Pride and Prejudice
Austen invented the modern marriage plot and the ironic narrator in the same novel, in 1813. Elizabeth Bennet is the first fully modern female protagonist: witty, observant, resistant. The novel is funny in a way that most novels called comic are not actually funny. BBC's Big Read ranked it second, behind only Lord of the Rings.
Strip out the wit and the plot is "just people going to each others' houses and talking," which one reader condenses to "345 pages of nothing." Darcy arrives cold and rude, then turns warm and self-aware around the midpoint, a change readers find "no more convincing than a well-constructed fairy tale." Read without period allowances his conduct looks worse: he insults Elizabeth publicly at the assembly, engineers the breakup of her sister's romance, and turns up uninvited to find her alone. "He wouldn't be worth your time," one reader concludes. Elizabeth has her own problem, since her cleverness lands on Mr. Collins's poverty and on her own mother, closer to bullying than to wit.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
