Pride & Prejudice is 200 years old today (Penguin has a nice post on their cover art throughout the past age, for those visually inclined). Last year, Sense & Sensiblity celebrated the same milestone, something we commemorated in our "Jane Austen: fiction, history, fans" course. The other novels will follow suit, ending with the post-humously published Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in 2018.
I think it is amazing that novels which were written 200 years ago still resonate, and are still relevant and exciting today. People are still drawn to these novels and discover new subjects, angles, and layers in them. These are not just romantic novels for teenage girls, these are novels that paint a detailed, honest, sometimes ironic, often humerous, picture of the lives women in Austen's time. I have read them many times, am writing my dissertation about them, and will probably continue to read and love them for the rest of my life.
If you've never read any of her novels, but always wanted to, this is the perfect opportunity. Start with Pride & Prejudice, the most popular, accessable, and least 'layered' of them all. 200 years of enthusiastic readers cannot have been wrong.
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