoping this will be available as one of my tracks on Insight Timer. Fingers crossed for that one, as some people can’t make it, so that will give them a chance to catch up.

So, we’re going to begin and I’m going to talk about Jane Austen a little bit to start with and particularly her style of writing and her Pride and prejudice specifically, because there are other novels that I’ve read and shared with you that I haven’t been so enamoured with. Partly that was because of the level of investment that was made by Austen at the time of writing.

Austen was born in a family with seven children, much larger than we have today, and obviously with that comes a lot of energy, but also quite a lot of self-preservation and resilience. It was a very creative family and she was writing from the point of view of someone who had a working knowledge of the landed gentry in the late 18th century, so that would have been late 1700s early 1800s.

Her family was close knit according to records and her father was a rector and did some teaching, so there was a passion for education, within her home environment, which was par for the course with the gentry in those days.

Being a young lady she would have been dissuaded within society from publishing her own work and it was very difficult at first for her to get published, but she did succeed with the help of her brother. So that was one of the many barriers she faced.

So, she was born into the bottom rung of the landed gentry if you like, and Pride and Prejudice is a societal account of that, but she writes with and irony so she’s almost mocking it somehow, and that’s what makes it so good.

Prode and prejudice is a weighty novel. It’s a much thicker volume than sense and sensibility or persuasion, and that gives us a chance to enjoy the characters, to learn about the characters, to follow them through a long journey. And there’s a lot to be said for that.

At first it can be quite daunting to look at a novel and think ‘wow, how am I going to get through that?’ But when you actually step back and say ‘you know what, it’s not a race and I’m not in this to ‘get through it, I’m in this to revel in the craft itself’ – which is mindfulness, right? That letting go of distraction and willingness to absorb oneself completely in the experience at hand.

And we can revel in the wit and the humour which is very often sitting between the lines so that sometimes we must pause, go back to acknowledge, ‘oh! That’s quite funny!’ and really enjoy those moments. It’s a satirical masterpiece.

Pride and Prejudice is the one volume I have recorded word for word, as kindly acknowledge by my most loyal listeners. I have abridged almost everything else I have read and produced of that era, as in weaker novels I find, there’s a tendency to dwell on moments that are not driving the plot forward. That’s not to say we should always be rushing ahead, but sometimes there seems to be text that almost drains the energy of the novel, is superfluous to the energy of the book.

So, to recap – it’s a weightier novel which means we can really come to understand each character as they feature, and each character in Pride and Prejudice is a gem. They are clearly definable, they have a specific agenda, or in the case of the main characters, they have a specific development to watch and to enjoy, to invest in, as a bystander.

And we don’t get this with Persuasion.

We have the character Anne, and Captain Wentworth her love interest. But the some of the other characters are almost clumsily dropped in, and the action too.

For example, it felt like the accident Louisa Musgrove (Mary’s sister-in-law) had was almost dropped in as an after-thought – as a convenient way to showcase Anne’s sensibility and practicality in the midst of an emergency to Captain Wentworth, in contrast with the ridiculousness of her rival. Characters somehow get clumsily dropped in to move the narrative along, and being a smaller novel, with almost the same number as Pride and Prejudice, we don’t get the time to invest in them, partly because it is a smaller novel, and partly because they are just not as well rounded or developed in our minds, which might be the reason why Pride and Prejudice is more popular. In this novel we get a chance to love or hate them, to invest in them, to laugh at their stupidity.

The same goes for Sense and Sensibility which I found difficult to read at times, because it was frustrating. The two sisters Eleanor and Marianne were very well dramatized in film, but in the book itself, there was so much confusion, mis matching and misunderstanding, with little resolution along the way. It persists in flogging the unresolved, uncommunicated misunderstanding between characters. And I just didn’t get that with Pride and Prejudice. Yes, there are miscommunications and difficulties but there is so much else going on, we aren’t hanging onto these. We don’t have to spend the whole novel hanging on the resolution of one problem, because there are so many other things going on.

And I felt the first time I read Pride and Prejudice this was Austen’s moment, I could feel the love coming out in it, even though it was in some ways a frivolous account on society, and a simple romantic plot: will they, won’t they? But they key to the beauty of this is: the portrayal of a gentlewoman by a gentlewoman who in that period, with such societal expectations out upon her, was sure enough of herself and her own mind, and her own wit and ability, to portray another in her image.

Elizabeth was intelligent and had something to say. Austen’s energy was injected into the novel through her. And this makes for exciting reading.