The (London) Guardian reports that “Pride and
Prejudice,” Jane Austen’s “salty-tongued commentary on the plight of women
in the 19th century, perhaps best known today for providing Colin Firth with the opportunity to
pose in a wet shirt in front of many grateful viewers,” has won the Women’s Watershed Fiction
poll.
Although Austen’s novel was published in 1813, it struck the 14,000 voters who were polled
(93 percent women), according to the Guardian, as the one that either spoke most personally to
them, or changed the way they looked at themselves, or simply made them happy to be
women.
But author-journalist Julie Birchill doubted the value of the poll: “I think if people had been
hooked up to lie detectors the winner would have been Jackie Collins.” The runner-up was Lee
Harper’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” followed by Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre,” Marilyn French’s
“The Women’s Room” and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.”
Burchill, who has written eight books including a biography of Princess Diana, dismissed the
choice of all five novels. She was especially scathing about the contemporary relevance of “Pride
and Prejudice,” noting that “if Jane Austen heard women today talking about clitorises she’d
faint.”
