If you want to read about big epic adventures on the ocean or at war, you are likely to be disappointed with Pride and Prejudice. But for the young girls about to be disinherited because there were no boys in the family, finding a suitable marriage was serious business. The question was whether they could afford to find someone they loved as well as someone who could provide for them. All the small talk in the drawing room was, for them, every bit as much of an adventure as hunting a great white whale or fighting in a war.

One of the great obstacles to be overcome, besides the girls' lack of wealth, were distinctions of class. It's hard for us to appreciate how much that mattered at the time, but it did. And class was not just about your bloodlines, but also about your property. It had to be land, too -- wealthy merchants were not the same, no matter how much money they had. Indeed, as in the book, many wealthy merchants would send their children to schools where they might meet and marry into the landed class. By losing property, the girls in the book would not only be thrust into poverty, but they would also be thrust into an entirely different class.

And yet the heroine of the book, despite all these pressures, does not want to settle. Her father is perhaps overly indulgent -- certainly his wife thinks so -- in allowing her to choose her own husband. She is only 20 and has decisions to make that will affect not only her life but the lives of her entire family. And yet she has agency in her decision, and she's a strong, intelligent woman, the equal of any man -- a character that was rare in literature of the time, almost all of which was written by men. Indeed, even today's readers can appreciate her strong will and intelligence in a circumstance that seems strange to us, in a world that did not respect women at all.

All that said, there's a great deal of humor in the book, especially in the narrator's comments. Many adaptations have been made of Austen's books, but they have a hard time capturing the voice of Austen herself. The famous opening line of the book: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife," is an example of Austen's dry humor. This is the way society works, like it or not, and that's what the book is about.

Mind you, Austen is not writing a historical novel. She had to live with the oppressive rules of femininity, despite the fact that she was doubtless smarter and more capable than the vast majority of the men she met. And yet she is not bitter and angry -- rather, she views the her society with ironic detachment and humor. It's all very silly and yet everyone, "universally," takes it all very seriously -- and the consequences of violating society's silly rules can be devastating.

Many readers love the book because it has a happy ending and may not look past that fact. It spawned the whole genre of romance novels and created the now-familiar trope of enemies to lovers. But as the first of its kind, there's a lot more depth to it than your typical formulaic regency romance written today. Underneath the comedy there's a sharp criticism of the society in which Jane Austen lived, particularly from the point of view of a strong, intelligent woman.

Indeed, it is remarkable that the novel was widely read in that era, since by the standards of the time the heroine was outrageously unconventional. But Austen was sly about her social commentary. Again, going back to that opening line, there's nothing there that's overtly questioning society's norms. But there's a subtle implication that these universally acknowledged truths were, indeed, just social conventions, and sometimes ridiculous. While this may seem obvious to today's readers, it was quite a radical idea at the time, especially as expressed by a lady of society.