Regarding Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, what do you see as the source of book's appeal? How does it speak to a contemporary audience?

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is
an enormously appealing book for a wide variety of reasons, and it will probably always
retain its popularity thanks to many of these factors.  Among the reasons for the book’s
demonstrable appeal are the following:

• It deals
  with relations between members of a family and is therefore appealing in some of the
  same ways that Little Women is appealing. (Often the same people
  love both books with the same kind of devotion.)


• It deals
  with relations not only between siblings but between siblings and their parents and
  between the parents themselves.  These are fundamental human relationships to which most
  people can relate.


• It deals with romantic relations
  between people and with the confusions, anxieties, and hopes those relationships can
  cause. Such relationships, like relationships within families, are ones to which most
  people can relate.


• It deals with fundamental human
  worries, especially worries about the future, about one’s worthiness, and about the way
  one is perceived by others.


• It deals with fundamental
  human desires, such as the desires for happiness, love, and
  stability.


• This list could easily be
  extended.

None of the items on the list above
would matter much, however, if the book were not extraordinarily well written. Hundreds
of thousands of novels have probably been written that deal with such topics as the ones
listed above, but few of those novels are as brilliantly composed as Pride and
Prejudice is. (Indeed, some of Austen’s other books do not equal the
achievement of Pride and Prejudice.) Consider, for example, the
novel’s famous opening line:

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that a
single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a
wife.

Often, when trying to
determine why a sentence is effective, it is helpful to imagine how the sentence could
have been written differently. Consider these alternatives to Austen’s
phrasing:

• Everyone knows that a rich man needs
  to get married.


• Personally speaking, I have to say that
  wealthy guys need wives.


• You ought to get married if you
  have money but no woman.

Notice how much better
Austen’s sentence is than these. The first four words of her sentence are simple and
plain. The next two are a bit grandiloquently multisyllabic. The first six words
altogether imply a narrator who at first seems extraordinarily sure of herself (or
perhaps, as we discover by the end of the sentence, she is only mocking extraordinary
sureness). Notice, also, how effectively the narrator postpones the punch-line until the
very last word.  Thus, instead of simply and quickly writing “rich man,” she writes “man
in possession of a good fortune.” Here again the phrasing is perhaps mockingly elaborate
and high-toned.  I could go on, but I’m running out of space. Suffice it to say that
Austen knows, with the skill of a master, how to use the English
language.