Book review of Pride and Prejudice

傲慢与偏见读后感英文

Book Review of Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice is a comedy of manner wrote by Jane Austen in third-person narration. She wrote this story basically according to her personal experience, only she altered the end of the story. The story was set in England during 1796 and 1813, where the only way for women t o gain wealth is by marriage, and that’s why the topic of marrying a wealthy man can be seen throughout the whole novel.

Pride and Prejudice depicted two young men who had their deficiencies but eventually lived a happy life. Personally, I believe the secret of this novel’s success lies in true love, regardless of the reputation, secularity and wealth. Most people at that time were like Charlotte, their marriage were mostly driven by benefits, they wanted to pursuit a love driven solely by heart but they can’t. This novel more or less realized their dream, it gave them a hope for better marriage.

However, for me I thought this novel unrealistic, it was only written because it can hardly be found in real life. For one thing, the love between Elizabeth and Darcy were like the one between Austen and Lefroy, but in real life, it turned out that Austen ended up alone and Lefroy married another woman. It was not that they didn’t have true love, it was just that we often underestimated the power of secularity. For another, we can’t just throw away all our responsibility and care only about what we need. There is no perfect thing in the world.

The love i n the novel was unrealistic, because there’s no such thing as perfection. Take Charlotte as an example, I actually think she was right. She was 27 years old, she had no money, no prospects, and she was already a burden to her parents. Marrying Collins was like the only choice she had left. Personally, I believe that we cannot leave all our burden to others just because of our own happiness, it was selfish. It was a truth universally acknowledged, that we can’t build our world perfect in every way, we can only weigh between the pros and cons. Most woman were not as lucky as Elizabeth, if they all want the love Elizabeth wanted, most of them would end up alone, just like Austen. We cannot live our life just for one in thousands possibilities.

I understand that the author just wanted to depict a perfect world, however, since we were very young, we were stuffed with all kinds of fairy tales, child movies,

傲慢与偏见读后感英文

novels, even the text books, that all leaded to happy endings. However, as I grow up, I see the world is totally different. For example, in the movie Shanghai Noon, there was a princess whose favorite book was The Frog Prince, she liked the ending very much, “So the princess leaned and kissed the frog, but as she did, he became a handsome prince, and they rode of f to his kingdom, where they lived happily ever after.” But after the emperor asked her to marry an ugly, vulgar, disrespectful guy just to consolidate his power, she said there’s no such thing as happily ever after, not for a real princess. And it was so predictable that the only choice she left was to run away. And upon all this build my point, since you adults know how disillusioned we would be when we find out the truth, why did you fed us with lies at the first place? I just thought even as a kid, we deserve to know the truth about the world out there.

My personal suggestion is that, read this book and the life of Austen at the same time. It’s all right to worship true love, but we also have to know the harsh reality in the real life.