Customer Reviews

Flirting With Pride And Prejudice: Fresh Perspectives On The Original Chick Lit Masterpiece (Smart Pop series)

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The more subtly packaged Flirting With Pride and Prejudice (Benbella, $14.95) is a far better choice for serious readers in need of a diversion. Editor Jennifer Crusie neatly sums up this witty collection by describing it as a series of dates with Jane Austen. "Some writers were serious about her, some were looking for a good time and some, frankly, took advantage of her," she writes.

All the writers offer original takes on Austen's work, from "Does This Petticoat Make Me Look Fat?" in which Beth Kendrick explores the pressure on women to live up to societal standards of perfection, to Lawrence Watt-Evans' study, "A World at War," which looks at the looming Napoleonic wars just outside the main action of Pride and Prejudice.

Shanna Swendson's critical essay "The Original Chick-Lit Masterpiece" identifies the key difference between romance novels and chick lit. In chick lit, the handsome man who appears in the first chapter might or might not end up being The One. And Swendson makes a compelling case for Austen's Elizabeth Bennet as a chick-lit heroine, a woman who, even as she hunts for a wealthy husband, displays a wry cynicism about the role of money in romance.

The contributions are uneven, especially the "fan fiction" pieces that imagine new lives and chapters for Austen characters. Jill Winters' "The Secret Life of Mary," in which one of the Bennet girls has a passionate affair with an Irish footman, is brilliant, but others fall flat.

Michelle Cunah offers a rich comic premise -- how the many misunderstandings in Pride and Prejudice might have been avoided with cell phones, if only they'd been invented then -- but fails to deliver a truly Austen-worthy satire. Even the worst selections in Crusie's compilation, though, are far better than the few almost-bright moments in Santini's novel.

And, since each piece is short, you can easily read them during the breaks in your busy schedule of calls to the G-8 finance ministers.

It is a truth, universally acknowledged that Jane Austen's popularity will continue for a long time to come. With another version of Pride and Prejudice on the screens and the Bollywood version, Bride and Prejudice recently released she will continue in the foreground for a while yet. The writing of a new type of critical literature to allow new readers to take new perspectives on her work is therefore timely, and this collection is not too bad either.

I have some reservations on it from the start. I found Jennifer Cruise to be mostly quite good in her (short) introductions to each chapter, but was occassionally annoyed by her blithe ignorance. At one point, for instance, she insisted that Jane Austen 'scholars' all thought of Jane as 'never having a thought that wasn't pure"......Excuse me?! Austen scholars who have studied her letters know indeed, despite Cassandra's heavy editing and likely huge destruction of her sisters Letters, that Jane Austen had many thoughts that were not indulgent and pure.

There were 25 Essays in here, of which 5 were fan fiction or continuations, and at least 2 others might as well have been. There was one quite fun script for a Bennet/bacherlorette reality show. But for the most part these ones just didn't interest me greatly and I skimmed through them.

Beth Kendricks first item sets the tone of the book, relating the choosing of a husband (Elizabeth's burden as a single woman) to modern day choices. For the most part I enjoyed this, but one thing I felt she could have mentioned was that under property laws of the time not only was Elizabeth without money, but any she had became the property of her husband. Choosing a husband was more than a simple process of hit and miss as it is now - it really was for life.

Jennifer O'connells next essay struck me with the same issues - of course her friends wouldn't give Charlotte the advice not to marry Mr Collins - Charlotte was competing for husbands with the 5 Bennet Girls, she also had her younger sister following behind. Mr Collins had money or at least the living at Lady de bourghs, and would be rich once Mr Bennet died, and he was not cruel, just a fool. So for Elizabeth to persist in advising her otherwise was against Charlottes best interests. Still it was salient advice for modern readers

The two best essays, I thought were Jane Austen and History and these are highly recommnended. Jo Beverly gives a very interesting and readable outline of just why there were Gold Diggers in 1813 (the year this book was published) and what the income meant for the Bennet family. Also pointing out that Men were gold diggers too. Beverly pointed out Mr Wickham was a gold digger but interestingly she didn't point out that Darcy's cousin whom Elizabeth met at Rosings was also a gold digger - he had to be as he had no money himself - the difference between himself and Wickham is that he had ethical standards.

