There's something about Lizzie

Lincoln Allison reads Pride and Prejudice for the first time and falls in love.

But what makes it great is the character of Elizabeth, the second of the Bennet's daughters. The writing of fiction remains a kind of magic for me and I cannot begin to understand how a spinster in the Regency period using only pen and ink succeeds in creating a character whom I would unequivocally elect as the woman in fiction I would most likely to have chatted up. (Eat your heart out slaggy Emma Bovary and Becky Sharpe, boring Margaret Hale and the rest.) Lizzy is fierce and feisty, loyal and determined. She also has a "physicality" as the sociologists put it, which leaps off the page. She walks and walks: walks to think, walks off her frustrations, walks to get places. In chapter 8, carriageless but determined, she walks the three miles from Longbourn to the much grander Netherfield, arriving flushed and muddy. Perhaps she is even a little niffy. Our author makes it clear that the women who receive her are contemptuous, but the men are rather excited. In chapter 44 the hostile Miss Bingley derides her appearance as "brown and coarse". Frankly, whatever else she is, it seems likely that Lizzy is a bit of an animal, rather threatening to the other females of her species.