From the Gregolt and Previn files:

[pyat]

While making an initial foray into Pride and Prejudice I could not help but be drawn up short by a single sentence on the 2nd page.

“When she was discontented, she fancied herself nervous.”

“Nervous” in this case is being used in the old sense, as in "suffering disorder of the nervous system.” In modern terms, a mental health problem.

Gosh, I sure don’t know anyone who fit that description. No sir.

Comments

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

Ha! Mrs Bennett does have a tendency to self-absorption, but I think mostly because the surrounding world confounds her so, and so pushes back in the only way she knows how: by imagining it as personal persecution. That said, she does love her daughters, and her husband. When they're not confounding her.

You'd probably be confounded as well, if you had to put up with the mercurial Mr Bennett (especially considering a large part of his daily enjoyment seems to come from taking the piss out of his daughters and his wife)...

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Yes, even by the end of the first chapter I have him solidly placed in the category of "that annoying coworker who is always rolling his eyes and winking as soon as the person he was talking to has turned his or her back, and you're sure he does it to you, too."

[thebitterguy]

Is there a single character in the book who doesn't remind you of that person?

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Most of them don't, thus far!

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

To be fair to Mr Bennett, I think he very much loves his wife and children; it's just that he's very bored and he's surrounded by women, who's behaviour is a semi-constant amusement to him. Unfortunately for them (and him), his level of intelligence, and his off-kilter sense of humour, leads him to tease them, sometimes too much, as a source of personal amusement. But I honestly never thought of him as cruel or malicious; neither Mrs Bennett. I don't think their children could have turned out so well as they did if the Bennett's didn't love them very much and fundamentally do right by them, and each other.

[nottheterritory.livejournal.com]

Most of the people I've talked to about the story were very fond of Mr. Bennett, so it always comes as a shock when Darcy rebukes him later - which in turn heightens the feeling of crisis and regret he feels when it's clear that his bemused indifference has landed Lydia in trouble.

(I'm sorry, there are no spoiler alerts for 200 year old classics of the Modern Western Canon)

I still liked him a lot though.

One of things that is fascinating to me about P&P is that, for a 'chick book' the men in it, especially Darcy, are extremely potent masculine fantasies - I mean Bond has nothing on Darcy.

[nottheterritory.livejournal.com]

Gosh, I sure don’t know anyone who fit that description. No sir.

What did I tell you!

[pyat.livejournal.com]

You did indeed tell me!

[sassy-fae.livejournal.com]

*cackles, because I am a bad person *