What I present is inevitably fallible since it is authentically original.

　　 With both its sensible and courageous heroine's denial of courtship vaccum of mutual respect and reciprocal love and the fulfilling end indicating the matrimony based on genuine love, Pride and Prejudice has long been my favourite novel since my early teenhood. It is true that "Pride and Prejudice" enjoys universal favor, it is ture that it's acknowledged as one of the greatest novels in the 19th century and its author, Jane Austen, has been respected as one of the most distinguished female writer in history.

　　 Yet the re-reading of "P&P" had offered me a new way of understanding and evaluating this classical masterpiece. Elizabeth was once my role model since she shows genuine interests in books and she should know what she wants in marriage. Lizzie is the prototype of a daring princess--she had the mind of her own and would never throw herself to wealthy men; she has good command of skills to argue and to refuse; she undertook the responsibility to protect her youger sister when her much-withdrawing father shuned it; she was not suppressed by her mother like her poor father and nor was she ruined by her mother like her younger sisters; she denied being submissive as Mr Collins offered an courtship. As a young girl who had read too much fairytales in which princesses marry princes the first time they meet without knowing their personalities, and whose conceptions about matrimony was nothing more than a happily-ever-after, I entirely regarded Lizzie as a princess to whom the god had offered a bonus of bravery and ingenuity to challenge the othordoxy.

　　 It is some seven years later and here I am reading P&P and judging the protagonists again. My criteria has changed, though. As I get to know about the patriarchal society in which Lizzie and her sisters and her mothers lived, and as I grow into my early womanhood and become increasingly capable of sympathizing the pressure and fear and social expectations that they had to respond to, I start to associate Lizzie with not a princess, but a sensible lady.

　　 The nineteenth century witnessed a harsh oppression upon women who rely wholy on their male relatives for financial support and social positions. Marriage provides the only salvation if any women wants to improve her social status and living standard. In another work, Jane Austin has pointed out that single women have dreadful propensity for being poor--which is one very strong argument in favor of matrimony. Such was the situation for women, no wonder that the overall conventions could be so suffocating and so maddening that that it had victimized a lot of women. Mrs. Bennet and Miss. Bingley fell into the same category of women who either try every deceitful, evil means to marry a man of higher social ladder for her own sake or wanted her daughters have benefiting marriages. Miss Lucas, who had no choice but to have a marriage without reciprocal love for personal security, is another type. Lydia and Kitty were women who's been ruined by the society that value women only by physical attractiveness and family background. They functioned as selfless, fun-seeking girls who don't have values inside. Lady Catherine DeBurgh represents the proud Aristocrat who despise people from lower classes regardless of their possible good quality. With the recognition of women of these less-respectful types, I become more impressed by Lizzie's well-developed capability of judgements and willfully-preserved pursuits of love in matrimony. Her proud characteristics still reveals

　　strongly, but it is more justified.

　　 Indeed Lizzie was a proud creature. Her dislike of Mr.Darcy soly resulted from his early offence to her. Darcy's manners of pride and aloofness had actually humiliated Lizzie's pride. Some time before Darcy found his attention being increasingly drawn to her, Lizzie had already decided, out of her pride and the harm done to her pride and her suffering of her tortured and tangled pride, not to like him in the least bit. Her pride was largely originated from her fear of being contempted and being mistakenly regarded as merely the same as her foolish mother and younger sisters, for she probably knew that she has something different--that discrepancy between Lizzie and her mother and sisters had given her a lot more to bear. Her sensitive character gives her the awareness of the existence of the prejudice and disfavourable sentiments against her and her family and her class, and from her defence and defiance and denial of such sentiments, she had formed her own prejudice and disfavourable sentiments against the upper class. It had been, then, a lot of misunderstanding and misjudgements before the defensive pride and prejudice that blinded Lizzie got entirely demolished.

　　 A man of large fortune is surely desirable to single ladies. Yet to a woman of a Lizzie's type, who do, despite the universal of the importance of fortune, value genuine happiness and reciprocal love in a marital relationship, he cannot himself be a form of salvation for her since she defenitely expects more.

　　 When I am reading this book at a second time as a sophomore year assignment, I see clearly how my criteria of judgement alters as my understanding of the world, the relations between men and women and the purpose and reality of marriage advances. Lizzie is no longer that shiny princess who dares to say "no". The original Lizzie that the authoress intended to dicpict becomes more authentic and more vivid, as if I am observing her three-dimentionally.

　　 Lizzie's final fulfilling marriage is no longer a bed-time nice-dream fairytale, but an documentary illustration of managing matrimony with a balancing compromise. Matrimony has long been intrepretted as either the unity of two people who could implant all meaning of life into each other or the only means of practicality of women to acquire an economically better life. Through Lizzie, Jane Austin intended to reveal,with her 19th-century romanticism and her pro-feminist critical judgement, that matrimony is the combination of both.

　　 This, I contend, is the real Austin's voice.

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