My recent experience of reading Pride and Prejudice to my daughter suggests the value of exposing children to classic literature earlier than might be thought possible. A classic ignites their imagination and opens them to the complicated motivations of adults around them. It permits time travel, highlighting the changes between our world and the past. The inspiration derived from greatness can never start too early.

Immersion in traditional fiction at home would have been beneficial fifty years ago, but it is absolutely imperative today. Schools have pared down exposure to the best of the Western canon in favor of reading lists curated by the authors’ race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. If a child does not enjoy a classic work at home, there is no guarantee that his or her education will ever include it. Even if it is assigned, modern politically correct pedagogy may well ruin the experience. And by the time children would have read these works in the past, the omnipresent screens may have eroded the patience necessary to get through them. Reading a nineteenth-century novel with a child has become a countercultural act. The great tradition of English literature can provide a sound moral education, countering the insipid political correctness of contemporary Disney.

Reading Pride and Prejudice was not only a brave new world for my daughter, but for me. Enjoying a classic novel after finishing so many children’s books highlighted the similarities of stories for all age groups. Just as the child is father to the man, so are the essential elements of children’s narratives the building blocks for adult fiction. My daughter’s innocent but probing questions also helped me recognize afresh important fault lines in the novel.

Pride and Prejudice as a Fairy Story 

Select the kind of classic most likely to interest your child. The reason for our choosing Pride and Prejudice was its theme of romance—in which she has already developed an abiding interest. My daughter has previously shouted out suggestions to Almanzo Wilder when he was courting Laura Ingalls in Little House on the Prairie. Pride and Prejudice seemed the logical entry point into the English literary tradition.

From the start, my daughter definitely had views of who should marry whom. Even though almost everyone in Hertfordshire, including principal female protagonist Elizabeth Bennet, turns against the proud Fitzwilliam Darcy as soon as he comes into the county, my daughter liked him immediately. When Elizabeth angrily rejects his first proposal of marriage, saying he is the last man in the world she should marry, my daughter thought her objections were over the top. “What about Mr. Collins, wouldn’t he have been worse?” my daughter interjected, referring to oleaginous Rev. William Collins, who had tried for Elizabeth’s hand previously with the most ill-judged marriage proposal in the history of literature. 

On reflection, it became clear to me why my daughter had quickly recognized that Darcy was worthy and destined to be Elizabeth’s husband. From the beginning, he is portrayed as tall, rich, handsome, and high-born, with a splendid faraway mansion. These are all fairy tale markings of a prince. And Pride and Prejudice has many elements of folklore. Darcy, like any prince in a good tale, must go through a trial to gain his beloved’s hand. Here modernity has updated the form, and the trial, unlike a fairy story, requires some psychological introspection and admission of error. But it still includes his rescue of a damsel in distress—in this case, that of foolish Lydia, Elizabeth’s sister, from the fate of living unmarried to the unworthy Wickham.

The novel also includes a witch in Lady Catherine de Burgh. She also lives in a grand house, but it is a joyless, mirthless one, where her bossy monologues keep her audience in thrall. Lady Catherine bewitches Rev. Collins, turning an already foolish man into a simpering mouthpiece and sycophant. And in one of the great scenes of the novel, she sallies forth in her magnificent coach to try to bewitch Elizabeth into not marrying Darcy. But Elizabeth sends Lady Catherine back home, reversing the vector of her powers so that her similar interview with Darcy prompts him to propose to Elizabeth again. Of course, the good live happily ever after.

The Rise of Market Society 

At other times, my daughter’s questions prompted a new perspective. She wondered why Elizabeth might fear that Darcy would think her connection to her Uncle Gardiner “disgraceful.” The reason, I explained, was that Gardiner was a businessman. While in our society it might be thought disgraceful not to work even if one had inherited enough to enjoy leisure, in eighteenth-century England, it was not possible to gain the highest status by earning money, only by living off the income from your inherited land or government bonds.

But Pride and Prejudice captures the moment when values are changing and when the hierarchical aristocracy and gentry must accommodate the rising merchant class of the industrial revolution. Elizabeth’s Uncle Gardiner is a symbol of the new respect and place that the human dynamos of a liberal economy gain in society. On their visit to Pemberley, Darcy’s estate, Darcy converses with Gardiner more easily than with any of the gentry in Elizabeth’s hometown, including her parents. One of the first marks of Darcy’s greater civility is to invite her uncle fishing. Her connection to him enhances Elizabeth’s suitability as a wife. When Wickham takes Lydia off to sin in London, it is the industrious Gardiner rather than her indolent father who takes matters in hand and works with Darcy to save her. The last lines of the novel in fact focus on how the Gardiners become fast friends with Darcy and frequent visitors to Pemberley, presaging the union of the aristocracy and industrialists that will govern nineteenth-century Britain.

Austen is not generally thought to be a novelist concerned with social change like many later nineteenth-centuries writers, such as Charles Dickens. But her work does reflect the way that the more intense market economy of the time is reordering her world. She even has an ear for how the greater fluidity of society is changing the connotations of the English language itself. The word “condescension” at the time she wrote it could still capture the appropriate attitude for those higher in the social hierarchy to display to their inferiors. But when repeated often by Rev. Collins and Lady Catherine, it becomes mixed with odium of these two characters and moves toward acquiring the meaning of patronizing superiority that it has acquired in modern English.

Encouraging Moral Judgment 

Great literature also helps the young refine their moral judgment. When Lydia and Wickham finally get married, my daughter observed that they will ultimately be unhappy, because they got married for the wrong reasons, just as she noted that Mr. and Mrs. Bennet obviously did. She took away from the book its cardinal lesson: marry someone you admire, not someone who infatuates you. I hope she remembers it as a teenager.

The often brilliant adaptions of classic novels available on video can aid a child’s understanding. Best of all is the BBC TV series because, unlike the movie versions, they have the space to be faithful to the entire narrative. Watching an episode of Pride and Prejudice after reading the relevant chapters helped my daughter catch what might have otherwise been missed. It was particularly helpful with tone. I think my daughter, for instance, understood Mr. Bennet’s ever-present irony and the tragedy of his marriage only after seeing the brilliant performance of Benjamin Whitrow. Moreover, the series better captured the speed of Austen’s pen than our slow nightly readings. Pride and Prejudice gallops through incidents and events.

Even the departures of the series from the book make for interesting conversations. For instance, a TV program cannot easily dramatize the novel’s famous first sentence: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” Instead, its opening shot shows Bingley and Darcy riding on horseback to look at the house that Bingley will rent near the Bennets. That is a beginning that emphasizes how Pride and Prejudice fits neatly into one of the two paradigms that Fyodor Dostoevsky says gets novels started: either a new person comes to town, or someone goes on a journey. The new arrival sets the action in motion.

Reading a classic to a child is a lot like having a dynamic new neighbor. And the results may be equally transformative.