Just Finished Reading Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice

If Emily Brontë's 1847 novel Wuthering Heights shows the dark side of the lives of rural landed English families in the late 18th century, then Jane Austen's 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice, which I just read, represents the light. Austen also injects a great deal of humor into this story, especially coming from its chief protagonist Elizabeth "Lizzy" Bennet.  Lizzy is the second oldest of five sisters in a family having no male heirs...a problem in that the archaic laws of that time "entail" an estate in such a case to the ownership of a more distant male relative upon the father's death (the mother has no inheritance rights, apparently).  Mrs. Bennet, the mother, is continually trying, with a marked lack of subtlety (to the constant consternation and embarrassment of Lizzy), to marry them off to suitably wealthy young men.  However, one young man, Mr. Darcy, who is the friend of a Mr. Bingley (who likes the eldest sister Jane) quickly incurs the wrath of both Mrs. Bennet and Lizzy through his prideful, arrogant behavior before them.  Because of this and other "information" about him that Lizzy picks up from others, she forms what turns out to be a prejudicial judgment against his character.  The story, in general, concerns how the two...Darcy with his pride and Elizabeth with her prejudice (hence the novel's title), are able to eventually remove the obstructing filters from themselves and finally see each other for what they really are.  Without trying to give away the ending, I suppose from this you might easily surmise the outcome.  After all, I've already said that this is no "dark" story!

The developing relationship between Elizabeth and Darcy dominates Pride and Prejudice, but what happens with the rest of the sisters figures into the story as well.  Still, it all comes back to the two main characters.

Having been made into movie and serial TV shows, I was tempted to first "watch" Pride and Prejudice before reading it.  But now that I have read it, I'm looking forward to seeing how it is depicted on the screen.  For one thing, I like to notice the discrepancies between book and film.  For another, I like to see how much (or little) my imagination painted a picture of the settings and characters in my own mind just from reading the book.  Still another thing I like to see is how the tone of the screen presentation resembles the book's...or is it vastly different...