Pride and Prejudice 6

Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
162 of 262 pages
Classic Novel

Quote from the book: “The general prejudice against Mr. Darcy is so violent, that it would be the death of half the good people in Meryton to attempt to place him in an amiable light.” This quote is important, because the part of the book that I read right now, is a lot about how many people dislike Mr. Darcy, and prefer Mr. Wickham, and that's why it would be hard to bring out the truth about what really happened between Mr. Darcy and Mr. Wickham.

What happened until now: Jane, to have a change of scenery and be able to forget about Mr. Bingley, goes to live with her aunt in London for a few months. Although it is the same place where Mr. Bingley, his sisters and Mr. Darcy are staying, she only gets a visit from Mrs. Bingley once, and that visit is enough to convince Jane that Caroline doesn’t want anything to do with her anymore.         
Elizabeth visits the freshly married couple, Charlotte and Mr. Collins in Rosings, where they live very close to Lady Catherine de Bourgh, and are often invited to dine and have tea with her. Elizabeth enjoys her stay there, until Mr. Darcy, who is a cousin of Lady de Bourgh, and his other cousin Colonel Fitzwilliam come to stay at Rosings for a few weeks. Elizabeth’s opinion of Mr. Darcy is very low, although she finds out that his opinion of her are the total opposite: he admits that he admires her and was in love with her for a long time already. He even proposes to her, but she refuses and tells him that he did too many bad things. When he asks what, she tells him about how he robbed Mr. Wickham of the money he was supposed to get from him, and during this conversation, Mr. Darcy also admits that it is his fault that Jane and Mr. Bingley detached. Elizabeth gets angry, and Mr. Darcy leaves, although he gives her a letter the next morning, where he explains that the affair with Mr. Wickham is totally different, that Mr. Wickham is the mean and disagreeable one, and that he tried to marry Mr. Darcy’s sister Georgiana just so he could get her money. Elizabeth understands, and can’t believe that she was so blind and ignorant all this time when she was with Mr. Wickham. The second problem though, she still doesn’t understand. Mr. Darcy’s reasoning of why he wanted to break apart Jane and Mr. Bingley is that he thought Jane wasn’t actually in love with him, while Mr. Bingley clearly showed his affection all the time.

This part of the book was actually a lot more interesting, and I hope it stays like this. I tried to concentrate less on the style of the author, but more on the words, and I actually learned a lot of new vocabulary.

Blog Question #6: I don’t think the partner reading helped a lot, although my mum said that she enjoyed it, because it was an opportunity for her to improve her English and learn new words and phrases. I liked that I had a second person to talk about the book, for example if I didn’t understand something or didn’t get the reasoning behind it. The best aspect of the partner reading was that I knew that I always had someone I could talk to about the book, and my mum said the same. Although it would have probably been even better if we had chosen a better book; and for my mum it would have been better to read a modern book, or at least written in a more modern style, so she could actually use the words and phrases she learned.