Gramercy Book Club Selects Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for February!

Angus Fletcher, Story Scientist and Author of Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, will moderate! Gramercy Book Club celebrates Jane Austen fandom in February as it selects Pride and Prejudice, Austen's most popular novel that tells the unforgettable story of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy for its February pick. Angus Fletcher, a professor of story science at Ohio State’ University’s Project Narrative, will moderate the group discussion. A ticket to this program includes a copy of Pride and Prejudice. For those who already have their copy, there will be a small admission fee. It is strongly encouraged that registrants read the book prior to the program. THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH is Gramercy’s Community Partner for this special book club program. Few have failed to be charmed by the witty and independent spirit of Elizabeth Bennet in Austen’s beloved classic Pride and Prejudice. When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Bingley and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined to dislike him more than ever. In the sparkling comedy of manners that follows, Jane Austen shows us the folly of judging by first impressions and superbly evokes the friendships, gossip and snobberies of provincial middle-class life. This Penguin Classics edition, based on Austen's first edition, contains the original Penguin Classics introduction by Tony Tanner, the late professor of English and American Literature at the University of Cambridge, and an updated introduction and notes by Viven Jones, a senior lecturer in English at the University of Leeds. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, in Steventon, a small village in Hampshire, England. As a girl, she wrote stories, including burlesques of popular romances. She lived with her family in Steventon until her father, a clergyman in the Church of England, retired in 1801. After his death, in 1805, she, her mother, and her sister did not have a settled home until 1809, when they moved to Chawton, Hampshire. There she was extraordinarily productive, revising three novels and writing three more from scratch. Published during her lifetime were Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1815). Austen died on July 18, 1817, in Winchester, where she was receiving medical treatment, and was buried in that city’s cathedral. Two more novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, were published posthumously in 1817 with a biographical notice by her brother Henry Austen, the first formal announcement of her authorship. She also left two earlier compositions: a short epistolary novel, Lady Susan, and an unfinished novel, The Watsons. At the time of her death, she was working on a new novel, Sanditon, a fragmentary draft of which survives. Angus Fletcher is a professor of story science at Ohio State’ University’s Project Narrative, the world’s leading academic think-tank for the study of stories. He has dual degrees in neuroscience and literature, received his PhD from Yale, taught Shakespeare at Stanford, and has published widely on the scientific workings of novels, poetry, film, and theater. Angus is the author of Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature and Primal Intelligence. His research has been called "life-changing" by Brené Brown and "mind blowing" by Malcolm Gladwell; it has been endorsed by psychologists, neuroscientists, and doctors such as Martin Seligman and Antonio Damasio; and has been supported by institutions from the National Science Foundation to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.