What is your favorite Jane Austen book and why?

Question

What is your favorite Jane Austen book and why? What is your favorite Character from that book and why? Do you have a favorite excerpt from that book/ Character?



Mine is Lizzy from Pride & Prejudice because she is strong minded willful and refused to marry for anything less then love!



My favorite excerpt from the book is:

"I do, I do like him,'' she replied, with tears in her eyes, "I love him. Indeed he has no improper pride. He is perfectly amiable." (Jane Austen/ Lizzy Pride & prejudice)

Answer 1

Sense and Sensibility... -ESPECIALLY after Emma Thompson's version of the Movie came out. The book is just so RICH with the emotions of the Period in England...-I've loved that story ALL my life (& I'm a GUY!!!).

Answer 2

Favorite Jane Austen Novels

Answer 3

I actually have two favorites" Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion. I love Pride and Prejudice because it seems perfect to me. I was 13 when i first read it and i still read it. It's the type of book i can read and still be excited about when Lizzy and Darcy finally get together. My favorite part i think is the first marriage proposal because of all that energy and it just goes so fast. My favorite character is Mr. Bennet because he is just awesome even though he has a lot of flaws, i just really like his wit.

My other favorite is Persuasion because it is so mature compared to her other books. It is a book where you know that the main characters are in love and that they have a history together. It is just so heart wrenching for me when Anne thinks they will never be together again. My favorite part in this novel is in the letter where he reads "You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago." That part just makes my heart beat faster lol. My favorite character in this novel is Anne because she has a maturity that makes me like her.

Answer 4

My favorite is Pride and Prejudice and l love Mr Darcy and Lizzie too! But my favorite excerpt comes from Emma when they are walking in the garden and they admit the truth to each other, it's so romantic.
I like sense and sensibility and lady Susan the least of Austens but i suspect thats because i haven't given them a fair chance yet. :-)

Answer 5

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I agree with the others who said that Pride and Prejudice is my favorite of the Austen books, although I also really like Emma. Actually, I really like them all.... Since you like Jane Austen's books, you might also like these books that I liked (that remind me a little in tone of her works): I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons Summers at Castle Auburn by Sharon Shinn (this one is romantic fantasy) Austenland by Shannon Hale Little Women by Louisa May Alcott You might also stop by your local library and see if the Reader's Advisory librarian has any other suggestions. I have this feeling that I am forgetting some.

Answer 6

The best one by Austen has to be Pride and Prejudice. You simply hate Darcy then adore him by the end. What other author could bring you to such extremes? Brönte sisters would be a good place to start for other novels.

Answer 7

I love all of Jane Austen's books, though my least favorite is Mansfield Park (partly because I don't like that first cousins marrying plot, even though it was an accepted practice at the time).

Of all of them, my favorite is Pride and Prejudice. It's so light and witty and pithy and full of wonderful dialog and scenes. It is so much fun to read and the characters are all unique and seem real.

I like the excerpt you included. I have to say, though, the beginning always gets me, "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters."

I also really like Mr. Darcy's letter.

I also like this: "He then went away, and Miss Bingley was left to all the satisfaction of having forced him to say what gave no one any pain but herself." That's in the scene after Elizabeth and the Gardiners leave Pemberly after their visit and Miss Bingley begins berating Elizabeth to Mr. Darcy and he says, "Yes,'' replied Darcy, who could contain himself no longer, "but that was only when I first knew her, for it is many months since I have considered her as one of the handsomest women of my acquaintance.''

I agree that I like Elizabeth the best. She has a good sense of humor and is smart, strong and loyal and she won't fall in with her mother's plans to marry her off to the first eligible man who offers. Even though she's so wrong about both Mr. Darcy and Mr. Wickham, in general she's a good judge of character without being blinded by vanity. (That's why she's so appalled at her own fault when she admits the truth of Mr. Darcy's letter. That's another thing I like about her: she readily admits it when she's been wrong.)

