On Mr. Darcy

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

She had me at the first line and I fell in love with Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. This book was required reading my senior year in high school. I remember not being able to put it down. I would read it during every class and even during my free sixth period, when I hung out in photography for laughs (that is another story entirely).

Up to that book, I had never come across a character like Mr. Darcy, someone I immediately identified with and thought I understood. I was so much like him, in personality, not appearance. Stiff, unsociable, proud, but at the same time and less noticeably, possessing some good traits as well. He was a character everybody else in class immediately disliked. In so many ways, I'm still like him and not entirely happy about it.

"I certainly have not the talent which some people possess," said Darcy, "of conversing easily with those I have never seen before. I cannot catch their tone of conversation, or appear interested in their concerns, as I often see done."

"My fingers," said Elizabeth, "do not move over this instrument in the masterly manner which I see so many women's do. They have not the same force or rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I have always supposed it to be my own fault -- because I would not take the trouble of practising."