Saturday Rave: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

This week has seen Pride and Prejudice's 200th anniversary, so I feel rather obliged to mention it.

If that sounds grudging it's not because I don't admire the book. I think that after 200 years it's still one of the best novels ever written.

Personally, I think that Jane Austen's other book Emma is even more astonishingly wonderful. But it's close.

The reason I feel reluctant to write about Pride and Prejudice is that the world is already full of a great clamour of voices proclaimng that the book is especially theirs because it's about love/class/property/self-deception/ordinary people/well hot guys/money/jokes/idiots/passion/morals/beautiful writing/wit/twits/philosophy/growing up, and, especially, all about MEEE.

Ah well. I suppose that if I want to get across the fact that Pride and Prejudice, as well as being an absorbing and amusing story about fascinating people, is a work of utter genius, then that's probably quite a good way to do it.

Word To Use Today: prejudice. This word comes from the French word préjudice. Before that it came from the Latin word prejūdicium, which means a preceding judgement or disadvantage. The Latin word jūdex means judge.