Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish - reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!
Last week, I shared what I learned about punting on the Cam. Jean shared a book of embroidery inspired by British culture from a thousand years ago. Tina reviewed the psychological thriller Good Me, Bad Me by Ali Land. Sim shared a photo of those iconic red phone booths in London.
I'm kind of embarrassed to say that I'm not entirely sure that I've read Pride and Prejudice. I know that I read Sense and Sensibility in high school. I was sampling authors at that time, so I got distracted by Dickens and Thackeray. I got on an Austen kick about twenty years ago and remember reading Mansfield Park, Persuasion, and Northanger Abbey in quick succession. I probably read and Pride and Prejudice at the same time, but my memories are all confused with the movie and television versions of those stories.
I re-watched the 1995 television series of Pride and Prejudice, the one with Colin Firth, recently. It's available for streaming on Amazon. I was more entranced than I expected to be by the story and the characters. In that version, Mary Bennet is insufferable with her moralizing.
This review, of a production of the play last year in California, says that Mary's character has improved in the two years since the end of the events described in Pride and Prejudice. All that reading has given her some depth.
Did you love the Bennet's house, Longbourn, as it appeared in the 1995 TV series? It's for sale: Luckington Court. If you have an extra £7,750,000 lying around, it might be the perfect home for an Anglophile and Austen fan.
About Joy Weese Moll
a librarian writing about books