Lawrence Watt-Evans also wrote an excellent essay on 'a world at war' pointing out the conflict in dates. The book was first written around 1797 and revised in 1802, but revised again somewhere between 1809 and 1812 and published in 1813. The action takes part over a year from June through to the following june, however the three dates in the book do not correspond to two consecutive years. Watt-Evans outlines the two major arguments from R W Chapman (1811-1812) and PBS Andrews who settles for a period 1797-1802 (saying that it was started in 1797 but the latter half revised substantially in 1802 thus the descrepancy in dates and the small section at the end which talks about Peace (referring to Peace in Amiens). This is a great small outline of the research of these dates, but I think he would have done well - given that his article is about war with the French to have read John Brehan and Clive Caplan;s Article in Persuasions #14 which convincingly argues that the date this was set is in actuality more likely 1794/5 because after that date no Militia were billeted out of season in inland towns of Britain as barracks were built for them. The key element of Pride and Prejudice, the billeting of the Militia could not happened after 1795. There is a great deal more convincing edidence in this article and I strongly recommend it

Elisabeth Fairchild wrote a reasonable review of Pride and Prejudice in Chick lit but I found it unnecessarily confusing as she referred to onions, broccoli to try to clarify them....yeah, confusing isn't it? I just couldn't read Adam Roberts article about the Masturbating Critic, it just was too self indulgent. I also found Elizabeth Baratz-Logsted's article about who has Pride and who has prejudice unncessarily naive. Surely the themes of Pride and of Prejudice relate to all characters at one time or another?

I loved Jennifer Reillys analogy of Pride and Prejudice with Fiddler on the Roof - Masterful! I also really enjoyed Laura Resnick's take on Bride and Prejudice - I would only add that the opening number in this movie (reflecting the sedate country dance in the novel) is a hugely ironic moment by the director and Well done to her, the movie was great by the way.

I guess I could go on, but the only one I will mention in passing here is Erin Daileys short peice in the form of a questionnaire - I didn't think I would like it, and I don't generally find these amusing, but I loved her questions - they have a great modern hilariousness to them for instance, "The guy you liked dumped you because his friend told him to, now he is suddenly interested in you again.....what do you do? I mean when you put it like that don't Bingley and Darcy sound callow?

So the theme of this book is bringing Austen to the modern reader and I think this book does it more than averagely well. There is really no way that you can translate her work from one century to another without loosing something. So these various angles on either explaining it or interpreting it for the modern reader are varied in approach and in success. However I would definitely recommend this to anyone who is interested in Austen. A pretty good attempt.

Flirting with Pride & Prejudice is both pleasing and disappointing. Some of the essays are quite entertaining and some offer unusual insight that make interesting reading. I found myself laughing out loud while reading a couple of them. A few of them are a dead bore and as I read them I kept wondering why they were included in the collection.

What is missing is Jennifer Crusie's input. I was looking forward to reading what this intelligent and quirky writer has to say about one of my favorite novels--and all she contributed was a brief introduction describing how busy she is and how honored she is to have been selected for the project.

Flirting with Pride and Prejudice is supposed to be a light-hearted look at Austen's best known novel from a contemporary "Chick-lit" perspective, mostly made up of essays by current writers ruminating on the modern-day popularity of the novel, and even a section of Pride and Prejudice sequels or rewrites, such as ones from the perspectives of Georgiana Darcy or Mary Bennet. This sounds like a promising read, a fun way to spend a few hours reading. Unfortunately, it's too light. The essays (if you could call them that, as they are rather too short and emphemeral to be true essays) do not have much of a clear point to them, other saying that the novel is a predecessor to Bridget Jones's Diary and similar contemporary novels, or that we all can relate to Elizabeth Bennet. This all becomes rather repetitive and tiresome after the third or fourth essay. Also, far too many of the writers spend their words reiterating the plot of the novel. Chances are, if someone's picked up this book, they've read Pride and Prejudice, or at the very least, seen one of the movie or television versions. I found myself skimming through most of the paragraphs of boring plot summary. I will admit a few of the writings are amusing, like "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Critic", a fictional dialogue between an Austen scholar and a romance reader, or interesting, like the piece by Karen Joy Fowler, author of the Jane Austen Book Club. I do not regret having read it; but I wish I'd saved my money and borrowed it from the library instead.

