I'm at the office late tonight doing a bit of testing and writing the first draft of a white paper about the fascinating topic of Metadata Generation In The RVS Persistence Framework. Clearly, it's time for a Jane Austin intervention.

(Side note: I really am in love with "Project Gutenberg":http://www.gutenberg.org/ and their huge archive of classics, downloadable in a variety of free formats. The volunteers at that project and those who mirror the archive are doing a Good Thing(tm))

So far, it's a really breezy read with a lot of light, snappy banter. I've watched a number of movies based on her writing -- notably Emma (does Clueless count?) and my personal favorite Sense and Sensibility. I'm really happy to discover that the flowing, witty quality of those films comes straight from her writing. It's wry and amusing in ways that tend to be tied to literary narcissism in more recent authors. In this book, it's just grin-inducing.

...No sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she had hardly a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes. To this discovery succeeded some others equally mortifying. Though he had detected with a critical eye more than one failure of perfect symmetry in her form, he was forced to acknowledge her figure to be light and pleasing; and in spite of his asserting that her manners were not those of the fashionable world, he was caught by their easy playfulness.

It is little strange in the sense that every female character is defined by their relation to the men around them, their plans (or lack of plans) for marriage, and what they're doing to secure a suitor. Catherine had mentioned it before, but zounds -- it really does come through loud and clear. I'll just have to look at her as the grandmother of the Witty Romantic Comedy Genre and let myself enjoy it. Amusingly enough, stodgy Mister Darcy and his lamentable attraction to the defensively aloof Elizabeth seems to mirror the entire first half of Bridget Jones' Diary. Was that a cover-movie of Pride and Prejudice and no one told me? There'd better not be a bunny costume and Hugh Grant coming in chapter fifteen.