It’s one of my favourite books and you can read it over and over, it never gets old. Most people who read a book will want to change the story in some way and for me the thing that needs changing in Pride and Prejudice is the part where Elizabeth goes to Pemberley and meets Mr Darcy on his enormous and very expensive estate.
It always leaves one wondering, if he had *not* had a lovely country estate and ten thousand a year, would she have chosen him?
To me the book is brilliant but it would have been even better if she had met him again somewhere else and hadn’t gone to his estate until they were already married.
Would you change the book, if you’re a fan of it?
Ah, another P&P fan, I see (did you fall in love with the recent movie, or the earlier BBC production c.1995?).
I will confess that I did not like the way Darcy was presented at the first reading of the book in my teens. The part about Elizabeth having a change of heart after she had seen Pemberley entirely escaped my notice as an event of great significance, at that age. It stumped me then, with my limited understanding of nuance and irony at that age, that Elizabeth would even agree to, much less, wish to marry Darcy at the end of the novel.
Years later, on revisiting the book (again c. 1995 ;-) ), I spent a good deal of time laughing at all the not-always-gentle humor with which Austen portrays the characters. Elizabeth’s admiring the riches of Pemberley and letting it bias her more in favor of Darcy helps mark her as moving from the idealist view of love and romance to a more practical world view, which she very much espouses in all her sayings, no matter how much of a romantic she might be inside. That was possibly as romantic as it was possible to be in the 1800’s writing market, without incurring the wrath of the publishers and readers.
On the other hand, if you are merely looking at P&P as a predecessor for your average feel-good period romances, I guess the offerings of modern romance novelists would be more likely to have sugary-sweet do-no-wrong heroines than the works of Jane Austen. Or if you are inclined to Victorian writing, ‘Jane Eyre’ would fall more in line with the case of the romantic impassioned, non-venal heroine.