Why Pride & Prejudice Was A Bad Novel

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

My push towards Jane Austen was during a history lesson at school where we were being taught the effects of books in English society. I'd heard of her much quoted Pride and Prejudice before, and having it mentioned in the lesson got me seriously fascinated. So I decided to buy a collection of her books. Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion. Within a week i'd finished the former two, and was halfway through the 3rd. Know that I never leave a book unfinished, but for the first time, I really wished my brain had the capacity to ditch a novel.

My hate is mostly directed towards the well known 'Pride and Prejudice' here. It was mildly interesting and at times I actually wanted to find out what happened in the end but it was just not my kind of book. Jane Austen, seems to have landed herself a cult like fan following by pulling the whole "Byronic Hero" stunt over her largely female readers and she has simply happened to do it first. Meaning that she came up with the original, proverbial "bad boy" of this lustrum's teenage fiction books. And I know quite well that if anyone were to read this post, they would probably cringe and throw insults my way at my blatant disrespect for an enormously famed author,  but at the most, all they can really say is that Mr. Darcy is "drool-worthy" (I've been hearing that a lot) and that I wouldn't know a good book if it danced in front of me wearing Dobby's tea cozy. It wasn't a bad book, but it wasn't all that great either. I found nothing special in her writing and I all but think of her as as nothing better than an over-hyped Victorian era chick lit author. In fact, if you want to go further, I'm going to go ahead and say she's the reason for the recent BS that's been hitting the market ever since she started the genre ( 'Those Pricey Thakur Girls'. WHAT?)

I mean, Spare me the age old "Handsome-broody-rich-guy-falls-in-love-with-average-looking-sarcastic-girl" plot-line. Elizabeth herself is an extremely flawed character, and I don't even like her for it. All she did was base her opinion off of rumors and what other people said to her and judged others by it. The only time I even remotely admired her was when she sat in front of Catherine and did a good job of defending herself, and even then the entire argument seemed foolish. On top of that, Ms. Austen seems to think of all pretty girls as "silly". I  saw what she did to Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, because even though she ended up happily married to the Colonel, it was clearly not what her younger self would have wanted. In Pride and Prejudice, her two pretty sisters are portrayed as Victorian-era bimbos, and her pretty older sister is often accused of being nice to the point of idiocy. One could argue that the author was trying to bring out the message that looks aren't everything, but after one point or several "fine eyes" later, she just sounds extremely bitter.

Often it is argued that the book was meant to be a satire. Personally, I think that's an excuse for the character's irrational behavior and obsession with the business of another. Elizabeth Bennet is supposed to be intelligent, yet she forms an unreasonable opinion of Mr. Darcy on the words of another. I don't think she held an actual conversation with the man to actually judge him for who he was. She also doesn't have the courtsy to apologise to the man after he reveals all that he's done for her, that too after he had not for than 3 close encounters with her (the number may be wrong, but frankly, I don't care) The book even has a cliched 'mean girl' out to get the main leads hand in marriage along with a match-making and embarrassing mother!

Just shoot me already.

So why is this book on Guardian List of Books you can't live without? I don't know. Like I said, she has an age old cult following simply because she did it first. The only other reason I can think of for reading her is to analyse English society at its time and even then I don't think that this is the best book on the market. Jane Austen is revered for the simple reason that most girls rave about the book by just having seen the movie or the BBC miniseries, which I can understand because it supposedly wasn't all that bad (according to my sister), but regardless, Jane Austen of all authors, does not deserve the mantle on which she stands. And this is not an opinion, it is a fact. Nothing can counter the argument that her plot was a bore, her writing was just average and just like Twilight, she somehow appealed to the female population and developed a cult following that will get unreasonably offended if you tried to reason your opinion otherwise. It kills me that such a boring and irrelevant book has supposedly "made its mark" on literature. 

Cheers!
Ruka of the School of Insanity