Misled by the marketing, I was hoping to find this a volume of accessible critical analysis of Jane Austen's influence on modern fiction. Boy, was I wrong.

Only two of the essays were really thought-provoking: Lauren Baratz-Logsted's essay on Austen's heirs in chick-lit and Karen Joy Fowler's discussion of Austen's modern audience. However, I also enjoyed Jo Beverly's interesting exploration of women's economic prospects in Austen's period, which brought Elizabeth Bennet's budget into modern terms.

Lawrence Watt-Evans' essay on war in Austen (or the absence of war in Austen) was very thorough if somewhat out-of-place.

Aside from these stand-outs, the other essays are, for the most part, musings on Austen's relevance to the authors' personal lives -- light, amusing fare. Some of them are rewritings or sequels of part of Austen's own work, and I can't evaluate these: I found them tiresome, but perhaps that's just because they weren't what I wanted from the book.

This collection of dates with Jane Austen has something for everyone, and the diversity of the essays points to the continuing popularity of "Pride and Prejudice". Several writers examine Austen as The Mother of All Chick-lit, leading the reader to wonder at the esteem in which Austen is held, while the thousands of books she spawned languish in their pink ghettos. Several writers examine details of Austen's world, while others freely enter in to it, and still others drag her into the 21st century.

I don't know when I've enjoyed a collection of essays so much. A few of the writers I've read elsewhere, but many are new to me. Not all of the twenty-five perspectives offered will appeal equally, but all are well-written, informative, and amusing. And they'll all send you back to the original, thinking.

a mixed bag but enjoyable overall. i am always fascinated to read new takes on Jane Austen's books which are among my favorites and Pride and Prejudice is one of her very best. The articles by Adam Roberts, Joyce Millman, Shanna Swendson, Jill Winters, Erin Dailey, and Jane Espenson are the stand outs in this book.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that magazines should be judged by their best contents and collections and journals by their worst, as they are not under the same pressure to meet deadlines and fill pages. The worst here is Mercedes Lackey who in the absence of anything useful or interesting to say has inserted an advertisement for her own writings, but the competition was pretty severe, including Adam Roberts who has used his pages to defend simply indefensible conduct on the part of certain (other) academic critics. Crusie, an excellent writer herself, should not have signed off as editor to a collection containing these articles. Jane Austen wrote out P&P at least three times longhand, and sweated off at least a quarter of her text before it went to a publisher. I'm not sure some of these authors did more than type once and hit the spellcheck.
All of which said, Jo Beverley's "Gold Diggers of 1813" is first-rate work--a neat summary for beginners of the dilemma of an Austen heroine. It deserves to be reprinted in better company. Until it is, this one will stay on the shelves.

Reading this book of essays is much like sitting down to discuss Pride and Prejudice with a group of friends over coffee. Not every essay is a winner. Some cause laughing out loud (what if the characters in the book had been equipped with cell phones, indeed). A few sound like English class assignments written the night before a deadline. There is something worthwhile in all of them, though. This is a good book to take traveling since the reader can pick it up, read a brief essay or two, and come back to it later. One reason P & P remains a top seller is that each generation sees the book with a fresh perspective--as displayed nicely in Flirting with Pride and Prejudice.

Flirting with Pride and Prejudice is a delightful collection of essays about Jane Austen's classic novel Pride and Prejudice. Flirting with Pride and Prejudice is divided into sections, each fitting together perfectly. Jane and History deals with the more important topic of war. The other essay is about gold diggers around the time of Pride and Prejudice. Jane's Hero deals with Mr. Darcy and how women will always be attracted to the bad boys, especially Colin Firth. Jane's Untold Stories adds to the novel by giving other characters a life, including the hardly mentioned sister Mary. Charlotte even has an entire essay written for her. The collection ends with some twenty first century drama, including reality TV and cell phones during proposals. While serious in parts, Flirting with Pride and Prejudice mostly is a light read about the original writer of "chic lit."

Flirting with Pride and Prejudice is a wonderful collection of stories, mostly about how Jane Austen inspired today's writers but also about the movies and Colin Firth. I enjoyed the collection though I am not entirely sure that I read the whole Austen novel. I know. I will go out and buy it soon. Flirting with Pride and Prejudice will inspire readers to pick up the classic and read into it.