Pride and Prejudice, a novel of manners, was first published in 1813 and remains one of the best loved novels of all time. Although its characters, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, the Bennet family and others, are steeped in the insular world of Britain’s landed gentry at the end of the Napoleonic wars, they are timeless, as attractive to today’s audience as they were to readers in the Georgian and Regency Eras. It has been said that God draws straight with crooked lines, and perhaps nowhere is that more evident than in the comings and goings, false starts, premature endings, dead ends and yellow brick roads that mark the unlikely courtship of equals destined to be together. Such are the tortured, though light comedic journeys of Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy as they initially repulse one another like the wrong ends of magnets – only to be drawn ineluctably together by the power of a love so strong and determined that it watches over the best laid plans of man and woman and laughs. This is the kind of novel that speaks to the fact of “soul mates,” of love destined, of a world in the hands of a loving God or Fate, who knows better and works His will so that characters such as Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy can find each other and the love that has been waiting for them despite themselves. (Summary by Michael Hogan)

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