Scholars may celebrate Jane Austen for her pioneering use of free indirect discourse, but you don’t need an English degree to appreciate that she helped invent the romantic comedy as we know it. A drolly perceptive chronicle of clever and virtuous country maiden Elizabeth Bennet’s bumpy courtship with the rich, haughty yet honorable Fitzwilliam Darcy, Austen’s second and most influential novel, Pride and Prejudice, is the ultimate slow burn.