Pride and Prejudice

In a world where your inheritance limits your prospects in marriage, the Bennets have five daughters to worry about. This makes the arrival of the very eligible Mr. Bingley to their county an opportunity to secure the marriage of one of their daughters. And no one is disappointed that he seems to only have eyes for Jane, their eldest. However, in his company, Mr. Darcy arrives, who seems to be a very unpleasantly proud man, and his acquaintance with Elizabeth, the second daughter, is off to a bumpy start.
My first exposure to this story was when an abridged version of it was the assigned reading for my 9th-grade English class. Since then, I have watched multiple adaptations and retellings of the story, but I didn't come around to reading the original novel until this year. And boy was I missing out!  The novel manages to convey how much Mr. Darcy liked Lizzy very early on in the story. This has always been a point that bothered me before because the focus of all the adaptations seems to be on his comment of there not being any women handsome enough to tempt him to dance, but not his actual reaction and opinion about Lizzy.
I have often struggled with the title of the book, I knew that it was meant to convey Mr. Darcy's pride and Lizzy's prejudice, but I couldn't manage to see how it's prejudice when he was proud and thought that the people of Hertfordshire beneath him. However, the novel shows his aversion to social gatherings in general, making it obvious that his pride was indeed being prejudged.  The most entertaining thing to me was how my own opinion of Mary has changed. Even though I still would never perform any sort of music publicly, I agree with her that staying home and reading is better than any social function.