So, here's the thing: no sooner do I post my first entry to this blog, about my intentions to read the first chapter of a famous novel each day, for 365 days, but I discover that 2012 is the National Year of Reading in Australia. Well, what do you know! How cool is that...a year dedicated to the noble art of reading, and I have just begun a blog about such a past-time. (Check out the official website at this link
hthttp://www.love2read.org.au/tp:// )
Today's chapter contains one of the most famous opening sentences of any book. Seriously, it would rank up there with Dickens' "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." and "In the beginning..." As soon as I started reading Pride and Prejudice, my mind was cast back to Year 10 English, and Mrs Gamble's attempts to introduce us to the finer points of being a gentleman. No sooner had I escaped high school than I took a unit in English Literature at college and was again confronted with Austen's most famous novel.
I'm a bit older now, and hopefully a little more mature, that I can finally appreciate this book for its characterisations, its sense of time and place and, most significantly, the brooding, barely suppressed tension between Elizabeth Bennett and Mr Darcy. But for now, it's the first line, from the first chapter, that allows me to truly set aside my prejudice:
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
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