It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
January 28, 1813: Pride and Prejudice is published.
Jane Austen’s most famous work, a satire of society and manners, was published 200 years ago today. Like all of her works, Pride and Prejudice was published anonymously - Austen was identified on the title page only as “the author of Sense and Sensibility”. Austen completed the original version in 1797. at which point it was entitled First Impressions, but this version was rejected for publication. By 1812 she had apparently revised the manuscript significantly, and it was this version that was eventually published, though under the (equally appropriate) title Pride and Prejudice, so named as to avoid confusion with other novels.
For historical context - Pride and Prejudice was written during the late Georgian era and is typically associated (along with Austen herself) with the Regency era, during which the future king George IV ruled as Prince Regent in his father’s stead. Although this was a time of great political and social change, both at home and abroad, Pride and Prejudice touches sparingly on these issues and instead focuses on the lives of the landed gentry and the not-quite-aristocrats. In addition, the novel cannot be neatly classified into one or the other of the major literary movements of the time; although Austen wrote during the Romantic period, her writing had little in common with the movement. In fact, Charlotte Brontë was a notable critic of the book, citing a lack of passion and emotion as her main complaint:
I had not seen “Pride and Prejudice,” till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.
Perhaps the main difference between the two was that Austen saw the world as a comedy rather than a tragedy (“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?”).
June 26, 1997: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is published.
Fifteen years ago, the book series that defined a generation began. So have some quotes!
There will be books written about Harry. Every child in the world will know his name. (How right you were, Professor McGonagall.)
Sunshine daisies, butter mellow, turn this stupid fat rat yellow.
Always the innocent are the first victims, so it has been for ages past, so it is now.
‘The truth.’ Dumbledore sighed. ‘It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution.’
Once again, you show all the sensitivity of a blunt axe.
There are some things you can’t share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them.
It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.
Love as powerful as your mother’s for you leaves it’s own mark. To have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection forever.
To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.
He couldn’t know that at this very moment, people meeting in secret all over the country were holding up their glasses and saying in hushed voices: ‘To Harry Potter – the boy who lived!’- Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone(1997)
don’t you hate it when you’re reading a chapter and then it’s coming to its climax and omg what’s gonna happen, then woops, your eyes dart to the last line and you spoil yourself and hate yourself for it
June 25, 1947: Anne Frank’s diary is published.
In June of 1942, a young girl named Anne Frank received a diary for her thirteenth birthday. Two days later, she would begin a chronicle of her experiences under the Nazi regime - a chronicle that would soon be read by millions of people around the world. Anne and her family (plus four other people) went into hiding in the secret annex behind her father’s office building in Amsterdam - the Achterhuis - shortly after she received the diary. They managed to hide for two years with the help of ordinary Dutch citizens like Miep Gies and her husband before they were betrayed to the Nazis in August of 1944, and subsequently deported in September. Anne and her sister Margot both died in Bergen-Belsen in 1945, only weeks before the camp was liberated; their mother, Edith, died in Auschwitz of starvation; the family that had stayed with the Franks in the Achterhuis, the van Pels, all died in camps as well.
The only survivor out of the original eight was Anne’s father, Otto Frank. It was he who had Anne’s diary published after the war, and, in 1952, an English-language version was published as well, under the title The Diary of a Young Girl; since then, Anne Frank’s diary has been published in over sixty different languages.
In 1946, one Dutch historian wrote of the not-yet-published book:
This apparently inconsequential diary by a child, this ‘de profundis’ stammered out in a child’s voice, embodies all the hideousness of fascism, more so than all the evidence of Nuremberg put together.
life:
Happy 30th, Prince William.
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