I rarely reread books, but I pulled Pride & Prejudice off my shelf for a second reading this weekend because I was in the mood for comfort reading. I wanted to sit up in bed and read all day, and that is, in fact, pretty much how I spend my Sunday. Pride & Prejudice has often been something I've turned to for comfort, but not the book. I've spent many a sick, or sad, or hungover day watching the full 6-hours of the BBC miniseries, some episodes twice over. It was strange to reread the book being now so familiar with its content.
I read Pride & Prejudice for the first and only (until now) time in 2004, when I was 28. I somehow managed to get through all my schooling and early adulthood without ever having read Jane Austen, and I had also pretty much managed to avoid all the adaptations of her books (the only exception I can think of is Clueless). At the time, I was unemployed and living in a sublet and had run through the small collection of books I had that weren't in storage, so I pulled Pride & Prejudice from the small fiction collection I found in my sublet apartment.* I wasn't expecting to, but I loved it. I didn't know it would be so accessible, so funny. At the time, I had read hardly any 19th century English literature at all and I lumped the Brontës and Jane Austen (and all the rest of it, really) together in my head and it just didn't interest me. Reading Pride & Prejudice changed my whole perspective. I went on to read every other Jane Austen book in quick succession and a few years later I spent a year reading almost exclusively 19th century English literature and who knows if I would have done any of this if I had not picked Pride & Prejudice off the shelf in my sublet.
Between 2004 and now, I also became quite a consumer of Jane Austen adaptations for film and TV. I go to them again and again for comfort viewing and, especially, to the Pride & Prejudice BBC miniseries. I know it nearly by heart. When I started the book again, my first thought was that it felt clunky and stiff, compared to what I had become so familiar with watching and hearing. I got over that and became absorbed in the book pretty quickly after the first chapter, but I never really got over knowing the lines already. I was surprised at how true the BBC series was to the book in language. I tried, as I was reading, to be particularly attentive to the bits that were left out of the miniseries to see if they gave a different sense of anything. Occasionally I was gratified.
In any case, it was a pleasure, and really was comforting, to reread Pride & Prejudice. Maybe I should reread books more often.
*This is also the story of how I started Proust, because P&P only kept me occupied for a couple days.
