First impressions of Jane Austen

I've seen The Jane Austen Book Club, read about Jane Austen's life in various articles, heard about her books, and two years ago, was given two of her books - Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility - for my birthday, and said to a few too many people that I wanted to read all six.

I have just started reading Pride and Prejudice, and boy does it take some concentration. I'm maybe a quarter of the way through the story and while I can certainly see why Jane Austen is so well loved after all these years, she's hard work.

The writing is lovely, so intriguing, and so far away from how we speak today, yet it all carries the same meaning. The interactions people have with each other may be more polite and more structured, but the emotions that come out of pure human nature and our desire for each other have remained unchanged over the centuries.

We still fall for at least one bad boy in our lifetime.

We still play hard to get.

We still get jealous.

We still fall in love. In exactly the same way as we always have.