Review: Pride and Prejudice

Xiang Zhang, Copy

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a young student in the possession of a copy of “Pride and Prejudice,” must be in want of an excess amount of Ibuprofen to dull the mental pain from reading such a text. Indeed, if I were Jane Austen, the next five paragraphs of this review would be spent talking about how I opened the Google Doc that this review was written in. If this review were given an entire page of space, it would still take maybe a third of that space to reach the part where I would actually talk about Elizabeth or Darcy. In the meantime, you could read about the perils of finding which “Untitled document” is the real one, or the resourcefulness of “ Sort options. ” Now that’s some timeless literature.

 And of course, my sense of the book’s inferiority—of its being a degradation—of the written obstacles which had always opposed to inclination, would be dwelt on with a warmth which seemed due to the consequence I was wounding, but was very unlikely to be remotely comprehensible, because that’s what reading “Pride and Prejudice” is like. Say what you will about the British, but don’t they still speak English? Perhaps if Lady De Bourgh were to start quizzing Elizabeth on verb conjugations and noun-adjective agreement, I could convince myself that I was actually reading Ovid. The real metamorphosis is the change in my mental stability.

Not only is the prose so mystifying to read, Shakespeare could genuinely be Austen’s grandfather; Elizabeth marries Mr. Fitzwilliam over here because he was nice like two times and shelled out some money. Why couldn’t she just violently overthrow the monarchy? The ending is so disappointing it would be like if I unironically ended th-