Today@Dal

From "Austen's power: 200 eyars of Pride and Prejudice," posted to CBC.ca on Monday:

"It’s a love story, but it's an intelligent love story," says Rohan Maitzen, associate professor of English at Dalhousie University in Halifax.

"It's a love story that's mature and witty and it's about articulate, intelligent people who both have to learn and change in order for that romance to reach its very satisfying conclusion."

And that, suggests Maitzen, is an enticing model for us all.

"It's not romance as silly adolescence. It's not romance as teenage angst," she says.

"I think sometimes people who have seen versions rather than read it are a little surprised in the book. It's a very intellectual process of internal development. So although it's very romantic, it's about desire and gratification, it's kind of an interestingly voyeuristic novel."

While Pride and Prejudice has been roundly praised, not everyone has been a fan of Austen's second novel.

Indeed, some of the criticism came from other famous authors, including Charlotte Bronte and Mark Twain.

Bronte found the novel "limited," says Dalhousie's Maitzen. "She said there's no sense of the fresh air, there's no sense of the big expanse of life, there's no poetry in it, which seems to me a fair criticism, but you can see why Charlotte Bronte might say that because her idea of the novel would be so different."

Mark Twain was similarly not amused, Maitzen adds. "He said … every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shinbone."

Read the rest of this article at CBC.ca.