Jane Austen

I finished my Jane Austen goal of reading all 6 books this summer and am now rewatching the 5 hour long Pride and Prejudice over and over again for some reason. Maybe perhaps because it never gets old. Like my sister said earlier, every time you watch it, you see something new, or have a new perspective or insight into something that is going on in the story. It is such a timeless story.
The only problem with reading 19th century literature is that we do not speak in the way that they spoke then, so often I had to go back and reread phrases over again in order to understand them. Austen also tends not to write in a lot of the dialog, but instead describes what happens or lets the reader decide for themselves exactly what occurred. I would like to think reading those books has expanded my vocabulary, but I don't really think it did much.
Some of my favorite lines probably came from a letter written from the hero to the heroine in Austen's last novel, Persuasion. Austen often uses letters in her stories. If only guys wrote letters like that today. :)
"I can listen no longer in silence...You pierce my soul I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you..."
- Captain Wentworth to Anne Elliot, Jane Austen's "Persuasion"