Open Book: Pride and Prejudice - 200th Anniversary Special
Books and Authors
BBC
4.2 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 13 January 2013
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
To mark the 200th anniversary of the publication of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Mariella Frostrup travels to Austen's home in Chawton to discover why this novel has remained so universally popular, the story around its publication and what it has to say to modern readers.
Transcript
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| 0:47.5 | Hello, for today's open book, I'm in the leafy village of Chorton in the beautiful Hampshire countryside, |
| 0:53.3 | home for the last years of her life, |
| 0:55.2 | to one of the most famous novelists in the world, Jane Austen. |
| 0:59.3 | Her ample but modest cottage which she shared with her mother, sister Cassandra and family friend Martha Lloyd, |
| 1:05.6 | is situated right on this small main road through the village and opposite the Greyfriar pub, very handy to observe life literally going by. |
| 1:14.9 | It had been lent to them in 1809 by her older brother Edward after he'd inherited substantial estates. |
| 1:20.8 | There you can hear the more 21st century edition of a car rather than a carriage. |
| 1:25.6 | It's now the Jane Austen House Museum, and it was in this |
| 1:28.8 | cottage that she wrote or revised her books, including her most popular Pride and Prejudice, |
| 1:34.4 | published 200 years ago this month. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man |
| 1:40.8 | in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. However little known |
| 1:45.7 | the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well |
| 1:51.1 | fixed in the minds of the surrounding families that he is considered as a rightful property of someone |
| 1:56.0 | or other of their daughters. One of the most famous opening lines in English literature from Pride and Prejudice |
| 2:02.0 | published in January 1813, a razor-sharp social satire that wittily tells the story of Elizabeth |
... |
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