BTW: I love the proposal scenes (1st Mr. Collins then Mr. Darcy's 1st and then his 2nd), and I love the scene where she stands her ground with Lady Catherine when she comes to try to make Elizabeth promise never to accept a proposal by Mr. Darcy!

Addition: I have to add that I adore Captain Wentworth's letter to Anne in Persuasion.

Answer 8

lol I'm not a great P&P fan actually.. It's a bit lite for me and Darcy isn't really my cup of tea! I love Emma. It's a real masterpeice all about someone's sexual development- the reason DH Lawrence hated Austen is that she was better at his game than he was himself! Persuasion is very good too- it's a good book for guys as well. It's always reminded me of Sofia Coppola's 'Lost in Translation'

Answer 9

Probably Emma would be my favourite, just because there is such a huge twist in it. I also really like Northanger
Abbey.

Answer 10

It depends on whether I'm in for a "large canvas" or a small one to paint on with my imagination. Pride and Prejudice is a large canvas, with room for all sorts of character types. Emma is a painting in miniature, with swift, exact strokes deftly applied to fewer characters.

As someone who has read and re-read all six Austen novels (the ones she completed on her own and excluding the uncompleted manuscripts others have attempted to finish for her) over and over--and who discusses them endlessly with people who do the same--let me share something that "infects" us after many, many readings. We begin by liking best the main characters. Lizzy in P & P and Emma in the novel named for her. We love each character's foibles (Lizzy's hasty prejudice, Emma's wishful thinking and over-confidence that lets her imagine that things will turn out as she wills them rather than as they rationally should) as much as the character's better qualities.

But if you read the novels a dozen (or more times), a strange malady will aflict you. You will start to live for the appearance of the most ridiculous characters! As lovely a romance as the latest P & P movie was, the wonderfully ridiculous characters were either cut out or bled dry. When you read the whole story, no one is more deliciously ridiculous than the pretentious little toady, Mr. Collins. In fact, he is the hands-down favorite of people I've known who had re-read the Austin novels over many years. Mr. Collins' best "scenes" are usually in his fawning letters. It's wonderful how he advises Mr. Bennett to forgive "as a Christian" his wayward daughter Lydia but to never accept her in his home again. And though Lizzy is Mr. Collins' second choice (Jane was briefly his first choice) and Charlotte his third choice, in his proposals to the latter two, he tells them both that "almost" as soon as he arrived in their neighborhood, "I singled you out as the companion of my future life." He recycled his words, an economy indeed!

When I first read the Austen novels, my least favorite was Mansfield Park. Fanny seemed such a limp doormat compared to feisty Emma and wry Lizzie. But Fanny wears better on subsequent readings. This is the book that tackles the largest ethical questions, though the most recent movie inserted touches of deviant sexual behavior in Jamaica that the novel does not even hint at. Another quiet heroine I have come to respect is the dignified Anne of Austen's posthumous novel, Persuasion. In this novel, it is the heroine's sisters who are the most ridiculous and also mean-spirited characters, though Mary, the whinning younger sister, is more pathetic than hateful.

Sense and Sensibility is also a quieter story (though with a darker threat of death than most Austen stories) that develops the male characters better than other Austen stories do, I believe. And although Northanger Abbey is usually dismissed as the least of the Austen Six, reading one of the popular gothic novels Austen was spoofing really raises your estimation of this slim volume. What I like best about this tale is how Austen started out to write a satire but came to love her main character despite that goal. The story changes as Catherine becomes real to Austen--and to us. The best scene in that story is when Catherine, her mind swimming with gothic horrors from her silly reading, opens a drawer in the grand house she is visiting. She imagines she has found lost letters that will reveal murder and mayhem and so frightens herself that she fumbles her candle and is left in the dark. By morning light, she discovers the source of her gothic terror is an old laundry inventory.

So until you've read the novels many, many times, enjoy the sprightly heroines of Emma and P & P. In years to come, I'm betting you'll sneak back to chortle over the ridiculous characters we love to hate: Mr. Collins and his ilk!