It's not really about alliteration, just Jane Austen, but the ability to add two additional words starting with the letter 'a' was too hard to resist.
Two hundred years ago today, Pride and Prejudice was first published. Sold for a one-off payment of £110 (Jane had hoped for £150), this literary classic has sold more than 20 million copies. I had intended to post a photo of a different Austen novel, Persuasion, but it's nowhere to be found. I can't imagine I would have donated my much-thumbed, note-scribbled copy to a charity shop and kept only the York Notes used for my English Lit A'Level but who knows what madness may have struck during one of my 'we need a skip outside the house NOW' days.
Whilst I loved Pride and Prejudice, and was of course a huge fan of Colin Firth's wet shirt portrayal of Mr Darcy in the TV series in the 90s, paving the way for Daniel Craig some years later, I have to be honest it's not my favourite Austen novel. I much prefer the story of Sir Walter Elliot, a financially strapped widower and his three grown-up daughters, alongside a cast of 'Made in Chelsea/TOWIE/WAG' characters seeking only to marry for wealth and position. It was Jane Austen's last completed novel and its tale of love, rejection and betrayal contains one of the most beautiful love letters in literature, written by Captain Wentworth to the novel's heroine, Anne Elliot.
Let's hope I find my battered old book soon, as although a big fan of both the Kindle and the iPad, it's simply not the same as leafing through the real thing.
"Let us never underestimate the power of a well-written letter." Jane Austen. Persuasion. Published 1816.
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